goodreads Steven Pinker book about human morality improving over time
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13543093-the-better-angels-of-our-nature
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Decli…
2010-10-04
Author
<div><div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/4671027-miquixote"></a></section><section><p>270 reviews45 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/253147145">May 24, 2017</a></section><div><p>Breathtakingly mindless for 2/5 of the book, blowhard the whole way through.<p>Sometimes a good joke is more revealing than 800 pages of blowhardness. Pinker gives himself away with this quote by George Carlin on page 622: I think motivation is overrated. You show me some lazy prick who's lying around all day watching game shows and stroking his penis, and I'll show you someone who's not causing any fucking trouble!...</p><p>...I hope I am not the only one who thinks it is not necessarily a good thing to be reduced to lazy pricks watching game shows and stroking our penises...</p><p>Anybody with a modicum of a background in anthropology, history, sociology and economics should be laughimg themselves silly (if it weren't so disturbing how much influence Pinker has)... </p><p>Pinker proposes 5 ways that have reduced violence and can continue to do so: the Leviathan, Gentle Commerce, Feminization, The Expanding Circle, and the Escalation of Reason. The final 3 I have no argument against. But I have issues with the first 2. The state gets a monopoly on violence and capitalism is caricatured as gentle.</p><p>But there have been moments when violence spiked and recently, so Pinker has to explain it. Pinker conveniently blames Marxism (and leftism in general is caricatured the whole way through) as the singularly destructive ideology of modern times (without acknowledging the dangers of his own classical liberal ideology) and throws in 'a few other individuals' to the mix as the responsibles for the genocides of the 20th century, and the increase in violence in 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Fascism is acknowledged only as the twin of dialectial Marxism. Classical liberalism gets the nod as the ideology that reduces violence (of course Pinker would never admit that classical liberalism is even an ideology though). There is no comprehensive study of how fascism and communism came to be. It is really lazy stretch to say that fascism was just a few flukes of individual psychology, and not give credence to the idea that both fascism and communism came about from the specific conditions of a social system in crisis. Neither is it mentioned that big business actually financed and promoted fascism in Italy and Germany. That would complicate things too much. </p><p>So, nothing about communism coming into being as a reaction to capitalism... it is simply assumed that capitalism has been an overwhelmingly positive contribution to the world, since 'violence has declined since its advent, minus a few inconvenient peaks of violent wars and genocides' which, as I have already said, he attributes to Marxism and a few accidentally placed crazy individuals. Nothing either about theory, philosophy, economics, anthropology, activism owing anything at all to Marx's ideas. Marx isn't even worth the time of day to Pinker, except as an explanation for violence. This should raise the question, really can any intellectual who tries to analyze the history of modern times be taken seriously if they haven't taken the left seriously? how can you call yourself an intellectual if you just shrug off the whole left side of the policial spectrum as ideological nonsense? </p><p>So leftism gets all the blame for the bad stuff, but the increased rights that accompanied the 20th century are not attributed at all to leftist ideas or practice. They are accounted for as simply natural by-products of classical liberalism (ie. capitalism). The Expanding Circle of Empathy, the Escalation of Reason and the Feminization of society have nothing at all to do with leftist ideals. Class struggles never happened. Activists weren't leftists, they were classical liberals. These rights eventually became 'common sense'. If there any battles they were set forth by non-violent classical liberals, and always as peacefully as possible. </p><p>There are plenty of examples of serious breaches of truth here. According to Pinker, Martin Luther King apparently rejected Marx completely. Something patently false: 'King disagreed with Marxist materialism, but he found certain elements of Marxism's economic critiques of capitalism quite insightful' (I May Not Get There With You: the True Martin Luther King, Eric Michael Dyson). In fact, you would be hard-pressed to find any successful activist who doesn't find certain elements of Marxism insightful. But none of that is mentioned here because Pinker is not at an activist, he is status quo, out of touch with reality, pure and simple. </p><p>It is also fairly embarrassing for Pinker to not acknowledge how far from anything even remotely leftist or Marxist several so-called communist and their undoubtely genocidal regimes were. Something akin to blaming Jesus for the Crusades. It is not said that it is a far more convincing argument that Stalinist Russia and Maoist China were actually STATE-CAPITALIST regimes. And indeed ideological twins of fascism, but not at all in the sense that Pinker argues. But if he tried to go there, his simplistic view of everthing would implode. </p><p>Most people who rave against communism base their assumptions on secondary sources. It is clear that Pinker hasn't understood Marx (or even remotely leftist politics). As a fairly well-read leftist, it is obvious to me that there hasn't been a communist state to this day, as much as the leaders of those states have claimed to be. Neither is it mentioned how many different interpretaions of communism there are. He lumps the left all together. But if Pinker were to do so honestly, it would be quite a stretch to suggest that leftism is not about equality, freedom and the destruction of totalitarianism, oppression and alienation. In fact, you would think leftism was fascism the way Pinker describes it. Pinker comes across as a reactionary anti-communist suffering from the Red Scare, still inhabiting the frigid mental landscape of the Cold War. </p><p>But hey, when you are an authority in Harvard, sweeping caricatures and generalizations are allowed. There’s more. According to Pinker, dialectics are simply mysticism and a justification for violent struggle. Class struggle is of course also blown off as mystical dialectical hogwash. Well, that is some feat blowing off dialectics, considering how many of the greatest philosophical works in world in the last 2 centuries have had to deal with the idea of dialectics (because of its intellectual force), but the eminent Steven Pinker waves it off with his magic wand and without anything at all to back it up. </p><p>He also blows off 'intellectuals' in general because 'they are attracted to extreme ideas'. But he wholly contradicts himself when he proposes the superior intellectual value of classical liberalism. Which of course isn't extreme, it is just the obvious rational choice that doesn't even need to be intellectually defended. How arrogant can you get?</p><p>It's also fairly wacky when he argues that 'intelligent people overwhelmingly tend to be liberals'. Based on IQ test scores and surveys of people with high scores he concludes that the smartest people are liberals and the other lesser ones are leftists and conservatives. But what about the smartest of the smart (the intellectuals) being attracted to extremes? This should leave you wondering if these arguments are for real? Apparently so.</p><p>I am not familiar enough with the statistics that Pinker inundates us with to know if 'violence' has actually dropped or not consistently, progressively and continuously throughout history. But our propaganda alarm bells should sound when anyone makes a statement like that. According to Pinker, it is obvious that primitive tribes were the most violent humans ever. I have read some fairly convincing arguments otherwise, but I think it is likely the differences in opinion are going to come in the very definition of violence. The definition of violence by Pinker is dictionary strict, and very limited. Humans sometimes have to fight to survive. Pinker doesn't substantiate any difference in self defense and aggression, justice is mocked, freedom is not even covered. But when class struggle is just vain ideology to him, what can you expect? </p><p>Neither does he take on the prison industrial complex, although he does acknowledge the importance of caging up of the maximum amount of people that are considered most likely to fight back and apparently thinks it a necessary evil if there are 'a few too many' (as deterrence). Apathy or depression is not even mentioned. But of course if you look it up in a dictionary, violence isn't any of those things.</p><p>Since only 100,000 have been killed in Iraq(a disputed low-flying number) and there were at least 1,5 million in Vietnam, apparently US foreign policy is getting way more compassionate. Of course nothing is even mentioned of thinly-covered up US intervention all over the world (like in Latin America). An ignorance easily corrected by leafing through books like 'Killing Hope' by William Blum (on the ongoing American holocaust). A book Chomsky says is 'far and away the best book on the subject'. But the book has leftist leanings, and is therefore intellectually irrelevant to a religiously loyal status quoer. </p><p>Democracy is hailed as a reducer of violence, and justifiably so. However he also has an extremely limited idea of democracy. There is a crisis of democracy right now because of a lack of participation (the Manufacturing of Consent and Public Opinion) and fast-growing awareness of it. What about acknowledging the advent of a type of coercion that creates ignorance, apathy and depression? This is not considered as an element of violence of course. It would even appear to be a positive thing, if it can reduce those violence stats and keep us wanking. Even if certain types of coercion cannot be defined as violence, why not acknowledge it for what it is? </p><p>As said, Pinker targets ideology as a main cause of violence. When ideologies clash it often creates even more violence. Obviously. But it would seem Pinker is unaware of the current ideology’s potential for violence (and many have argued quite well that it is the main present cause of violence today). Currently the ideology of capitalism is being questioned by a large variety of people (because of its weaknesses). If and when that increases there may just be an increase in violence again, and not only from the Leviathan state that Pinker raves so much about. </p><p>Of course Pinker would blame the new ideology if that happened, instead of the old one and all its weaknesses that brought it to the conflict. This is ironic because he does spend some time criticizing conservative ideology for its inability to adapt to progressive change. I argue that Pinker betrays exactly that attribute despite his humanist claims. Liberals and conservatives are the only two electable parties (because neither is so different from the other and neither is at all threatening to the current status quo). But for Pinker to have his moral authority he should also be arguing that if capitalism doesn't work well enough or starts to create bigger problems than it solves (ie. environmental destruction and huge gaps in wealth and debt), it is the one that may actually PROPAGATE violence. But then again we might just sit around watching game shows and stroking our penises. If Pinker is right, that would be ideal.</p><p>Perhaps this can be avoided if the old ideology adapts peaceably. But neither should anyone who analyzes history or anthropology honestly assume that the current ideology is forever. Of course capitalism hasn’t always been there, has only been there for a tiny amount of history, but Pinker sidesteps that. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. The thing is that a large amount of us aren’t convinced it ain’t broke.</p><p>But perhaps Pinker’s main point is that we are less likely to adapt violently no matter what the change. Perhaps so, but denying or misunderstanding certain causes of violence (gross inequality and oppression which lead to new ideologies) will not help the matter. The so-called mystical class struggle and violence around the time of Karl Marx and the following century were actually consequences of the inability of capitalism to adapt to its structural weaknesses. If there were enough reforms the violence caused may not have been necessary, or rather it could have convinced the masses it wasn't necessary to challenge the system. </p><p>However, the inflexibility and fundamentalism of classical liberalism would seem to have actually CAUSED the majority of violent conflicts. One doesn't have to be a Marxist to see that the capitalist system did not adapt appropriately (or peacefully) to the class awareness (or if you prefer inequality awareness) that was developing. Pinker calls 'class awareness' ideology though. A more peaceful adaptation did not come until after World War 2 (with Keynesianism) IN REACTION to THE CLASS AWARENESS. But this has been progressively taken apart since around 1980. The fear of class war retribution has diminished. With the recent austerity measures only being the latest in a series of measures to increase the wealth of the rich at the expense of the middle class and poor. </p><p>But that doesn't mean that a self-defense type of violence will not develop in the near future if the current system doesn't adapt appropriately (rising homelesseness or unemployment could escalate things). The fact that violence actually went down during the 30s Great Depresssion is almost gleefully mentioned by Pinker though. So there really isn't a guarantee that violence will increase. In fact, it would seem that the elite powers are getting impetus from implementing their austerity measures because of Pinkeresuqe ideas of how non-violent we have become.</p><p>Anyhow, if Pinker is right and the world is better off being wankers than trouble-makers, then our intellectuals should be the best wankers. And so for that reason a wanker cannot read trouble-making literature, or leftist perspectives, one cannot at least acknowledge their intellectual validity and consider them. Pinker doesn't acknowledge these debates because he is pushing his own ideology, or rather absurdly and falsely pushing the idea of the 'end of ideology' (which is actually a thinly-veiled support for the current neoliberal utopian ideal). One that is as unsustainable and unrealistic as any utopia or ideology. Keep wanking.</p><p>The book was long and tiresome in many parts, but also very rewarding in the sense that it is an incredibly revealing look at how corrupt and anti-intellectual academics can be. Pinker is arrogant, puffed-up, self-promoting and irresponsible in his ideologizing (ironic isn’t it?) here. In Pinker's mind, it would seem he has earned the right to step right out of his specialty of psychology and linguistics and make sweeping generalizations in anthropology, history, sociology and economics. </p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/4671027?shelf=anthropology">anthropology</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/4671027?shelf=civilization">civilization</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/4671027?shelf=gs-exemplar">gs-exemplar</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/53165-warwick"></a></section><section><p>809 reviews14.4k followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/591838228">April 26, 2013</a></section><div><p>VIOLENCE HAS DECLINED, AND I WILL KICK THE LIVING SHIT OUT OF ANYONE WHO SAYS IT HASN'T<p> Disappointingly, Pinker strikes a slightly less confrontational tone than that, but the basic idea is the same. His thesis is that violence of every kind, from international warfare down to murder and corporal punishment, has been on a steady decline throughout human history, up to and including the present day – and not only does he make this case in considerable detail, but he goes on to give a very wide-ranging discussion of possible political and psychological causes for what's happened. This book is big, and it needs to be: it's built around a vast accumulation of raw evidence. Historical, statistical, sociological, neurobiological, and anecdotal – and I'm slightly confused by some of the negative reviews here, because although you might not like all of his conclusions, it's not easy to argue with the facts when they're laid out in this much detail.</p><p> Not convinced? Wondering if village life in the 30s can really have been as bad as dodging rapists in today's inner cities? Well, prepare for approximately 8,266 graphs and charts proving you wrong in every direction. Leafing through them is at first daunting, then fascinating, then astonishing, and eventually wearying. But they keep coming!</p><p> </p><p> The decline in some forms of violence is so dramatic that the figures have had to be plotted on a logarithmic scale, so vertiginous is their descent. Hitting kids – gone from normal to unacceptable in barely a generation. Murder rates? Dropping like a knackered lift. Paedophiles and child abduction? Statistically speaking, if you wanted your child to have a better-than-average chance of being abducted and held overnight by a stranger, ‘you'd have to leave it outside unattended for 750,000 years’. Terrorism, surely? Nope; in fact ‘the number of deaths from terrorist attacks is so small that even minor measures to avoid them can <i>increase</i> the risk of dying’ – one study suggests that 1,500 more Americans died in the year after 9/11 because they started driving rather than flying.</p><p> Okay then, what about WAR. ‘As of May 15, 1984, the major powers of the world had remained at peace with one another for the longest stretch of time since the Roman Empire.’ This is important, because inter-state warfare is much, much more deadly than the small-'n'-nasty invasions and civil wars that are more common today. And even they are becoming less frequent and less individually deadly.</p><p> Don't get me wrong, this is not a happy-clappy book about mindless optimism, and he is assiduous in stressing that the situation could easily change.</p><blockquote>The point is not that we have entered an Age of Aquarius in which every last earthling has been pacified forever. It is that substantial reductions in violence <i>have</i> taken place, and it is important to understand them.</blockquote><p>Pinker takes a good, long look at several possibilities, and (to my mind at least) identifies three major factors behind the decline. The first is the growth of democracy, which strongly correlates with lower rates of violence across the board, and we get the figures to prove it. The second is the revolution in communications, firstly during the Enlightenment, and then more recently with the birth of the mass media age. Again, huge numbers of studies are adduced to make the point.</p><p> The third factor is what he calls ‘feminization’: women are just less violent than men, and the more involved they are in a society the more peaceful it is. ‘We are all feminists now,’ he concludes, after a typically detailed examination of changing attitudes to, and rights of, women through history. (He is talking about the West here, but even elsewhere the trend is unmistakeable.) Studies suggest that this is not just a <i>consequence</i> of changing attitudes, but a <i>cause</i> of them, particularly given that ‘the one great universal in the study of violence is that most of it is committed by fifteen-to-thirty-year-old men.’ Pinker hones in on the obvious implications:</p><blockquote>Would the world be more peaceful if women were in charge? The question is just as interesting if the tense and mood are changed. Has the world become more peaceful because more women are in charge? And will the world become more peaceful when women are even more in charge? The answer to all three, I think, is a qualified yes.</blockquote><p> When he's finished considering social movements and political changes, he pokes inside your brain. We have pages and pages of various neuro-sociological experiments where people were strapped to an MRI machine and told to slap a puffin in the face, or something, so that various lobes and cortexes could be identified and examined. The question is whether there are anatomical, or evolutionary-psychological, causes for violence, and if so how easily they can be overcome. We get a lot of impressive-looking diagrams like this (I may have remembered some of the details wrong):</p><p></p><p> Pinker is very interesting on the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect">Flynn Effect</a>, which, if you're not aware of it, is the upward trend in general intelligence observed around the world in standardised testing since such things began. Many people that have written on this subject are skeptical that folk nowadays can really be smarter than anatomically-identical humans of a few generations ago, despite what the tests say – but Pinker, after a careful examination of how thought processes are influenced by changing social norms, is not afraid to draw his conclusions, at least in the ethical sphere:</p><blockquote>The other half of the sanity check is to ask whether our recent ancestors can really be considered morally retarded. The answer, I am prepared to argue, is yes. Though they were surely decent people with perfectly functioning brains, the collective moral sophistication of the culture in which they lived was as primitive by modern standards as their mineral spas and patent medicines are by the medical standards of today. Many of their beliefs can be considered not just monstrous but, in a very real sense, stupid.</blockquote><p>Obviously we are into speculative territory here, but I actually found it very heartening and thought-provoking to see someone prepared to follow the evidence that far.</p><p> How's it written? His style is exact without being dense, although he is not averse to the odd cliché (‘capital punishment itself was on death row’), and from time to time his desire to cloak the science in colourful imagery leads him into some awkward prose:</p><blockquote>The age distribution of a population changes slowly, as each demographic pig makes its way through the population python.</blockquote><p>Yikes. Also…and this may sound like a weird thing to pick up on, but once I noticed it I couldn't take my eyes off it…he is absolutely obsessed with telling the reader to ‘recall’ things he's already said.</p><blockquote>Recall the mathematical law that a variable will fall into a power-law distribution…<br />Recall from chapter 3 that the number of political units in Europe shrank…<br />Recall that there were two counter-Enlightenments…<br />Recall that the statistics of deadly quarrels show no signature of war-weariness.<br />…and recall that duelling was eventually laughed into extinction.<br />Recall that the chance that two people in a room of fifty-seven will share a birthday is ninety-nine out of a hundred.<br />England and the United States, recall, had prepared the ground for their democracies…<br />Recall that for half a millennium the wealthy countries of Europe were constantly at each other's throats.<br />Cronin, recall, showed that terrorist organizations drop like flies over time…<br />And recall the global Gallup survey that showed…<br />Recall that narcissism can trigger violence…<br />Recall that the insula lights up when people feel they have been shortchanged…<br />Patients with orbital damage, recall, are impulsive…<br />Recall from chapter 3 the theory of crime…</blockquote><p>Just how much stuff are you expecting me to remember, Pinker?! And surely someone who wrote three books on language has a fucking thesaurus handy?</p><p> There are a couple of minor errors, too, that an editor should have caught. The Polish city of Wrocław is printed in my edition as ‘Wroctaw’; and he also refers to some statistics gathered in the ‘town of Kent’ (there are dozens of towns in Kent, which in the dataset concerned is a county).</p><p>However, and despite my sometimes flippant tone in this review, the truth is that I thought this was a magnificent book – convincingly argued and truly multidisciplinary, so that I felt like I was getting a synthesis of the important studies carried out in half a dozen different fields. It's a big, serious argument that deserves proper consideration, and one that'll give you some ammo to argue back next time you're feeling cynical about the relentless news headlines. I think it's a clear 4.5 – and since Goodreads won't let me do that, I'm inclined to bump it up rather than down.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/53165?shelf=history">history</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/53165?shelf=psychology">psychology</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/53165?shelf=social-history">social-history</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1651956-riku-sayuj"></a></section><section><p>653 reviews6,927 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/243248009">December 8, 2014</a></section><div><p><br /><b>The Skeptic’s Peace</b><p>Pinker warns the reader upfront that the book is huge, and with more than 800 dense pages there is no question about it. It is so wide-ranging that it is fortunate it has such a memorable title - the reader might have easily lost track of where it is all supposed to be heading. Individually, any single section of the book is a throughly entertaining masterpiece, but as a whole, in terms of coherence, and on how the thesis and the direction of the arguments hold together, the book is not as much of a delight. </p><p>But it is an ambitious book and is in some respects a new sort of history - almost a moral history of the world and Pinker deserves praise for the attempt. The next such historian to come along has been given much to work with.</p><p>Pinker is very convincing about the fact that violence has indeed declined; he is even persuasive on why it was but bound to happen. But when it comes to explaining the phenomenon (which he spends most of the book convincing us is real) based on his strength (psychology and evolutionary biology), he comes up slightly short. Pinker says all the right things and spares no punches and doesn’t flinch from taking on the worst arguments the critics might throw at him but his arguments still seem to lack that knockout blow.</p><p>This is not to say that the arguments are weak. Pinker does a remarkable job in his survey of history, of stats and of a multitude of ideas. The scholarship is immaculate, the intentions are noble and the conclusions are plausible but I would still wager that Pinker would fail to convince the majority of his readers. </p><p>Why? Because he ignores the contingent nature of history and he forgets that the 'better angels' has not only made us a more moral society but has also made us a more skeptical society. I was disappointed that Pinker does not explore the preventive powers of sheer skepticism. </p><p>My own thesis, which was evolving as I read Pinker’s, is ultimately that the skeptical mentality is what the ‘civilizing process’ (and the years of bloody wars) has ultimately given us - a conviction that there are no easy answers, no ‘final solutions’. And that is a powerful deterrent to most forms of drastic action, since now it is harder to justify them. This to me is the real cause for optimism (of the measured and skeptical sort, as is our wont now). </p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1651956?shelf=history-civilizations">history-civilizations</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1651956?shelf=media-hyped">media-hyped</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1651956?shelf=pop-history">pop-history</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/166376-david"></a></section><section><p>865 reviews1,271 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/273624614">February 15, 2012</a></section><div><p>This seems like a stunning misstep by the normally brilliant Steven Pinker. His ability to write with extraordinary force and clarity has been demonstrated repeatedly in two separate areas of expertise -- linguistics and cognitive science. Unfortunately, the brilliance of his earlier books in those areas is nowhere in evidence in this regrettable dog's breakfast of a book. <p>I found it almost unreadable - poorly argued, undisciplined, self-indulgent, and - despite its grotesquely bloated length (800 pages) - support for its main thesis is woefully inadequate, dependent on a highly selective interpretation of existing data and completely unconvincing. Pinker can sling the statistical jargon (Poisson processes, power laws, the gambler's fallacy, the Gini coefficient) like a pro, but all the jargon in the world cannot make up for his recurrent habit of over- or mis-interpreting data whose limitations he consistently glosses over. </p><p>The jacket cover breathlessly promises "more than a hundred graphs and maps". Any graph is open to misinterpretation. Three of the most common ways of doing so are (i) selective interpretation (ignoring or explaining away the data that don't fit one's preconceived ideas) (ii) inappropriate extrapolation beyond the range of available data and (iii) failure to acknowledge the data's limitations, such as likely sources of bias, or extreme sparsity of information. </p><p>Pinker commits each of these errors, with such numbing frequency that one loses all respect. We are seriously asked to draw conclusions from a graph of the "rate of battle deaths in state-based armed conflicts between 1900 and 2005" (Figure 6-1) <b>while being instructed to ignore the figures for the first and second world wars</b>. After all, "the world has seen nothing close to that level since". This kind of rubbish insults the intelligence. Or you could look at Figure 7-28. Lest you be distracted by the actual data, Pinker has helpfully superimposed some very impressive looking solid lines documenting his cheerful belief in the rise of vegetarianism. These are much darker than the actual data points, presumably in the hope that the reader might be distracted from noting their complete lack of fit to the data. Worried about racially motivated killing of black people? Here are the yearly data (number of such killings) from 1996 to 2008:</p><p>5,3,3,4,3,3,3,4,1,2,1,1,1</p><p>Pinker's gleeful trumpeting of a five-fold reduction seems to rest on a pretty flimsy foundation to me. Not to mention being a little premature. </p><p>But nothing as inconvenient as facts, or their absence, can stand in the way of a man who has already decided he knows the answer. The threat of nuclear holocaust? Exaggerated, because - as any fool can see - nuclear weapons have never been used in wartime since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One imagines this argument must be of great comfort to those who survived those particular "anomalies". Just as Pinker's breezy insistence that the only meaningful way to interpret the number of people killed in a given conflict is relative to the world's population at the time is surely meaningless to anyone who has lost a family member in battle. It's at best breathtakingly insensitive; some would find it deeply offensive. </p><p>To anyone who respects the scientific method, this is a horrifyingly bad book, one which completely obliterates Pinker's credibility. Don't waste your time.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/166376?shelf=disappointing">disappointing</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/166376?shelf=intellectual-con-artist-at-work">intellectual-con-artist-at-work</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/166376?shelf=never-gonna-finish">never-gonna-finish</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/3583387-nebuchadnezzar"></a></section><section><p>39 reviews361 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/296539460">March 18, 2012</a></section><div><p>When an academic steps outside his or her field of expertise, it's best to brace yourself for a torrent of nonsense. Steven Pinker, whose work in linguistics and psychology I greatly enjoy, has made a habit of using that work as a springboard to foist his pet political theories on the public. Whereas his previous attempt in <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/5752.The_Blank_Slate_The_Modern_Denial_of_Human_Nature">The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature</a> was a vehicle for his ideological ramblings, it was at least not based on a gaping statistical flaw and had some value in refuting common misconceptions, even if it did so in a fundamentally dishonest way.<p>Whatever redeeming qualities to be found in Better Angels are far outweighed by the failure of Pinker's thesis. Has violence actually declined? If not, the rest is window dressing. Pinker quickly notes that the reader will be skeptical of his thesis off the bat -- we are inclined to believe the world is getting more violent due to our constant exposure to it in the media, which is biased toward reporting bad news, criminality, etc. No doubt he is correct in this. It is well known that crime rates in the United States have been in decline for the past 20-30 years yet many continue to believe that crime is on the rise. This likely comes from a bit of selective reporting mixed with confirmation bias; the proverbial man searching for his keys under the streetlight.</p><p>The main reason I was immediately skeptical about this thesis was that I had seen it before! The general thrust of Pinker's argument appears in a brief section in The Blank Slate and a TED talk he adapted that into a few years back. (<a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html">http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinke...</a>) Here he totally mangles basic anthropology and archaeology. The chart he presents is a misinterpretation of data from Lawrence Keeley's <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/328446.War_Before_Civilization">War Before Civilization</a> -- anyone familiar with the societies he presents knows that most of them are not nomadic hunter-gatherer bands but partly or fully sedentary and horticulturalist, e.g., the Gebusi and Yanomamo. (As an aside, I find the use of Keeley ironic as he argues against a biological view of warfare in the book while Pinker is an ardent supporter of this view.) Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha devote an entire section to deconstructing this <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/7640261.Sex_at_Dawn_The_Prehistoric_Origins_of_Modern_Sexuality">Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality</a> (a book not without its own problems, as Ryan and Jetha play Rousseau to Pinker's Hobbes). (An adapted excerpt can be found here: <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/sex-dawn/201103/steven-pinkers-stinker-the-origins-war">http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/s...</a>) </p><p>Using modern hunter-gatherer societies (or at least what Pinker thinks are hunter-gatherer societies) as stand-ins for pre-historic societies is a rookie mistake. The degree to which modern hunter-gatherers have been displaced and influenced by industrial societies and nation-states has been one of the big debates over the last half-century in anthropology. Thus, whether they are representative of some "state of nature" at all is highly questionable. (See this brief summary of the "hunter-gatherer revisionist debate" by Thomas N. Headland for an overview and references: <a href="http://www.sil.org/~headlandt/huntgath.htm">http://www.sil.org/~headlandt/huntgat...</a>) Pinker notes this at one point but then completely forgets about it in taking his own cooked numbers at face value.</p><p>Even if we accept Pinker's definition of violence, the whole undertaking itself is an exercise in guesswork and absurdity. There were no census programs or bureaus of statistics throughout much of history. Written records of war often inflate or deflate the body count depending on whose side you're reading from (and as we know, winners write the history books) and the archaeological record is spotty in a large number of places. Perhaps we can get fairly accurate body counts here and there, but there are large swaths of history that we essentially have to just guess at. Fortunately, the good folks at Quodlibeta, actual historians, have broken down a good deal of the historical and statistical flaws in the book (starting here): <a href="http://bedejournal.blogspot.com/2011/11/steven-pinker-and-an-lushan-revolt.html">http://bedejournal.blogspot.com/2011/...</a></p><p>Considering he has been "refining" this argument since The Blank Slate (read: futilely polishing a turd), Pinker seems unlikely to back down. His FAQ released to "respond" to criticism completely dodges the fact that he's pulled a good deal of his numbers straight from his nether region. (See Quodlibeta again for an appropriately snarky take-down: <a href="http://bedejournal.blogspot.com/2011/12/this-is-bogus-statistic.html">http://bedejournal.blogspot.com/2011/...</a>) At some point, it begins to stretch credulity that he doesn't realize there's a hole big enough to drive an eighteen-wheeler through in this argument. (This does, however, make the book a useful litmus test to see which critics will gush how "thoroughly researched, amply documented, and strongly argued" something is as long as you flash a few fancy charts 'n graphs and pseudo-intellectual smoke and mirrors their way. Unfortunately, it seems that the answer is "A whole lot of them.")</p><p>Once you realize the entire book is a house of cards that's more or less already collapsed, the rest of it becomes an incredible grind. As above, the rest is just window dressing, a game of make believe. Sure, there's some interesting parts about, say, the psychology of aggression and a few delicious nuggets and tidbits of trivia along the way. Digging through the rough for them seems a rather pointless exercise, though, especially where it's already been done better. Large chunks of his argument are recycled from other authors such as <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/12397.Peter_Singer">Peter Singer</a> and <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/47029.Lynn_Hunt">Lynn Hunt</a>.</p><p>The end result is a whiggish history where sense and nonsense blend together seamlessly, thus negating any use the layperson might find in it. The presentation of history too often crosses into the cartoonish, being loaded down with ad hoc theorizing deployed to save the book's overarching narrative. Pinker's goal is, at base, to push his ideology, his own brand of secular humanism he claims to be based in "Enlightenment values." It is an ideology whose values I happen to largely share, but history demonstrates that anything can be taken too far. This is why Pinker is forced to downplay or omit the excesses of the Enlightenment such as the French Revolution with its Jacobins and Cult of Reason.</p><p>The irony here is that Pinker reveals himself to be as much of a romantic as his ideological opponents. The doomsayers appeal to a mythical past to buttress their claims (Arthur Herman has written an amusing account of this phenomenon in <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/684476.The_Idea_of_Decline_in_Western_History">The Idea of Decline in Western History</a>), but the optimists of modernity similarly appeal to a mythical future. While the notion that the kids these days are just rotten and the world is going to hell in a hand-basket has been with us for millennia, one of the central narratives of modernity has been a belief in a steady incline. With an increasingly global economy and the inevitable advance of science and technology, the high priests of modernity preach time and again, we are surely on our way to the best of all worlds. Predicting the future direction of humanity, though, has proven to be a fool's game, a bit of off-track betting for the intellectual class.</p><p>While Pinker never commits to this teleological narrative wholesale, he does bang the drum for the steady march of progress quite a bit throughout the book. Obviously, while I don't pine for the days of King Cotton or colonial Africa, I don't find much comfort in the fact that while the number of debt and sex slaves has exploded in absolute numbers, their proportion of the total population has decreased. Oh, how marvelous!</p><p>What <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/5454596.Bjorn_Lomborg">Bjorn Lomborg</a> did for environmental issues, Pinker has done for the history of violence.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/3583387?shelf=hack-jobs-and-bullshit">hack-jobs-and-bullshit</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/3583387?shelf=history">history</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/3583387?shelf=politics-and-political-philosophy">politics-and-political-philosophy</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/25582110-kate-savage"></a></section><section><p>643 reviews111 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/785503852">January 22, 2014</a></section><div><p>Make me a t-shirt that says “I read an 800-page book and all I got from it was this lousy review.”<p>The Good:<br />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. </p><p>The bad: everything else.</p><p>How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Conquistadors:</p><p>“Though imperial conquest and rule can themselves be brutal, they do reduce endemic violence among the conquered” (56).</p><p>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.</p><p>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><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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."</p><p>(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.)</p><p>Hatin’ on the Poors:</p><p>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).</p><p>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.</p><p>Racism is a thing of the past, says P, before he says a bunch of racist shit.</p><p>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).</p><p>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><p>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.</p><p>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.”</p><p>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.</p><p>But as P shows, racism is only natural. Babies are racist, after all (523).</p><p>And Sexism:</p><p>“We’re all feminists now,” says the man who’s never been a feminist (404).</p><p>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).</p><p>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)</p><p>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.</p><p>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><p>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).</p><p>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.”</p><p>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.</p><p>Progress Comes from People like Steve Pinker:</p><p>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.</p><p>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).</p><p>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.</p><p>Adjusting all violence to per-capita:</p><p>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.</p><p>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?</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>(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.)</p><p>Making meaning and meaninglessness:</p><p>P can't edit his arguments down -- he's writing 800 pages, after all, everything in!</p><p>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.</p><p>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).</p><p>I mean, come on, you're not even moving these to a footnote?</p><p>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)</p><p>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.</p><p>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)</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>And about cooking the books</p><p>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?</p><p>Love affair with enlightenment and capitalism</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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).</p><p>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.”</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>I’ve seen a lot of victim-blaming in my days, but never anything so blatant and disgusting as this.</p><p>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. </p><p>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).</p><p>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.</p><p>Burying Truth:</p><p>"In absolute numbers, of course, civilized societies are matchless in the destruction they have wreaked. But --”(47)<br />“Europe’s ability to kill people [through the present] outpaced its ability to breed more of them. But --”(230)<br />“European governments may have brutalized the natives when conquering a colony and putting down revolts, but --”(307).<br />“The law may be an ass, but --”(538)</p><p>Howard Zinn wrote:</p><p>“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.”</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/4252261-tom-la"></a></section><section><p>585 reviews217 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/532678625">November 23, 2022</a></section><div><p>I love optimistic books, and there is a lot of optimism in the almost 800 pages of "The better angels of our nature". At the same time, I find it impossible to give a single opinion about this behemoth of a book, because I found some of its elements truly excellent, some ok, and some absolutely scream-out-loud dreadful, so I'll try to explain.<p>In brief: </p><p>- the great: the quality of the writing is superb. This is one of the best books I've ever read in terms of clarity of exposition and effectiveness of the writing. Also, at the very beginning the author outlines the structure of the book, which gives you a clear mental map of what you're getting into. As a plus, Pinker peppers his prose with anecdotes, jokes and references to pop culture (a bit like Malcolm Gladwell) that enliven the experience. I know some may not enjoy that. I do.</p><p>- the good: the analysis of the decrease in violent behavior throughout history is deep and overall fairly convincing. Pinker acknowledges the fact that we are missing a lot of crucial data (about deaths and violence in the past), and he's received a lot of criticism for presenting a thesis that's partially based on guesswork, but I think there is a lot of value in making the layman (like me) think about these topics, and at least in trying to find some general patterns. Some reviewers hated his methodology, or the way he handles some piece of data - all fair. I think it all makes for a healthy discussion.</p><p>- the not so good: is that Pinker didn't make much of an attempt to present a truly global perspective on the subject: in this book, Western world = The World. China, India, Africa, South America... marginal "who knows?" footnotes. "Religion" = Christianity. He explains that European history has the most available data, but I'm not the only one to think that he could have made a much better effort in this regard. </p><p>- the dreadful is where Pinker lets his underlying personal New Atheist agenda seep through without any restraint. Sadly, this lowers the level of the book in many parts to pure tripe, in particular when it comes to the very subjective reasons behind the apparent decrease in violence throughout history. </p><p>On page 642 Pinker spells out exactly what the main problem with his own book is: "<i>Even the scientists are piling on. Human beings are led by their passions, say many psychologists, and deploy their puny powers of reason only to rationalize their gut feelings after the fact</i>". Ironically, that is precisely what he ended up doing with this book. </p><p>To be clear, this has nothing to do with Pinker's titular argument in favor the decline of violence, which as I said I found fairly convincing and rational. No, Pinker's emotional, irrational underlying argument is the following: </p><p>1) Enlightenment humanism, secularism and atheism are the only cultural forces for good in the world. <br />2) Religions have been purely a destructive, negative force throughout history, therefore our planet will be a much better place when religions have completely disappeared. </p><p>THAT is where the author's heart is. </p><p>"<i>As if biology didn't make things bad enough, the Abrahamic religions ratified some of our worst instincts with laws and beliefs that have encouraged violence for millennia</i>".</p><p>Incidentally, I just found out that Pinker and Richard Dawkins are buddies and share the same New Atheist credo. That gave me a sudden bout of nausea... Dawkins, the Grand Master of Missing The Point himself! </p><p>Watching Pinker zig-zag his way through his own version of world history where religion has caused only mayhem and suffering is like watching a professional skier slalom down through the obstacles. You have to admire his incredible ability to make it through without tripping over every few seconds. </p><p></p><p>For example: in Pinker's world, the "<i>Rights Revolutions show that a moral way of life requires a decisive rejection of instinct, culture, religion, and standard practice. In their place is an ethics that is inspired by empathy and reason and stated in the language of rights.</i> [ ] <i>This conclusion, of course </i> [but OF COURSE!], <i> is the moral vision of the Enlightenment and the strands of humanism and liberalism that have grown out of it. The Rights Revolutions are liberal revolutions</i>". </p><p>Under this light, it becomes hard to reconcile and explain how Martin Luther King, perhaps the greatest protagonist in the "Rights Revolutions", was a Baptist preacher who dedicated his life to worship, prayer and to following Jesus Christ as a role model. But no worries! Slalomist Pinker turns his skis swiftly and manages to dismiss MLK's adherence to Christianity almost completely! </p><p>What a feat, ladies and gentlemen!! Here he goes:</p><p>"<i>MLK, as a graduate student in theology, was, of course, conversant with the Bible and orthodox theology. But he also read renegade theologians such as Walter Rauschenbusch, who criticized the historical accuracy of the Bible and the dogma that Jesus died for people's sins. King then embarked on a serious study of the social and ethical theories of the great philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle down to ... [etc. etc.].". "King was profoundly inspired by Gandhi's theory of nonviolent resistance not as a moralistic affirmation of love, as nonviolence had been in the teaching of Jesus</i>". </p><p>And now - pay very close attention. After this microscopic cherry-picking, later on, on page 677 comes the master stroke. Here’s how Pinker references his ridiculously insufficient excursus through MLK's cultural influences:</p><p>"<i>As we saw, Martin Luther King rejected mainstream Christian theology and drew his inspiration from Gandhi, secular Western philosophy, and renegade humanistic theologians</i>".</p><p>Wait wait wait ..... we "saw" what??? The only thing you said was that he read some books, that is all we "saw". We never "saw" that MLK "rejected mainstream Christian theology"! Oh, what a number he just pulled there. Of course, an anti-christian MLK would fit perfectly in Pinker's nice little box. If only it wasn't a complete fabrication! Maybe, if we stretch it a bit, King was a "liberal Christian", but still very deeply and fully embracing Christian theology. <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Writings-show-King-as-liberal-Christian-2623685.php">www.sfgate.com/news/article/Writings-...</a></p><p>For King, his Christian faith was far more than a source of soaring rethoric. It was the boundless reservoir of the colossal courage he would need to risk his life day after day. Frankly, I find Pinker's statements about MLK's faith quite offensive. </p><p>So it is with unbelievably misguided violence (pun intended) that Pinker strips our history of any trace whatsoever of the positive influence of religion and religious people on the world, while focusing only on the stereotypical negative stories (of course, confusing "religion" with "corrupted clergy").</p><p>As I said above, what Pinker really means with Religion is Christianity, because it's the only one he keeps referring to, and he doesn't seem to know much at all about Hinduism or Buddhism. </p><p>"<i>Very little good has come from these ancient tribal dogmas. [List of stereotypical pub-banter-level bad things that the Church did] Defenders of religion claim that the two genocidal ideologies of the 20th century, fascism and communism, were atheistic. But the first claim is mistaken and the second irrelevant</i>". </p><p>Pinker is often leaving rationality aside to go FANTASTICALLY off the rails like this. Aside from the fact that he is wrong, what is even the point of this argument? What value does a defense of atheism bring to this book? </p><p>Pinker then constructs a couple of sentences aimed at resolving and clarifying why he has chosen to completely ignore religion in the 800 pages of "The better angels of our nature":</p><p>"<i>Religion plays no single role in the history of violence because religion has not been a single force in the history of anything.</i> [Says the erudite expert on religion, as we have just seen] <i>The vast set of movements that we call religions have little in common but their distinctness from the secular institutions that are recent appearances on the human stage</i>". </p><p>Ok. So, let me get it straight: you find it reasonable to metaphorically pee on 100% of what goes under "religion" because you say it's always been so diverse and multifaceted that its overall impact on history is, in the end, completely irrelevant? There is no fundamental golden rule, no consolidated drive for empathy and compassion, no focus on respect for human life across the main religions? The declaration of Human Rights has been inspired exclusively by Enlightenment humanism, and not at all by Christian values? You are actually using the horrors committed by a small part of the clergy to invalidate all the positive messages of religion and, more importantly, the useful and positive initiatives that most religious institutions pursue throughout the world (and very rarely make it to the news - like these <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/17/100-religious-groups-doing-good_n_5460739.html">www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/17/100...</a>) ?</p><p>After these statements, it's not surprising that the author forgets to articulate how "secular ideas" possess this ideal quality of being "a single force in the history of something" that religions do not have. As if everyone who was ever inspired by secular ideas behaved in the same way and went exactly in the same direction - the BEST direction, of course. </p><p>Here Pinker goes on to perform some more professional skiing to get around other obstacles, like the excesses of the French Revolution, Cult of Reason etc., at the risk of losing his pants: </p><p></p><p>I thought people who kill, or in general use violence, do it in the name of anything at all: good, bad, old, new, religious beliefs, political beliefs, and science- or reason-based beliefs (a small example: the interpretation of Darwinism by the Columbine killers).</p><p>More in general, I wonder: was it really that difficult for Pinker to admit that all types of cultural movements, religious and non-religious, have been influencing each other and impacting the history of violence in many different ways? Why did he need to defend secular ideologies as if they'd never been the inspiration for violence or violent acts? And why did he pinpoint all these cultural movements as a cause "in themselves" for violence and war? How would communism IN ITSELF or atheism IN ITSELF or Christianity IN ITSELF cause atrocities and wars? They are ideas: words on paper. None of these ideas was ever a specific order to commit atrocities. I've always thought that, in reality, bad or deranged people are the ones who read those words and bend them to their basic, animal desires. </p><p>But again, Pinker is a human being himself, and each human being needs to worship something - we are powered by emotions, not by reason. As much as he tries to tackle this immense subject with pure rationality, his personal opinions come through loud and clear and crash to a pulp any of his efforts to sound objective and fully rational. </p><p>So, in the end, to go back to the main official thesis of this book: violence has probably decreased, overall. We can talk forever about the type of statistics used by Pinker in this book, but it seems he could be right, and I hope he is. </p><p>As for the reasons behind the decrease, as discussed, Pinker gets irrational about it, for understandable reasons (his wife). Here is his own explanation from his website: "<i> It was only through the intellectual influence of my wife, the philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, that I understood the logic connecting them. She explained to me how morality can be grounded in rationality, and how secular humanism is just a modern term for the world view that grew out of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment (in particular, she argues, from the ideas of Spinoza). To the extent that the decline of violence has been driven by ideas, it’s this set of ideas, which I call Enlightenment humanism, which has driven it, and it offers the closest thing we have to a unified theory of the decline of violence</i>". </p><p>A crucial passage here is "To the extent that the decline of violence has been driven by ideas". No one knows how much this is! It could be 0.2%! But Pinker certainly thinks the history of ideas has been much more impactful on reality than what it actually has been. </p><p>This is a common misjudgement of academics: many of them tend to give far too much practical importance to ideas, books and cultural movements, and too little to money and power. </p><p>If violence has decreased, I see no evidence that the decrease has been directly and mainly caused by the advent of the Enlightenment ideas, as Pinker is trying to convince us with this book. Those ideas were certainly a big piece of the puzzle, a great inspiration, just like many other ideas have been a positive inspiration. But fundamentally, I think what needs to be credited most of all is: military technology, increased wealth and global commerce, a change in the cost / profit scenarios of violence, the increased spread of information, and therefore better risk assessment tools. Maybe, but only maybe, we could also add to this list some steps forward on the path of evolution of our collective consciousness. </p><p>--------------------------</p><p>Here is a good book that quietly destroys the myth of Enlightenment perfection: "In defense of Faith", by David Brog </p><p>Here are some interesting articles that talk about Pinker's world view:</p><p>On his view of scientism:<br /><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/aug/23/steven-pinker-language-poole">http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013...</a></p><p>On his New Atheist credo:<br /><a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/scienceonreligion/2013/08/steven-pinker-stop-bashing-religion-its-hurt-science/">http://www.patheos.com/blogs/scienceo...</a></p><p>On his (mis)understanding of religion:<br /><a href="http://bedejournal.blogspot.com/2008/04/steven-pinker-on-religion.html?m=1">http://bedejournal.blogspot.com/2008/...</a></p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/155663-david-rubenstein"></a></section><section><p>801 reviews2,502 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/283778889">January 9, 2014</a></section><div><p>In this book, Steven Pinker explores a very controversial thesis, that is, violence is declining. Different types of violence are declining on multiple time scales. It would seem like the twentieth century had some major wars and plenty of genocide to make his thesis sound rather foolish. But in the first seven chapters he shows lots and lots of statistics to back up his thesis. In the eighth and ninth chapters he also explores the scientific reasons for violence and the reasons for increasingly non-violent behavior. <p>The book is very comprehensive--it is quite long and detailed. The first chapters are not particularly "heavy" reading, but towards the end of the book, it can be tough-going--but fascinating throughout.</p><p>Pinker tackles the main objection to his thesis--the three worst dictators of the twentieth century (Hitler, Stalin, Mao) were responsible for an immense amount of violence, deaths and misery. Some of the reviewers here at Goodreads have remarked that Pinker underestimates the number of deaths that are attributable to Mao. Perhaps he did grossly underestimate the numbers--I really don't know.</p><p>Pinker makes an interesting point about the recent theory, raised in the book <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/1202.Freakonomics_A_Rogue_Economist_Explores_the_Hidden_Side_of_Everything__Freakonomics___1_">Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything</a>, that crime in the United States declined in the past few decades, because of the legalization of abortion in 1973. The idea is that the reduction in unwanted children led to fewer violence-inclined youths. Pinker argues that after 1973, the proportion of children born to vulnerable women actually increased, rather than decreased.</p><p>One of the reasons for the decline in violence is the increase in literacy and reading. Pinker argues that the transmission of new ideas in books has acted as a liberal force in society. He shows that during the Middle Ages, most people were religious and believed in the <i>literal</i> truth of the bible. Heretics were everywhere, and were persecuted in wars, massacres, pogroms, executions and torture. Nowadays, while religious people "believe" in the bible, most do not take such a literal interpretation. They don't think that it is moral to invade a city and kill--or take as slaves--every single person. A higher value is placed on human life, because of the "shift from valuing <i>souls</i> to valuing <i>lives</i>." Pinker writes, </p><blockquote>The theory that religion is a force for peace, often heard among the religious right and its allies today, does not fit the facts of history.</blockquote> Later, he writes, <blockquote>The world has far too much morality.</blockquote> Very true indeed.<p>Pinker shows how game theory plays a big role in the evolution of morality. In fact, he defines morality as the opportunity for positive-sum games. In so much of history, people played in zero-sum or even in negative-sum games. For example, war is usually a negative-sum game, in the sense that so many people die and suffer, that the gains to the victor are completely overwhelmed by the losses to both sides. </p><p>Nowadays, the language of violence is often cloaked in "bureaucratese", in words like purges, deportations, bombardments, pacification, rectification, ethnic cleansing, collateral damage, and rendition. These euphemisms help to self-exculpate the perpetrators of violence, and make violence seem to be justified or involuntary. </p><p>Pinker discusses in some detail the factors that he believes have led to decreased violence in recent times. He talks a lot about the concept of <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/91953.Leviathan">Leviathan</a> from the book by this name by Thomas Hobbes. According to Pinker, the presence of a legitimate, strong central government helps to reduce violence, at least on a personal basis. People are less inclined to violence when they think that punishment is likely. (Not always true, but usually.) </p><p>He describes how "gentle commerce" helps to "turn zero-sum warfare into positive-sum mutual profit ... sweetening the outcome of mutual pacifism with the mutual gains of exchange." Pinker also shows how "feminization" has helped to move society "... away from a culture of manly honor, with its approval of violent retaliation for insults, toughening of boys through physical punishment, and veneration of martial glory."</p><p>One of the most interesting--and potentially useful--parts of the book is his analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The root of the problem is that there are so many <i>sacred</i> concepts on both sides. A sacred concept is one that is not subject to negotiation--it is completely <i>off the table</i>. People will not compromise on their sacred values, but they might compromise on so-called "pseudo-sacred" values. Pinker describes evidence that both sides might be willing to <i>declare</i> compromises through symbolic concessions, even though they are not actually willing to <i>perform</i> on their compromises. Pinker writes, </p><blockquote>To find <i>anything</i> that softens the opposition of Israeli and Palestinian fanatics to what the rest of the world recognizes as the only viable solution to their conflict is something close to a miracle.</blockquote> It all has to do with the symbolic framing of a peace agreement.<p>There are certain parts of the book that might make a squeamish reader cringe--there are some short descriptions of barbaric tortures. If you can get through (or skip) those parts, then you will find a fascinating theory developed from the point of view of scientific scholarship--sociology, psychology, and evolutionary biology. As with all of Steven Pinker's writings, this book is fascinating, comprehensive, and sure to be controversial. He has (most of) the facts behind him, and it is difficult to argue against his major points. </p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/155663?shelf=biology">biology</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/155663?shelf=ethics">ethics</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/155663?shelf=history">history</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/35434974-kevin"></a></section><section><p>269 reviews564 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1066604628">November 17, 2022</a></section><div><p>This book asserts that violence has decreased. I can set this aside as a worthy discussion. However, that is just the hook to catch readers. The purpose here is spreading ideologies to explain <b>why</b> violence has decreased.<p><b>The Bad</b>:<br />Well, it turns out Pinker puts much of his faith in the <b>status quo</b> (i.e. power) as directly responsible, i.e. the State ("Leviathan") and Capitalism ("Gentle Commerce"). </p><p>Let us consider status quo bias:<br />1) One can argue that it is <b>resistance</b> to power that has brought much of the decrease in violence we see today! After all, slavery and colonialism were the most profitable Capitalist ventures, backed and enabled by the growth of States. Elites sure are innovative at <b>co-opting grassroots demands</b> (and then smugly taking credit for it!), like the liberal elite property-holders who did all they could to thwart democracy ("mob rule") until it became advantageous to run as "democrats" (while power migrated from the political sphere to the private economic sphere of one-dollar-one-vote). </p><p>2) Even if such violent power structures were capable of forcing an increase in material production, must we assume they are the only options? Have we really reached "<b>The End of History</b>" in finding the optimal social system, as <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/32633.Francis_Fukuyama">another status quo shill</a> put it? (Indeed, we might soon reach the end of history given <b>climate change</b> and other destruction of crucial Earth systems, but never mind that; Pinker just picks out the "science" that conforms to status quo triumphalism)<br />...Euro/Americentric Liberal elitists and their useful idiots (Pinker?) place their faith in "the Enlightenment" (similarly, the "Founding Fathers") as the foundational social movement in human history, but we should look beyond Orwellian history, towards accounts that do not just assume whatever is written by the victors is the totality of reality. The autonomous communities not requiring and openly resisting the violent shepherding by authority are indeed written out of history... </p><p>I tried to re-read these 800+ pages to give a thorough unpacking, but frankly there are better uses of one's time. I am thankful for <b>
 <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2290478277">The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions</a>
</b> which brings an accessible dose of <b>decolonization</b> ideologies to expose just how atrocious Pinker's ideologies are. </p><p>...and these beautiful (negative) reviews, enjoy!<br /><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/785503852?book_show_action=true&amp;from_review_page=1">Brilliant review #1</a><br /><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/253147145?book_show_action=false&amp;from_review_page=1">Brilliant review #2</a><br /><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/238329819?book_show_action=false&amp;from_review_page=1">Inception of spicy reviews</a><br /><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/273624614?book_show_action=true&amp;from_review_page=1">...and one more</a><br />...in fact, there's an entire book (<a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/41051083.Reality_Denial_Steven_Pinker_s_Apologetics_for_Western_Imperial_Violence">Reality Denial: Steven Pinker’s Apologetics for Western-Imperial Violence</a>), co-written by <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/7985.Edward_S__Herman">Edward S. Herman</a> (who also lead the co-writing of that famous Chomsky book on foreign policy media: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2075902259">Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media</a>)</p><p><b>The Missing</b>:<br />I used to first recommend the following critiques on power and appraisal of popular resistance and decision-making for Western audiences given their accessibility. They are still useful:<br />-<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2075920080">Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky</a><br />-<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1095781325">The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement</a></p><p>However, to appreciate why socialism in 20th century revolutions took place in the Global South/periphery is to build the historical context of the <b>violence of global capitalism</b>. This is crucial to avoid becoming the smug Western armchair critic that sees everyone else as primitive/violent/"totalitarian"/"anti-democratic"/"not real socialism", while at the same time failing to prevent the exportation of bombs and embargoes, or achieving economic democracy at home. Where to start?</p><p>1) I'm accumulating a playlist on Global South Socialism, featuring <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/10707.Vijay_Prashad">Vijay Prashad</a>, <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/21234.Michael_Parenti">Michael Parenti</a>, <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/367522.Utsa_Patnaik">Utsa Patnaik</a>, <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/2771988.Max_Blumenthal">Max Blumenthal</a>, etc.: <b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSQhQoKnYhTXceMPfa4MYyJjnm5ScFIZ_">https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...</a> </b><br />--Highlights include:<br />i) <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/21234.Michael_Parenti">Michael Parenti</a>:<br />-on Cuban Revolution: <b><a href="https://youtu.be/npkeecCErQc">https://youtu.be/npkeecCErQc</a> </b><br />-full: <a href="https://youtu.be/O8k0yO-deoA?t=27">https://youtu.be/O8k0yO-deoA?t=27</a> <br />ii) <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/10707.Vijay_Prashad">Vijay Prashad</a><br />-on <b>ideological censorship</b>: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jKcsHv3c74">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jKcs...</a> <br />-"The Many Lives of Communism in the Third World": <a href="https://youtu.be/NZXh2Guebhg?t=104">https://youtu.be/NZXh2Guebhg?t=104</a><br />-<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3400391327">Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations</a><br />-<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2075869876">The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World</a><br />-<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2075870125">The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South</a></p><p>2) Books on the history of global capitalism not glossing over its violence and contradictions: <br />-accessible intros: <br />-<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2075894568">Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism</a> (has reformist blind-spots towards empire, but very accessible intro to the history of economic development where long-term productivity gains require nurturing/protection from ruthless short-term market competition)<br />-<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2661299837">The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry</a><br />-<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2076294721">Capitalism: A Ghost Story</a> <br />-<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2076168012">A People's History of the United States</a> (history from below instead of by the winners)<br />-<a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/185099.A_People_s_History_of_the_World">A People's History of the World</a><br />...deeper dives:<br />-<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3865335980">Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present</a><br />-<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2122888077">Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World</a><br />--<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2075867825">Debt: The First 5,000 Years</a><br />-<a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/2690635.Perilous_Passage_Mankind_and_the_Global_Ascendancy_of_Capital">Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital</a></p><p>3) Capitalism as the end of history?<br />-Intro on capitalism's dynamism being at the same time its volatility: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2497354356">Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails</a><br />-Structural alternatives? <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3534877165">Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present</a><br />-Capitalist growth on a finite planet: <br />-<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3432909941">Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World</a><br />-<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2501281520">Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System</a><br />-Capitalist State as a tool to manage class conflict: <br />-<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2075901174">A Brief History of Neoliberalism</a><br />-<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2076290954">The State and Revolution</a></p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/35434974?shelf=critique-violence">critique-violence</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/35434974?shelf=theory-psych">theory-psych</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/35434974?shelf=theory-violence">theory-violence</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/5864678-jan-rice"></a></section><section><p>509 reviews427 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/975673510">September 29, 2016</a></section><div><p>Steven Pinker has written a monster of a book. He has used his intelligence to crunch a huge volume of material. He has made a number of great points to which I'm sure to be referring often.<p>Yet despite all the insights and accompanying drum rolls, I am suspicious of the dramatic hypothesis, the grand prediction that humankind has learned in any permanent sense to be kinder and gentler. That hypothesis is a welcome change from all the dystopian predictions, and I do think I, and western civilization in general, has it pretty good right here and now in terms of space to survive and thrive. I just don't think it's necessarily a permanent pinnacle. And when people are thumping their chests and seeing themselves as representing that pinnacle, well, that's concerning--even though he insists his views are scientific and not in the least messianic. So, if Steven Pinker had been a little more humble and had spoken of current times as pretty nice for some without necessarily approaching the best of all possible worlds, I could better countenance him. But Steven Pinker can be hard to take and he doesn't do humble.</p><p>Here's a cartoon making fun of Obama from the right--and of the notion that violence has declined. But, as when we see ten feet of snow and sneer at "global warming," everything is not always as it appears!</p><p><br />--Ramirez, 06-17-2014</p><p>On the other hand, given all the predictions of doom for the world that are in circulation, it's good to hear thinking from the other angle for a change. We need it. Having leaned too far one way, maybe the only way to get back in form is to lean the other way. And that's why, when I finish complaining, I'll be touching on some of Pinker's many surprising assertions, despite not being a Pinkerite.</p><p>But, first, here are some more of my objections.</p><p>Steven Pinker has thrown so many ideas and hypotheses into this book, and he's such a fast talking, smooth intellect that it's hard to evaluate all of it--as though he were some rogue trader wheeling and dealing beyond the capacity of his would-be supervisors. You can't help but be impressed by his moves even when they're too fast to follow and you know he's sometimes pulling a fast one.</p><p>Steven Pinker doesn't do justice by his opponents. I remember the Platonic principle I learned in <i>Plato at the Googleplex</i>--that you haven't refuted an argument unless you have it in its best articulation. Straw men won't do. We hear references to opposing ideas and their proponents but in this book it's assumed that Pinker's views represent the "normal" and "best" views. I mean his views that the current commercial economy and individualism do represent the best of all possible worlds. I may even agree with him, but my point is that not everyone does. </p><p>One of Pinker's main arguments for the decline of violence is that a lower percentage of humans suffer violence now than in the early modern period, medieval times, the Renaissance, or in antiquity or prehistory. Yes, a lot of people suffered violence in the 20th century, but, according to him, a lower percentage. But, if more people suffer now but are a lower percent of the total population, is that really less violence? Did anybody ask the particular sufferers? If each human is an end in him- or herself, and a greater number are suffering, can that really be considered evidence for the decline of violence?</p><p>Actually, I took that line of argument--asking what the individuals themselves would have had to say--straight from Pinker's mouth:</p><blockquote>Ho Chi Minh was correct when he prophesied, "Kill ten of our men and we will kill one of yours. In the end, it is you who will tire." The American democracy was willing to sacrifice a tiny fraction of the lives that the North Vietnamese dictator was willing to forfeit (<i>no one asked the proverbial ten men how they felt about this</i>), and the United States eventually conceded the war of attrition despite having every other advantage. (p. 309)(my italics)</blockquote><p>Something similar happens--the author's doing what he himself reprimands others for--in the area of religion. Over and over, Pinker comes down hard on religion, blaming it for the violence and excesses of earlier eras. Yet he has to employ the most fundamentalist interpretations and he has to ignore aspects that run counter to that thesis, and all in a field that is outside his area of expertise. He has to take things literally and his interpretations as the one-and-only interpretations, laid down once and for all, for example, to take a common and conventionally-made criticism: </p><blockquote>The overriding principle was that animals exist for the benefit of humans. In the Hebrew Bible, God's first words to Adam and Eve in Genesis 1:28 are "Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." (p. 458)</blockquote><p>And he has to pick out only the aspects of scripture that he finds distasteful. And use whatever "God said" in some Bible verse as if an actual historical event to compare to "other" historical events. Apparently he must even keep the King James flavor (<i>moveth</i>).</p><p>Expounding on the meaning of seemingly arbitrary and bizarre but nevertheless rigidly required manners and rules of etiquette, Pinker studies their history. But studying the history of religion that way wouldn't advance Pinker's argument, while blindness to any such thing does, so he leaves it in the dark. "<i>What you see is all there is</i>," as <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/72401.Daniel_Kahneman">Daniel Kahneman</a>, another cognitive psychologist, says. My early impression from the quotes that were up when I started out was that most casual readers were reading <i>The Better Angels of Our Nature</i> primarily to hear Steven Pinker diss religion and reinforce their own views.</p><p>In an apparent spirit of fairness, Pinker disses the New Testament, too, but he reserves most of his ire for the Hebrew Bible. Let that be a lesson for you, Christians who disrespect your Old Testament. You are doing the work of atheists for them. </p><p>Speaking of cognitive psychology, Pinker pretty much worships at the alter of reason. Doing otherwise wasn't something that was going to advance his thesis; the reader will have to look <a href="http://janetrice.blogspot.com/2013/09/part-iii-science-of-rules-religion-and.html">elsewhere</a> for the limits of reason and for the understanding of consciousness as a system of attention rather than as some pristine space for free choice.</p><p>One more criticism: I was surprised by a clear inconsistency on Pinker's part. This author loves local authority, and, on the national level, <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/91953.Leviathan">Leviathan</a>--a central government large and powerful enough to reserve violence to itself and wield it in an increasingly disinterested and just manner--as an alternative to a wild, wild west scenario of every man for himself. Yet when it came to the international level he argues correlationally for a "Democratic Peace" theory, calling the "empire" theory of peace "cynical." (p. 281) Huh?</p><p>And going back to religion for a minute, what about God and religion as a means to call up a symbolic "Leviathan," long before there could be an actual central government in that role. He hints as much on p. 539, quoting from Martin Daly and Margo Wilson's 1988 book <i>Homicide</i> on the subject of our retention of a "just deserts" approach to justice as opposed to adopting a purely utilitarian "deterrence" approach:</p><blockquote>From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, this almost mystical and seemingly irreducible moral imperative is the output of a mental mechanism with a straightforward adaptive function: to reckon justice and administer punishment by a calculus which ensures that violators reap no advantage from their misdeeds. The enormous volume of mystico-religious bafflegab about atonement and penance and divine justice and the like is the attribution to higher detached authority of what is actually a mundane, pragmatic matter: discouraging self-interested competitive acts by reducing their profitability to nil.</blockquote><p>Pinker himself goes on to argue that just deserts itself may serve a deterrent function, and that if we were to get rid entirely of the just deserts, "retributive" aspect, making the justice system "too narrowly utilitarian," then "malefactors would learn to game it. Just deserts can close off that option."</p><p>I think it is here, in those words, and in waffling sprinkled throughout the book on the subject of religion, that Pinker concedes the value of of the very phenomenon against which he becomes so exercised. But he doesn't get that he has done so.</p><p>I got the impression that Steven Pinker really, really wants his theory that our better angels have won to be true. More on that at the end...</p><p>Now to some of his thought-provoking assertions and conclusions:</p><p>Prehistorical hunter-gatherer times were not some idyllic period during which the world was populated by noble savages free from the corrupting influence of civilization. On the contrary, life was nasty, brutish and short; those times were dominated by sneaky, murderous, rapacious raiding parties. Things had to settle down considerably before anybody could write or read any books, people! Yes, it was two steps forward, one step backward for eons; people lost health and strength when they traded in hunting and gathering for agriculture--but still!</p><p>Nor were medieval times some idyllic period over which to nostalgically yearn. That would be "cutting off your nose to spite your face," nose-snipping being one common response to a slight. Honor was priceless but life was cheap. The way we feel now--that our bodies belong to us and are ours to care for--a perception that seems to reflect "reality" but is of recent, modern derivation. It is an attitude we anachronistically think always existed. Instead, individualism developed gradually. With modern times we no longer belonged to some warlord or king; and with the spread of trade we had to get inside the head of the prospective trading partner and see others as we see ourselves..as we see others.... </p><p>The biggest problems for a society come with an overload of young males. And, yet, the confounding preference for male babies that drives female infanticide in many cultures!</p><p>Infanticide itself is far from being some aberration attributable to the impact of modern stress and alienation. Infanticide was the norm from time immemorial--if it helped the survival of current young whose viability was already established, circumstances being such that a mother could care for only so many.</p><p>This kind of thinking--some people don't want to hear it! It's enough to garner threatening letters for poor scientists.</p><p>Genocide is not a disease of modernity either. We've just learned to recognize it, that's all. Life used to be a permanent holocaust for nameless multitudes, in slavery and through the impact of war and violence. No one thought anything was wrong with it unless it happened to you, says Pinker. Murderous death was supposed to represent the verdict of history, of God, in accordance with a way of thinking only lately subject to question. </p><p>In this day of competition for victimhood (at best a two-edged sword!), silence in the aftermath of genocide seems inconceivable, but if genocide was a <i>just verdict</i>, no wonder that, at first, Holocaust survivors couldn't talk about it. I am told that changed for American Jews in consequence of the 1967 Six Day War. Did that raise the possibility of an alternative verdict?</p><p>I want to digress here on how views on the suffering of violence are shifted around in religious narratives. Some ideas have begun to consolidate themselves while I've been working on this review but since they <i>are</i> off the beaten path of the review I'll hide them. </p><p>In particular I came back to Galatians 3:13 in which Paul turns around the crucifixion of Christ from the "curse of the law" to a blessing. That has always bothered me because Deuteronomy 21:22-23 doesn't say being hanged (or crucified) is a curse. (The Jewish Study Bible and the NRSV share an editor; the translations and footnotes are very similar.) It says that leaving the body out and unburied is the curse (affront to God)--basically the same as for Sophocles' Antigone and her brother whom Cleon considered a traitor and wouldn't let her bury, to the misfortune of all. In biblical times--meaning Hebrew biblical times--stoning was the method. The final redaction was around the time of the Exile, when crucifixion didn't yet loom large. The Hebrew bible--"the law" in Paul's terms--recognized that, atypically, some traitor-types might be hanged or impaled; in that case, leaving the body exposed might well be part of the punishment. So the bible, to circumscribe such practices, said the body must not be exposed and left overnight to become carrion. The bible, in other words, sided with the morals of Sophocles' <i>Antigone</i>. <i>That</i> is what Deuteronomy is saying.</p><p>But, by post-testamental--make that <i>inter</i>testamental times, if you're from a Christian tradition--that had changed. The sadistic execution method of crucifixion had become unfortunately well-known, and, by then, that's what people thought of when they read those Deuteronomy verses. Here's an article I came across--the first few pages, anyway: <a href="http://www.tsm.edu/sites/default/files/Faculty%20Writings/LeMarquand%20-%20Cursed%20be%20everyone.pdf">http://www.tsm.edu/sites/default/file...</a> So, I think Paul thought what he thought and wrote what he wrote--and isn't the part about suffering a bad end as a curse typical? Isn't turning that upside down what religions do? But, "the Law" didn't say that being crucified is a curse.</p><p>No gas chambers? We may think genocide requires modern technology, but it doesn't. Just lock a town's population in a building and come back in two weeks. Think of the sieges of the ancient world, or of chariots, the advanced weapons of a long-ago day.</p><p>And, now--political correctness. For Pinker, PC is the residue of changes that have occurred and that we've therefore forgotten about. </p><blockquote>During the transition to modernity, people did not fully appreciate that they were undergoing changes aimed at reducing violence, and once the changes were entrenched, the process was forgotten. When Europeans were mastering norms of self-control, they felt like they were becoming more civilized and courteous, not that they were part of a campaign to drive the homicide statistics downward. Today we give little thought to the rationale behind the customs left behind by that change.... ...(A) civilizing offensive can leave a culture with a legacy of puzzling customs, peccadilloes, and taboos. ... The code of etiquette bequeathed by this and other Rights Revolutions is pervasive enough to have acquired a name. We call it political correctness.</blockquote><p>He also thinks we become amnesiac about the degree of change. We forget what the past was really like. We say little has changed. That is related to PC, enabling us to keep our guard up against the return of "the bad old days," and it also enables activists to exhort us to do more. In other words, exaggeration. If we had to acknowledge how much better things are, could we get away with it? People say racism is just as bad as it always was, but it isn't. Same for antisemitism. Not so far. </p><p>My husband was taking a Greek course last fall. In Georgia, people over 65 can take college courses for free within the state university system if there is space--isn't that nice? In connection with his course we could attend some lectures on antiquity, and at one the doctoral candidate made reference to the Greek "dark ages" (from about 1200-800 BCE). There was an African-American woman of uncertain age--meaning not young (but younger than I, as nearly everyone is getting to be) in the audience. I mention her ethnicity for any light that may shed on her reply, and what she did, during the question-and-answer period, is take issue with the "dark ages" designation, for, she said, we shouldn't make such a designation given that <i>this</i> is such a dark age. </p><p>That exemplifies the point Pinker was making re forgetting what the past was really like and exaggerating the problems of the present, even as we all sat safe, secure, comfortable and diverse, discussing our esoteric subject.</p><p>That segues to the Moralization Gap. </p><p>Say I've done something to you. From your point of view, you were my victim. Our perspectives are going to be very different. Mine will be that whatever I did wasn't all that serious. At any rate it was a long time ago. Did I really have a choice? What can one expect, anyway? My stance is going to tend toward you should get over it already, and, while you're at it, stop being so over-sensitive. Meanwhile, you don't see it that way, not by a long shot. Whatever it is lives on in your memory and your heart. For you, not forgetting is more than common sense; it's a sacred trust. </p><p>In short, the Moralization Gap is about the impact of self-interest on our views and dealings with each other, a potentially fruitful method of analysis for understanding the dynamics of a situation and why it's so hard to get along.</p><p>According to Pinker the scientist is usually going to side <i>against</i> the past as a living cause and <i>with</i> what's over being over. So, in other words, he's assuming whatever it is <i>is</i> over.</p><p>One can envisage still more angry letters and protests against that poor scientist.</p><p>Why does Pinker need to believe at all costs in his Enlightenment values? It occurs to me that for a <i>philosophe</i> who is not from the religious majority it's distinctly unpalatable to consider what it would be like if the hands of the majority tradition were to be untied. What would happen to his vaunted authority then?</p><p>And yet when he goes on and on with his criticism of the Hebrew bible, it sounds like sucking up to that majority, as if to say "Listen to me: I'm putting them down; I'm not like them." And, in that way, he's reminiscent of Marx.</p><p>Here's a 2008 article by Jerry Muller asserting the triumph of ethnonationalism. If Muller's assertions are correct, they undermine Pinker's general hypothesis. (<i>Foreign Affairs</i> allows non-subscribers one article a month and two if you register.) <a href="http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/63217/jerry-z-muller/us-and-them">http://www.foreignaffairs.com/article...</a><br />Here, critics try to refute Muller but don't succeed: <a href="http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/64457/james-habyarimana-macartan-humphreys-daniel-posner-jeremy-weinst/is-ethnic-conflict-inevitable">http://www.foreignaffairs.com/article...</a></p><p>Finally, don't think that all that's here is all there is. This review isn't very systematic. Or comprehensive; for example, there's game theory and the Prisoner's Dilemma in the evolution of cooperation. Or the concept "self-determination of peoples" as instigator of blood baths....</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/5864678?shelf=audio">audio</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/5864678?shelf=history">history</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/5864678?shelf=morality-justice">morality-justice</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1931383-faruk-ahmet"></a></section><section><p>5 reviews32 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/694008151">July 22, 2016</a></section><div><p>Loathing is the word. It infuriated me. You'd think that after all these years one would stop being surprised by this style of typical new-atheist/liberal argumentation but when I see this much cherrypicking, oversimplification, handwaving and western supremacism shoved into a single book, I still get all worked up. And of course, it doesn't help that they call themselves "The Brights" and "The Enlightened" etc. I mean, who does that? Even if I was intellectually convinced by their arguments, I still wouldn't wanna hang around these jerks.<p>His main thesis is simple and for anyone brought up after the 19th century, overly familiar: We were savages, then we were saved by Science and Reason. Not all of us, of course, only Europeans and Americans at first, but thanks to Capitalism (or as he labels it, <i>the gentle commerce</i>), everywhere else is catching up slowly, too. One time this evil thing called Communism had suddenly sprung up out of nowhere and caused many deaths and suffering but it was ultimately defeated by the Allies of Light. Etc.</p><p>"If you'd suggest occupying another country today, everyone would laugh at you and they'd think you were crazy; it is a thing of the past", he says (paraphrasing). So what about Iraq or Afghanistan? Panama, Bolivia, Vietnam, Libya and countless other bloody conflicts and interjections by the Western forces, mainly USA? Oh, they are not "wars", he says, but merely unfortunate but "defensive" actions taken by civilized nations to protect their democratic ways. Isn't it incredibly telling that in an EIGHT-HUNDRED-page book about the history of world politics and violence, the word "imperialism" is not uttered at all. Not even once.</p><p>There are a myriad of graphs and numbers stuffed inside. But the way he handles them and the way he chooses the sources he gets them from is so blatantly manipulative that it's cringe-inducing. A source repudiates his claims about "The Long Peace" and "the waning of war", and draws a bleak picture of the condition the world is in outside TheCivilizedNations? Well they are extremist, communist, leftist fanatics, you can't trust their data. Here, we have a government-funded organization that prints out numbers that fit my theory beautifully; surely they're the trustworthy ones. In one of the most embarrasing moments of the book, «<i>we are seriously asked to draw conclusions from a graph of the "rate of battle deaths in state-based armed conflicts between 1900 and 2005" (Figure 6-1) <b>while being instructed to ignore the figures for the first and second world wars</b></i>»**. Why should we ignore two world wars, while looking at the history of wars, you ask? Because "after all, the world has seen nothing close to that level since". It was a fluke. This is kinda like saying "please don't call it murder just because there's a body lying on the floor with a knife in the back, since it's not like we see something like that everyday". Forgive me for the vulgar language, but this reminds me of a lovely Turkish idiom: "If my aunt had balls, she would be my uncle".</p><p>Well, I could go on and on (like this occasionally biased and contrived -leftists!- but <i>very</i> detailed and informative <a href="http://goo.gl/fAz0Mp">review does</a>) but you get the gist. In the end, it's not that I find the claim that violence in general is getting comparatively subsided (and it's at least partially thanks to Western Civilization) completely worthless. It doesn't even have to be a glorious, total, irreversible change of paradigm to be worth praising. If we are living in a marginally better, more peaceful world, we should know about it, and understand the why and the how so we can push it further. If it really turns out that the Westerners are morally superior and more evolved or something, so be it; it's not the premise that bugs me at all, but if it takes this much deceptive and manipulative "scholarship" to prove a point, maybe we should at least raise an eyebrow in mild suspicion before patting our world of gentle commerce in the back, you know.</p><p>**Quote from <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/273624614">David's review</a>, because I'm too lazy to look it up myself.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1931383?shelf=history">history</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1931383?shelf=non-fiction">non-fiction</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6852430-fourtriplezed"></a></section><section><p>443 reviews90 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2012070760">December 14, 2018</a></section><div><p>What an interesting read! If the idea is to give the reader food for thought this book more than nourishes. <p>My approach to this book was a bit different than is usual. I have tended to write a review and then read others. Not in this case. I read many good reviews and few that were critical so was very open to being a critic. I am of the opinion that a few did not take note of what Pinker wrote. He got some numbers wrong was a fairly common complaint. He may have and admits as much. A few times he made it clear that his numbers were estimates based on researchers who are respected in the field. “…. so there is no single correct estimate” he writes on page 60 of my copy. Page 168 “….. no one knows exactly how many were killed…..” when discussing holy slaughters. In fact Pinker supports scepticism as he suggested on page 217 when discussing the Enlightenment. </p><p>As a westerner living a very comfortable life in Australia I was intrigued to read a comment by US politician John Kerry on page 417. “We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorist are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance. As a former law-enforcement person, I know we’re never going to end prostitution. We’re never going to end illegal gambling. But we’re going to reduce it, organised crime, to a level where it isn’t on the rise. It isn’t threatening people’s lives every day, and fundamentally it’s something that you continue to fight, but it’s not threatening the fabric of your life” He was right of course but he became “unfit to lead” and had to back pedal as the reality is that the authorities may well have reduced and contained crime, by cripes don’t tell the people that because the media will not be happy unless they are able to make you feel bad about just about every part of your life. Less violence? How dare that be considered when there is news to sell. And take it in your stride as you are not going to get hit by the Mafia? Bah! </p><p>This book covered a variety of female issues and after conversation elsewhere I even read On Rape by Germaine Greer. Hardly an area I knew much about. Glad I did. Perhaps blokes my age, 60ish, need to get of their fat arses and not think they rule the world as Pinker has given a very good case that the rise of feminist thought has been good for our collective health. While reading this I came across this item on the repulsive practise of female circumcision. Yes the item says caution is required but it is good to read that progress is taking place. </p><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/nov/07/fgm-rates-in-east-africa-drop-20-years-study-shows">https://www.theguardian.com/global-de...</a></p><p>This book has some fascinating sub chapters and one on page 572 called Whence The Rights Revolution? should thrill the hearts of all book readers. Among other things is a fivefold increase in books published from 1960 to 2000. The information we are getting seems to just make us collectively smarter when it comes to treating each other with a little bit of respect and not get on our high horse and want to smash the face in of our neighbours be they next door or in the nation next door. </p><p>So does Pinker say we are in for even less violence in the future? No! In fact he makes it abundantly clear that one bit of lunacy can change everything. I personally am very unsure we have rosy future. I am like the next father of children and worry about the environment, that a loony with a nuke will go mad but the book itself is in fact not really about that. It is about the data that shows violence has dropped and gives several reasons why. Disagree with the reasons by all means but also enjoy the fact you have more chance of dying in a car crash than by a terrorist attack no matter what the newspapers tells you.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/6852430?shelf=history">history</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/6852430?shelf=my-non-fiction">my-non-fiction</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/396341033">September 24, 2012</a></section><div><p>I have a peripheral awareness that Pinker awakens red penitus in a goodly proportion of his stalwart readers: but I don’t know why. I shan’t delve into this before I write up ‘better angels’: don’t want to be distracted by ‘noise’. <p>800 pages of socio-economic postulating: always an inexact science, is going to rub someone the wrong way hither or thither. We see what we want to see, and 800 pages of the ‘humanities’ is like waving a red flag to a bull: plenty of scope to flare up, statistically speaking, and isn’t that just what we love to do best: exploit the ‘Moralizing Gap’ to justify our own world view:we’re brushed up dammit: well, OK, we may not be able to prove a point statistically, mathematically, economically, biologically or physically, but give me the humanities, I say: and see if I know my oochie from my achie. </p><p>The subject centre stage here is violence, (mainly in the westen hemisphere, where data is more readily available)and the overarching conclusion is that it has decreased over time: in terms of war, rape, homicide and any other conceivable physical violation against the person. </p><p>No one, as far as I am aware, has disagreed with this overall premise, although certain definitions of violence are under debate : e.g. the high prevaleence of infanticide has been supplanted with high levels of abortion, so in this particular area Pinker’s hypothesis does not hold up: but this is and other instances are outliers in the more general scenario of violence reduction.</p><p>Pinker’s starting premise is the biological impulse, the Darwinian hegemony for survival . This type of thinking will either resonate or repel. But it is an important point because if you’re going to go down the route of biological justification, then its inadmissible to switch and bait halfway through as Pinker does. And he does so by positing the issue of excessive violence in terms of biological necessity, but resolves its decrease through ambiguous channels such as self control, empathy, reverse morality and, incongruously, and ultimately, the Flynn effect.</p><p>Hence the incompatibility? How can something which starts off as nature be dampened by nurture? Huh? Huh?</p><p>On the surface, all of the theories Pinker posits withstands microscopic examination: the Civilizing Process (e.g. the contract between man and state) does indeed explain the decline in violence: prior to Henry II introducing the state vs Jane Doe as opposed to Joe Bloggs vs Jane Doe, violence was the only way out: you smacked your feudal neighbours about, or you lost out. The aristocracy were just as likely as the hoi polloi to ‘engage’ in a good brawl. After the change in law, it wasn’t so beneficial. The upper and middle classes modified their behaviour. The lower classes persisted (and persist), because they have never fully bought into the state-citizen contract (and to be fair, neither has the state, on their behalf). Other influencing factors intervene: commerce, the integration of minorities in spheres of influence which engender the ‘rights revolution’, the pacifying influence of women, the clear demarcation of national borders, the influx of democracy, the redefinition of moral values.</p><p>And you know what: its all true. All of it. All of these trends decreased violence. And not one person can nary say it didn’t. But how exactly:well, Pinker’s final analysis is: mainly, Reason. Now, I’ve cut and pasted this next section from Peter Singer in the New York Times book review, because he rightly summarises Pinker’s position and I am too lazy to. I’m saving my fire for the constructive anlaysis after:</p><p>‘Pinker’s claim that reason is an important factor in the trends he has described relies in part on the “Flynn effect” — the remarkable finding by the philosopher James Flynn that ever since I.Q. tests were first administered, the scores achieved by those taking the test have been rising. The average I.Q. is, by definition, 100; but to achieve that result, raw test scores have to be standardized. If the average teenager today could go back in time and take an I.Q. test from 1910, he or she would have an I.Q. of 130, which would be better than 98 percent of those taking the test then. Nor is it easy to attribute this rise to improved education, because the aspects of the tests on which scores have risen most do not require a good vocabulary or even mathematical ability, but instead test powers of abstract reasoning. ......</p><p>Pinker argues that enhanced powers of reasoning give us the ability to detach ourselves from our immediate experience and from our personal or parochial perspective, and frame our ideas in more abstract, universal terms. This in turn leads to better moral commitments, including avoiding violence. It is just this kind of reasoning ability that has improved during the 20th century. He therefore suggests that the 20th century has seen a “moral Flynn effect, in which an accelerating escalator of reason carried us away from impulses that lead to violence” and that this lies behind the long peace, the new peace, and the rights revolution. Among the wide range of evidence he produces in support of that argument is the tidbit that since 1946, there has been a negative correlation between an American president’s I.Q. and the number of battle deaths in wars involving the United States. ‘</p><p>Here is where I wade in now: First of all, surely the Flynn effect is fallacious? There has been much debate about the accuracy of IQ tests in general, and how they are loaded with prescribed sense-data which automatically ‘disqualifies’ intelligent people who have not been immersed in the culture of this sense data. Second, the mode in which abstract reasoning is included in standardised tests is very easily a ‘learnable’ rather than an ‘applicable’ commodity, whose sequences have been incorporated in thousands of ephemeral ways in the educational system to begin with, and routinely tested over time. To use the Flynn effect as some overarching proof that we are ‘smarter’ than our predecessors is a travesty. But no more so than Pinker’s next theory, that ‘Reason’ has finally got the upper hand and carried us away ‘from impulse led violence’. This must be intuitively wrong, even to a philosophical novice. How can Reason deal with a biological impulse? In fact, when has Reason ever successfully ‘eliminated’ a biological impulse? Need I remind Pinker about the painful, unnecessary and degrading experiments in say trying to ‘reason with homosexuals’ that they have other choices? Conversely, I’m pretty certain no amount of reasoning will sway my biological sexual impulses either. Obviously countless other examples pertain. Pinker!!!<br />And yet violence has gone down. How to explain this, then? Given I don’t buy Pinker’s theory, I’m going to have to have a go at this myself. Why not? </p><p>First, Pinker concedes the impulse to violence is biologically driven. Then, buried deep within the 800 page text is a study by Preston and de Waal in 2002 ‘aversiveness of conspecifics in pain’, which basically translates into primates (and humans) having a natural inbred revulsion to inflicting violence on other primates/humans (backed up by Stanley Milgram’s shock experiment and the Trolley Problem). On a separate note, there is also the well known concept of ‘crowd mechanics’: or how we all fall into rank when the mob rules. My personal theory here is that, based on the studies above, it is possibility that violence was ‘overexaggerated’ in early history to begin with, due to lack of behaviour limiting controls. Perhaps in the wild these might be say greater geographical distances between competing primate groups. In human history, perhaps it was the state contract which modified an unnaturally rampant exhibition of violence between competitors in close proximity.(picture two pitbulls in a ring: excessiveness, eh?) Effectively then, an ‘overly violent’ population was stabilised to its natural levels. But this is not the whole story. ‘Better Angels’ shows we have gone one further, and overt violence is now perhaps below what might be considered the natural equilibrium. How did this happen? </p><p>Well, it didn’t. The first thing that I must concede if I am to accept that violence is a biologically driven impulse, is that it simply can NOT have been dissipated, and certainly not by Reason. The question then is, where did the violence go? Its not easily seen as a subject-object agreement, so what happened? Its been redirected, I think. We’re not rid of it, we’re simply rechanneling in a ‘non statistical’ way. Its not with a little trepidation I’m going to mention the xBox and film now. I realise I might be relegated to cuckoo territory (my only consolation is I’ll be sharing it with Pinker though!). </p><p>In the first half of the last century we had two world wars to keep us busy (and I think anybody would agree a combined total of over 40 million casualties is enough to keep anyone’s bloodthirsty instinct at bay), in the 60s there was the Vietnam war and the most intense cold war stand off ever (Bay of Pigs), and from the eighties onwards, we have: well, video games. The xBox (and read here all its technical predecessors and contemporaries) cuts across class, race, age divide and unite men (yes, men) in an indiscriminate guts and glory campaign. Usage is phenomenal., and all inclusive. If you’re old enough to hold the controller: you’re in. Its the new passage of initiation: four year olds sat next to fourteen year olds next to forty year olds: killing, massacring, rampaging, destroying and eviscerating (apparently the only taboo is raping: there is no button for it. Says Pinker). If its not the xBox its organised sport in a way well, in a way sport hasn’t been organised ever before. Not for nothing do we have the football hooligans and the mandatory Saturday matches. And finally. Film. This is something I’ve been ‘doing’ for the last month and a half: I’ve traversed the chronological gamut of film, and I find that the level of violence in film ‘now’ is phenomenal compared to anything found before the 1960s, with ever escalating etudes since. Its gotten so bad, that at the moment we are in a new era of image making: and I call it gender segregation. The majority of current offerings seem to run across gender biased lines: mindless violent action for the men, where the directors don’t even pretend to be aiming for all round inclusivity, tempered with a backlash for women: just as silly a regression in stereotypical ‘romcom’ where no allowances are made for the non chicklit minded. Cinema is divided, in a way it never was prior to the 1960s onwards. Which serves no one well. But apropos of violence: this is where its all happening. Behind the scenes, where the victims are not ‘real’ people, and the statistics don’t register. Which means, of course, that the problem of violence hasn’t gone away. </p><p>It will resurface in all its glory. Just give it the right time and place.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/6163905?shelf=2012">2012</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1662632-richard"></a></section><section><p>1,131 reviews1,007 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/221728145">February 10, 2017</a></section><div><p>Steven Pinker certain ranges widely in intellectual circles. Although he is nominally a professor of psychology at Harvard, but even with specialties (per Wikipedia) in experimental psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, he somehow dove into history to present one of the best TED Talks, back in 2007: <i>
 <a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html">Steven Pinker on the myth of violence</a>
</i> (watch those nineteen minutes, if you haven't already).<p>Wonderfully, he has now followed that presentation up with an entire volume.</p><p>Peter Singer wrote the glowing review of this book for the New York Times, and that somewhat lengthy essay is itself well worth reading: <i>
 <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/books/review/the-better-angels-of-our-nature-by-steven-pinker-book-review.html">Is Violence History?</a>
</i>.</p><p>Update — the Autumn 2011 issue of the excellent pop sociology quarterly <i>The Wilson Quarterly</i> also enthusiastically recommends the book (with minor caveats) in <i>
 <a href="http://www.wilsonquarterly.com/blog/index.cfm/Current_Books/2011/10/17/peace-on-earth">Peace on Earth</a>
</i>.</p><p>Update — Just got this from the library; must read within three weeks since the number of holds will prevent me from renewing. Curiously, the podcast I was listening to on the way to the library was on a related topic. The U.C. Berkeley School of Law professor (and socioologist) Franklin Zimring wrote an article back in August on the precipitous decline in crime in New York City, and was interviewed by the charming SciAm editor Steve Mirsky, <i>
 <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=the-city-that-became-safe-what-new-11-08-09"> The City That Became Safe: What New York Teaches about Urban Crime and Its Control</a>
</i>. Check it out!</p><p>Update — just stumbled on a brief Q&amp;A with the Economist <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2011/11/qa-steven-pinker-0">here</a>. Poked around and found a review, also covering <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/11796285.A_History_of_Violence_From_the_End_of_the_Middle_Ages_to_the_Present">A History of Violence: From the End of the Middle Ages to the Present</a>, titled <i>
 <a href="http://www.economist.com/node/21531411">Punchline</a>
</i>; and a summation by the Economist blogger Buttonwood at <i>
 <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/buttonwood/2012/01/violence-history">A Cause for Celebration</a>
</i>.</p><p>Yet another update — since I bought the book, I'm hoping to read it again after I finish a few others. Meanwhile, I've found a few other reviews and interviews.</p><p>The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Warburton">philosopher Nigel Warburton</a> interviews Steven Pinker on the <i>Social Science Bites</i> podcast. A transcript of the interview is <a href="http://www.socialsciencespace.com/2012/11/podcast-steven-pinker-on-violence-and-human-nature/">here</a>, along with a downloadable PDF or audio MP3.</p><p>Pinker was interviewed on the <a href="http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/12276">Charlie Rose Show</a>.</p><p>A review of the book on the GuardianUK Observer column by John Naughton, <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/oct/15/steven-pinker-better-angels-violence-interview"> Steven Pinker: fighting talk from the prophet of peace</a>.</p><p><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/audio/2011/nov/07/science-weekly-extra-podcast-steven-pinker">An audio interview</a> from the GuardianUK's Science Weekly podcast.</p><p>A text interview with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Harris_(author)">author Sam Harris</a> (who is Pinker's friend and wrote the introduction to Pinker's book), <a href="http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/qa-with-steven-pinker"> Twilight of Violence</a>.</p><p>A vigorously negative review (albeit simplistic and misguided, in my quick, and as-yet contingent appraisal) by the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_N._Gray">philosopher John Gray</a> in Prospect Magazine, <a href="http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/john-gray-steven-pinker-violence-review/">Delusions of peace</a>.</p><p>Finally, the book's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature">Wikipedia page</a> has additional citations in the praise and criticism sections.<br />­</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1662632?shelf=awaiting-big-review">awaiting-big-review</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1662632?shelf=nonfiction">nonfiction</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1662632?shelf=own">own</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/36819318-scott"></a></section><section><p>288 reviews291 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1549923653">September 10, 2017</a></section><div><p>Are you afraid of being of being attacked or murdered? Do you think our society is becoming more violent and less safe? If you watch the news, read the papers and listen to politicians it would be logical to be afraid of the seemingly rising tide of violence and criminality in the world. However, Steven Pinker's <i>The Better Angels of Our Nature</i> will show you your feelings are misguided- crime and violence in society is lower than it has ever been, and our often idealized past (even the recent past) was a very violent and scary place.<p>Before you read this book (and you should read it) be aware that it is Looooong. Weighing in at 832 pages <i> The Better Angels of our Nature</i> is no reading Everest, no Tolstoy, but each of those pages is a heavy bit of paper, drowning in a kudzu of fascinating facts and info that has spread to near every sentence. It was a long march to the final page, but trust me, it was worth it.</p><p>This is a fascinating and constantly surprising read. Pinker presents the perfect antidote for the doom, gloom and bolt-your-doors crime hysteria present in the media. I already knew that we live in a comparatively safe era of history- the lack of recent Viking raids on my apartment block is noticeable - but Pinker makes it clear that this is by far the safest period of human history that there has ever been. Present-day developed nations make even the 1970s and 80s look like a time when to step outside was to enter a gritty urban version of the hunger games, complete with roving packs of armed rapists (the sexual violence stats for those decades are genuinely horrifying).</p><p>The United States, sadly, is still more violent than Europe or Australasia, but even with all the shootings and killings of recent years the cold hard statistics show that Americans are still safer than ever. This completely flips the established narrative in politics and the media, and the hard data shows that suicide is a greater threat than murder, or even from war and natural disasters combined. The average person in twenty-first century society is more likely to die by their own hand than they are by the hands of others. </p><p>The reality of contemporary crime and violence is completely contrary to the apocalyptic vision presented by fearmongering politicians and news outlets and <i>The Better Angels of our Nature</i>, or at least a summary of Pinker’s findings, should be compulsory reading for anyone standing for public office. Pinker's book stands as an engaging testament to how much progress we have made in making our broader human society far less violent.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/36819318?shelf=history">history</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/36819318?shelf=non-fic">non-fic</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/957634-daniel-clausen"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>9 books455 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2028201893">November 2, 2017</a></section><div><p>Steven Pinker’s "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined" is a big ambitious book. Perhaps too big, perhaps too ambitious. And perhaps, too sprawling for its own good. One could opt for a Peace Studies reader and get a more eclectic taste of what research is out there. Would it be as comprehensive as this book? Maybe, maybe not, but you would get the benefit of tasting the many kinds of literature through many different voices. <p>Here, we get a great deal of peace science, behavioral science, religious literature and more, all sifted through one scientific (and often brilliant) voice. Much research is included in this volume, and the many references often drown out the voice, but the voice is also in control of how we receive the literature. </p><p>So, what is the book -- polemical argument, scientific memoir, or reference volume? I doubt it knows the answer. </p><p>The point of the book is simple: to outline how violence has decreased, and to answer why so that we may learn from our successes and continue to replicate them. </p><p>The book might strike some as counter-intuitive -- in the time of Rwanda, Darfur, Iraq, mass-casualty terrorism, runaway gun violence in the US, and much, much more, it would seem like our times are just "another bloody century". Surely, if we subtract the effects of nuclear weapons in deterring warfare between major powers, and on top of that, if we discount the way modern battlefield medicine has led to a decrease in fatalities from warfare (many are still wounded and crippled), then our century can't be that much more peaceful than others. And there is also the other issue, the possible historical contingency of our own "long peace" (much like the long relative peacefulness between the Napoleonic wars and the first World War). One really bloody hegemonic war between nuclear powers might be all that's needed to eliminate our current gains. </p><p>And yet there is a surprising body of evidence that suggests that violence has decreased that spans across multiple disciplines. Pinker makes the case that this trend is deep, enduring, and possibly sustainable. Ancient and medieval societies took genocide, rape, mutilation and other types of violence as given. All of these forms of violence were permissible as long as customs and traditions were adhered to. </p><p>For me, the most interesting aspects of the book are the tracking of the rights movements and the civilizing processes. These are truly fascinating aspects of the evolving peace that I was not fully aware of. I think for many of the scholars coming to this book with some background in peace studies or studies of violence, they will have a similar reaction to mine. I know that...and I know that...and I know that...but ah!, I didn't know that! </p><p>This speaks to the benefit of having such a comprehensive volume. Peace researchers who are aware of one of type of literature might be bored by some chapters of the book, and yet, find themselves enthralled by others. </p><p>Overall, a fantastic read and one that I would readily recommend to others.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/957634?shelf=books-of-2017">books-of-2017</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/957634?shelf=international-relations-classics">international-relations-classics</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/8079403-max"></a></section><section><p>337 reviews288 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2199965554">January 12, 2018</a></section><div><p>Pinker goes into voluminous detail to show us that violence has steadily declined in human society since prehistoric times. In this well-structured work rich with statistics, charts, and the ideas of influential scholars he identifies six prevailing trends: The Pacification Process, the Civilizing Process, the Humanitarian Revolution, the Long Peace, the New Peace, and the Rights Revolutions. Turning from history to psychology he identifies five inner demons that lead us to violence: Predation, dominance, revenge, sadism, and ideology. Then he identifies four better angels: Empathy, self-control, morality and reason. He gives us a brief review of violence in human history before explaining each trend and the underlying psychology. Below is my recap.<p>The first trend, the <b>Pacification Process</b>, explains the decline of violent deaths as a percentage of the population from the time of prehistoric tribes to today’s modern nation states. Incessant feuding and raiding between tribes gave way to organized societies that enforced laws and weighed more carefully the consequences of war. The decline has been steady but not smooth with large conflicts and exterminations causing big blips in the trend line but not breaking it. </p><p>The second trend, the <b>Civilizing Process</b>, explains how people acquired manners and standards of behavior that were less prone to violence. Pinker attributes much of both processes to Hobbes Leviathan, the state. From 5000 fiefdoms in 15th century Europe came 30 nations in 20th century Europe. As these states grew in size, so did strong central authority. Laws, rules and norms on behavior were imposed to ensure loyalty and stability decreasing internal violence. Increased commerce created interdependence between states also engendering stability and reducing the benefits of interstate conflict. The degree of violence in a country or even a region in the US is best explained by acceptance of the rule of law. The rule of law is not accepted where governments are weak or by people in remote regions or by people who feel discriminated against. In these situations street law replaces government laws, honor systems prevail and personal disputes are much more likely to end in violence.</p><p>The third trend, the <b>Humanitarian Revolution</b>, developed from the Enlightenment which began in the seventeenth century led by philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. The Humanitarian Revolution challenged sadism, despotism and cruel punishments for people and animals. The invention of the printing press had resulted in an explosion of books and rapid increase in literacy. Reading, particularly popular novels which induced vicarious emotion, led to shared ideas, values and perspective crossing traditional community lines. People from different backgrounds congregating in cities and increased international trade contributed to the Humanitarian Revolution as did the Civilizing Process. Prior to the Humanitarian Revolution the world was brutish and cruel. Pinker goes into great detail about many popular tortures that were widely enjoyed such as burning witches and dangling cats over fires for evening fun. Communities even purchased prisoners from other jurisdictions so they could hold executions for public entertainment. Reading this section is like reading about a completely different world. Barbara Tuchman’s <i>A Distant Mirror</i> provides good background.</p><p>The fourth trend Pinker calls the <b>Long Peace</b>. He is referring to the relatively peaceful period since WWII. He also points to the long period of relative European peace between the Napoleonic Wars and WWI. Pinker goes back further amassing a plethora of statistical measures to posit that the trend of the world since at least the fifteenth century is towards fewer wars and fewer war deaths as a percentage of world population. This holds true even considering the huge casualties of WWI and WWII and other deadly calamities. Pinker believes nationalism and territorial conquest are on the decline as Enlightenment values such as human rights take hold. The humanitarian influence is strongly reinforced by the now readily available real-time graphic pictures of war. He sees hope in the number of countries that have stopped conscription and the slower than expected rate of nuclear proliferation. He goes back 200 years to Kant who pointed out three forces that promoted peace – democracy, international trade, and international organizations. All three have experienced recent dramatic growth supporting Pinker’s trends of pacification, civilizing, and humanitarianism to support peace. </p><p>The fifth trend is the <b>New Peace</b>. This encompasses the period following the end of the Cold War in 1989 up to the time Pinker wrote the book, published in 2011. Pinker analyses different types of wars (interstate, non-state, and civil), mass exterminations (racial and political) and terrorism to show the world has continued to become more peaceful. He points out how our perceptions have changed. Compare the 5,000 Americans and 100,000 Iraqis that have died during this period in Middle Eastern conflicts to the 58,000 Americans and 1,000,000 or more Vietnamese who died in that conflict. What shocks today would have seemed far less significant just decades prior. Once, even genocide didn’t raise the eyebrows of those not affected. Pinker discusses modern exterminations including the Armenian genocide, Soviet collectivization, the Holocaust, Chinese land reform, and Rwandan genocide. Political instability, ethnic divisions and ideology all play roles leading to authoritarianism and genocide. Terrorism has always afflicted the world. But reliable statistics are available only going back to the 1970’s. Western Europe has seen a steady decline of terrorism as has the US with major exceptions: 9-11 in 2001 and to a lesser extent the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Pinker points out with the exception of 2001 and 1995 “more Americans were killed each year from lightening, deer, peanut allergies, bee stings, and ‘ignition or melting nightwear’ than by terrorist attacks.” So the recent trend, despite all the histrionics, is toward less violence, but it only takes one megalomaniac with nuclear weapons to undo all the trend lines.</p><p>The sixth trend Pinker calls the <b>Rights Revolutions</b>, which were primarily due to the increase in access to information exposing people to new ideas and different viewpoints. Contributing are democracies which promote access and prosperity which allows people to focus beyond necessity. Pinker describes five Rights Revolutions:</p><u>Civil Rights</u>: From the lynchings of the American South to the pogroms of Russia, racial and religious violence has persisted throughout history. In America only since Truman integrated the armed forces in 1948 and Johnson signed the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 did change begin to take hold. Today most Americans accept diversity and respect differences. <br /><u>Woman’s Rights</u>: Rape and wife beating have been endemic in every society. Women were regarded as property. Rape was considered a crime against the husband or father. Not until the late middle ages did Western views begin to change and so.me cultures still haven’t. It wasn’t until the 1970’s that states in the U.S. began to pass laws against husbands raping their wives. As late as the 1970’s women were denied credit unless their husbands signed. A 1974 law made that illegal. Change has been dramatic in the last fifty years with the “me too” movement the latest iteration of progress. <br /><u>Children’s Rights</u>: Until recently 10-15% of all children were killed shortly after birth. Infanticide has been regularly practiced by all types of societies. Mothers did it to ensure the survival of other children. Men did it because they did not believe the child was theirs. Both men and women did it because the child was a girl. For children that survived, beating or at least spanking them was considered good parenting until the last half of the twentieth century. Today the danger may be that parents are obsessively controlling their children’s lives and taking “safety” precautions that are counterproductive. Children should be allowed to learn how to play without adults around. Parental influence has its limits. Children take on the values and vernacular of their peers. <br /><u>Gay Rights</u>: As late as 1969 homosexuality was illegal in every U.S state except Illinois. That gay and lesbian marriage is now legal and widely accepted in the U.S. is to me the most unanticipated of all the gains in human rights in my lifetime. <br /><u>Animal Rights</u>: Abuse of animals like abuse of humans has a long history and only in the last decades has the issue come to the forefront. Rising concern over the humane treatment of pets, farm animals, and laboratory animals has spawned action groups and regulations to protect animals. Cock fighting and dog fighting are outlawed many places and even bullfighting is on the decline. This is a far cry from primitive, ancient and medieval societies where torturing animals for fun was widely practiced.<p>Next Pinker describes the psychology that predisposes us to violence. He describes the Moralization Gap, self-serving biases used to justify our actions and feelings. This gap enables perpetrators and victims to create widely different narratives of the same event. He even digs into brain structure to explain how violent and anti-social impulses are generated and to further discredit the concept of pure evil. The ingredients for evil lurk inside all of us. One is reminded of Solzhenitsyn’s observations that, “…the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” and “To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good...” Pinker identifies what he terms the five demons that drive violent behavior: </p><u>Predation</u> is exploitive, practical violence done for personal gain. <br /><u>Dominance</u> is characterized by actions that tell others - Don’t mess with me, I’m in charge. Narcissistic (grandiose, needs admiration, lacks empathy) political leaders are particularly violence prone. Thwarted narcissists feel humiliated leading to envy and rage. Virulent nationalism and tribalism can form in the presence of group narcissism. <br /><u>Revenge</u> is a common urge and major cause of violence. Empathy, dependence and close connections can modulate revenge. <br /><u>Sadism</u>, inflicting pain for pleasure, is hard for most of us to understand. It can grow out of predation and punishment. It is largely an acquired taste. People in control of others can slide into sadism. <br /><u>Ideology</u> justifies violence as a means to an end for the greater good. People in tightly knit groups feed off each other making violence seem reasonable. When the group is dominant others behave like sheep and pretend to believe. Euphemisms, gradualism, diffusing responsibility, distancing from and denigrating victims are common techniques that lead to moral disengagement.<p>Lastly Pinker reviews four “Better Angels”, those traits that mitigate violence: </p><u>Empathy</u>, often used in the sense of sympathy or compassion, has several meanings. One is perspective taking which refers to seeing things from someone else’s point of view. Another is theory of mind, trying to figure out someone else’s thoughts and emotions. Empathy is typically applied disproportionately to individuals in the same community, or who share our values, or are cute. Thus empathy does not embody fairness. Expanding our perception of interconnectedness with others can expand our circle of empathy and altruistic behavior. <br /><u>Self-Control</u> often means delaying gratification. It’s fair to discount future benefits but many of us discount them far too much. Individual self-control is rooted in brain structure and function including the workings of hormones and neurotransmitters. But it can be cultivated. The Civilizing Process by setting behavioral norms has helped us make substantial improvements over the centuries. <br /><u>Recent Biological Evolution</u> (not a better angel) has been proposed based on varying demographics in birth and death rates, but there is not adequate proof for this. The Humanitarian Revolution, The Rights Revolution and significant recent declines in crime have happened too rapidly for biological evolution to be a factor. <br /><u>Morality and Taboo</u> have shifted. Pinker reviews several models. The shift has been from morals based on purity, community and authority which appeal to social conservatives to those based on fairness, individual autonomy and rationality which are values embraced by social liberals. The shift is reflected in recent changes in minority, women’s and gay rights. <br /><u>Reason</u> despite newsworthy examples to the contrary is on the rise. It reduces violence by identifying the absurd, promoting self-control and even morality. It introduces the concept of proportionality which is essential to fairness. For whatever purpose reason originally developed, its continued expansion to other areas is only natural. IQ test do show people are getting smarter, at least in the area of abstract reasoning, a skill that is developed as educational levels, science, technology and a symbol rich environment have increased. This does not mean underlying general intelligence has increased only the way it is applied has changed. The development of abstract reasoning promotes cooperation, liberalism, economic literacy and democracy; all of which help reduce violence. <p>To put this all together Pinker looks, “for common threads in the Pacification Process, the Civilizing Process, the Humanitarian Revolution, The Long Peace, the New Peace and the Rights Revolutions. Each should represent a way in which predation, dominance, revenge, sadism, or ideology has been overpowered by self-control, empathy, morality, or reason.” He identifies forces that turned out not to be important to the six trends: Weaponry and disarmament, resources and power, affluence, and religion and ones that did matter: The Leviathan, gentle commerce, feminization, the expanding circle of sympathy and the escalator of reason. It is popular to opine nostalgically on the good old days and extol the simpler more natural life of past centuries and eons, but as Pinker points out those past times for most people were harsh, bitter and much more violent.</p><p>Pinker makes a convincing and well documented case that we have gone from a society where violence is the accepted and expected norm to one where violence has diminished to the point that we look on it as an aberration. He takes pains to not predict the future even though the many statistical trend lines Pinker presents imply that we might expect more of the same in the future. I’m not swayed by statistical implications for the future but his analysis of the forces at play give me hope. Pinker’s thesis is not uncontroversial. However, despite its detractors, it has won many awards and significant endorsements. But even if you don’t buy in to Pinker’s conclusions, there is much food for thought. This book is for readers with a serious interest. It is well written and clear but there is a lot to digest and I think most readers will be best served by patience and allotting the time necessary to take it all in. It is, as widely claimed, a very important book that can change the way you look at the world and the human animal that is dictating its future.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/8079403?shelf=science">science</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/7672661-lois-bujold"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>154 books37.5k followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/652168585">June 27, 2013</a></section><div><p>After a steady recent diet of short-attention-span theater internet surfing, it was very interesting to dive into a dense read that took me a week to chew through. (I am not a very fast reader, but I'm usually faster than that.) The exercise of following a really long, complex, sustained argument was probably good for me.<p>Seven chapters of convincing examination of historical evidence to the best approximation that could be managed, all of which jibes well with what I know or have experienced of history, followed by three chapters of attempts to figure out the <i>why</i> of the what. Pinker was pretty good about fencing off his facts from his hypotheses with suitable disclaimers. Several times he more-or-less interrupts his narrative to give the reader tutorials on basic statistics, in a desperate bid to bring his audience up to speed so that they can understand his data and how he massages it to get it to yield up more understanding. I was very interested in the brief survey of recent formulations in neurology and cognitive psychology that he used to underpin his arguments. </p><p>I was also reminded of a classic little book from the 50s, <i>How to Lie with Statistics</i> by Darrell Huff, which should really be required reading for every voter and consumer. (It has been reprinted in paperback and is now available on Kindle, I'm pleased to note.) Pinker, I think, is trying very hard to tell the truth with statistics; that little book would help ground one's evaluation either way.</p><p>I was charmed by how many of my own humanist beliefs about history and human nature were supported variously, not to mention how many of the jokes and cultural references I got, but naturally, I would be; Pinker and I are of the same generation and share a certain amount of world-view, after all. I am pretty fond of the modernity that cocoons me and has repeatedly saved my life, and he does not underrate it, either. Not everything worked for me in his arguments, but enough did for going on with. He footnotes the hell out of everything, which I appreciate. Along the way he dropped recs for what sounds like a lot of potentially interesting further reading, should I find energy for it. (31 pages in very small print of sources one could go check up, ditto.)</p><p>Highly recommended. </p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/9517361-blaine-snow"></a></section><section><p>137 reviews84 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/371549671">July 8, 2016</a></section><div><p>This book is sure to anger or confuse just about everyone who cares about the world today, but particularly those who love to hate the idea of cultural progress: "What? You gotta be kidding - violence has declined over time? No frikin' way - just look at the news." But be assured - after you read only a few pages of this book, you'll be reminded of what life used be like in the foreign country called The Past and you just might change your tune and recognize how, for large sectors of the world's population, life today is less violent, less brutal, and less cruel. <p>Pinker's basic thesis is that, no matter how you look at the data, no matter what time frame, no matter what part of the world or what era, and no matter what form it takes, violence, cruelty, and brutality in human society has declined over time. With over 700 pages of detailed charts, data, and references to other such studies (such as the books "Homicide" by Daly/Wilson and Keeley's "War Before Civilization"), Pinker demonstrates the astonishing fact that, despite the continued violence everywhere in the world today, much of today's world lives in a time of relative peace and safety unknown to past generations. It's not an argument that violence has been eliminated but that there is a pacification and civilizing process at work in history in which violence in its many forms has been decreasing over time. It is especially an argument for the success of secularism, modernity, liberalism, the democratic state, and societies based in law and order, an argument many just don't want to hear. Many of my friends simply refuse to read it because they're unwilling to challenge their adherence to some version of the narrative that "the world is going down the toilet" and that some version of modern western culture is the reason why. They may be right in some sense but they're not in terms of what Pinker is talking about. </p><p>When you are able (willing?) to separate out just how Pinker is framing "violence" from your overall view of violence in today's world, his argument becomes crystal clear. He is quite aware that there still exists cruelty, slavery, and horrific brutality in today's world but, like the difference between the institutionalized, culturally-sanctioned slavery of the past and the clandestine forms of human trafficking of today (not to mention the sheer numbers difference), there really has been progress here as there has in so many other areas. </p><p>Pinker's book deals mostly with human-on-human violence and to a lesser extent, human-on-animal violence. While the evidence he presents points to an ongoing decline in the former, it could be argued that human&gt;animal and human&gt;natural world violence has actually increased as human populations increased. The question for Pinker is: have certain privileged parts of the world's population gained a relatively violence-free society at the expense of the continued violation-destruction of nature, of plant and animal species? </p><p>Edited: Jan2016</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/9517361?shelf=all-time-favorites">all-time-favorites</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/9517361?shelf=history-cultural">history-cultural</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/9517361?shelf=social-science-theory">social-science-theory</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1944947-barnaby-thieme"></a></section><section><p>497 reviews225 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1270033092">May 13, 2021</a></section><div><p>I was recently listening to a <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01by8ms">BBC interview</a> with two historians on the An Lushan rebellion, and the interviewer read a passage from Pinker's book in which he argued that this Chinese civil war was important evidence for his thesis that human violence used to exist on a scale we would now find hard to believe. When the interviewer read some of Pinker's death statistics about the rebellion, both of them spontaneously burst into laughter and one of them asked "What on earth is his evidence for that?" <p>What, indeed? Pinker relies throughout this book overwhelmingly on the death statistics for major historical events compiled by a librarian and published to his personal website in his spare time. Pinker explains that he finds the hobby website impressive, and argues that as a librarian, he can utilize source material better than most academics, i.e., than trained historians. If you think I'm joking, <a href="&lt;a href=">look for yourself</a>.</p><p>No, I'm afraid this book is the joke, and it makes a joke of its credulous audience, making specious, anti-empirical, and fatuous arguments fueled by intellectual narcissism. </p><p>What if the situation were reversed? That is, what if a history professor wrote an eclectic book on cognitive linguistics that was fundamentally at odds with the consensus of trained experts in the discipline, and that relied largely for support on a single source, which was itself entirely the work of an amateur? </p><p>I think such a book would quite likely be universally regarded as a laughingstock. However, we live in a generation in which the increasing consensus among intelligentsia holds that scientists hold the answers to questions that used to be addressed by the humanities, and so Pinker's book is not only accepted as plausible, but widely lauded and championed, including by people who should know better, like Bill Gates. Indeed, many of its chief boosters seem to be techno-utopians already deeply committed to the notion that gains in technology are a rising tide that lifts all boats. This is a work that flatters its secular humanist audience by suggesting we have learned our lesson and, by and large, moved past our brutish origins, carried on the wings of science, progress, and bourgeois values. </p><p>Apparently scientific progress doesn't include historiography, which anyone is qualified to do. </p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1944947?shelf=hated">hated</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1944947?shelf=history">history</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6132231-owlseyes"></a></section><section><p>1,634 reviews257 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2205853912">May 25, 2022</a></section><div><p><b>"War is peace"</b><br />in: NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR, by George Orwell<p><a href="https://imgur.com/T9zuItZ">
 
</a><br />Magic Mirror, do tell me, which one is </p><s>Rosier</s>Pinker??<p>I still don’t figure it out, in what planet psychologist Pinker lives on. I have watched him many times insisting on “things are getting better”. Due to his studies on violence, he sees there is less violence amongst humans. He adds to this optimistic picture: “we’re getting more humane”. </p><p><a href="https://imgur.com/YqSmQoQ">
 
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</a></p><p>One thing is reported, numerical cases of violence, in wars, in crime etc. Another different thing, is the human nature. Despite his studies going back in thousands of years, he just doesn’t report on the POTENTIAL for violence; I mean, atomic weapons still exist today (in big numbers, and in several nations), as well as chemical and biological ones. Should an atomic war conflagrate (say, in the Korean peninsula) (God forbid!), </p><s>The Day After</s>the next day the book of Pinker would be just obsolete. Yes, you cannot cope with (the idea of) the numbers killed. Pinker, the one who had affirmed “nuclear weapons are useless”, would be instantly refuted. For good. <p><a href="https://imgur.com/mOWYfx0">
 
</a></p><p>Deep down in the human nature, violence does exist. Let’s not put some sort of </p><s>pink</s>rosy camouflage, in the human nature. I've been thinking about Africa in this and the past century; Mao's China and Russia under Stalin, and other examples, which should make Pinker think thrice, at least,... about demons.<p>I would like Pinker to comment on the Mandalay Bay hotel shooting, in Las Vegas, the past October. And on similar cases.</p><p><a href="https://imgur.com/dtWVCsz">
 
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</a><br />(decline? what decline??)</p><p>UPDATE</p><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCm9Ng0bbEQ">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCm9N...</a><br />Here Pinker is good with numbers; yet, he didn't include mass shootings in the US. How many since the Mandalay Hotel have occurred up to the present moment??</p><p>UPDATE (for 2018 and 2019, for Pinker to check it out)</p><p><a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-mother-jones-full-data/">https://www.motherjones.com/politics/...</a></p><p>UPDATE</p><p>"It's Insane We're Having A 'Debate' Over Whether It's Acceptable To Assault A Journalist" (1st of July 2019) Pinker wrote on Twitter, regarding what happened in Portland. Yes, by Antifa people. Pinker is slowly waking up apropos VIOLENCE.</p><p> UPDATE</p><p>This is an important interview because Pinker goes nuclear. 😛</p><p><a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/rainerzitelmann/2020/03/02/steven-pinker-evolution-has-saddled-our-species-with-many-irrational-and-destructive-psychological-traits/amp/">https://www.forbes.com/sites/rainerzi...</a></p><p>UPDATE</p><p>How much of a "humanist"?</p><p><a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/stink-academic-hypocrisy-steven-pinker-usurps-humanist-values/amp/">https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/aut...</a></p><p><a href="https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/07/15/us/steven-pinker-harvard.amp.html">https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nyti...</a></p><p>UPDATE</p><p>( This is for Pinkerites)</p><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/sep/28/steven-pinker-celebrity-scientist-at-the-centre-of-the-culture-wars">https://www.theguardian.com/science/2...</a></p><p>UPDATE</p><p>Besides the war in Ukraine (it's been 3 months!), much sadly, I would like to add the Texas shooting. <br /><a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/24/uvalde-texas-school-shooting-00034864">https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05...</a></p><p>---<br />"For when they might say, "Peace and security," then suddenly destruction comes upon them, as the labor pains to her having in womb; and they shall not escape."<br />in: 1 Thessalonians 5:3</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/6132231?shelf=6-major-declines">6-major-declines</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/6132231?shelf=deep-down">deep-down</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/6132231?shelf=forensic-archeology">forensic-archeology</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/13162061-amirography"></a></section><section><p>198 reviews123 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1451485984">May 15, 2017</a></section><div><p>Mind-blowing book! I have never read a book about history and statistics that was this interesting. I love how Steven Pinker argues with countless studies and a great logical validity. <br />This book is a must-read book for anyone interested in sociology, history, politics and environment. This book breaks the long romanticized picture of the past which has been filled with nostalgia and confirmation biases. <br /></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/13162061?shelf=cognitive-science">cognitive-science</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/13162061?shelf=next">next</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/13162061?shelf=philosophy">philosophy</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1045774-mehrsa"></a></section><section><p>2,234 reviews3,663 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1741853412">January 15, 2023</a></section><div><p>there are some missing connections and it's an ethnocentric view of violence. Like did enlightenment ideas also diminish violence in the East?</p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/7232207-fiona"></a></section><section><p>319 reviews344 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/661077462">January 2, 2016</a></section><div><p>Did this really take two and a half years to read? I see that it did. I picked it up after a new-ish boyfriend press-ganged me into seeing Pinker talking about his new book - this one - in Edinburgh, and thinking that it sounded fascinating and potentially relevant to a PhD I was considering doing. Well, the PhD idea is discarded, and as for the boyfriend, I swapped Pinker for <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14201.Jonathan_Strange_Mr_Norrell">Susanna Clarke</a> and moved in with him. He finished my book first.<p>The premise of <i>The Better Angels of Our Nature</i> is that the world is getting less violent. I read about the first half fairly slowly, as it marched through prehistory and the Middle Ages, with graph upon graph and source upon source - I mean, that's pretty uncontentious, isn't it? That there are far fewer beheadings and settlement-on-settlement raids and Hundred Year Wars as we get through history past the Enlightenment. Knowing next to nothing of east Asian history, I was interested to read about things like the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Lushan_Rebellion">An Lushan Rebellion</a> and a brief history of belligerent Mongols. There are parts on international armed conflict, on genocide, on civil war. I spent a year studying humanitarian law. It felt like a lot of the coursework from that year, albeit a bit rearranged. So far so good, Mr. Pinker; I accept where you're going with this.</p><p>I put the book down, for a very long time. Then in November 2015 two things happened in quick succession: the Paris bombings, followed quickly by the vote in the UK Parliament to bomb Syria. I'm in Scotland, and a more dyed-in-the-wool pacifist you'll not find. So I picked this back up, to keep reading the sections about armed conflict in the twentieth century, because I wanted to be reminded (convinced?) that the world is broadly heading in the right direction.</p><p>I mean, it is. It is; but we're not anywhere near out of the woods yet. And we probably won't be in my lifetime. But maybe we will. Pinker's point is not that violence has gone away. He makes few predictions. (Five years down the line, his predictions on conflict in the Middle East have proved too optimistic. But hold that thought a moment longer.) He plots a direction, and the direction is more peaceful. It seems to involve more things being classed as atrocities and abuses - but that's because we're rightly outraged these days by things that nobody would have cared about fifty or a hundred or three hundred years ago.</p><p>Finally he talks neuroscience and psychology. Do your thing, Steven; that's more your area than mine, so I'll take your word for it.</p><p>Let's come back to the optimism of Mr. Pinker. Because he is very optimistic! Let's get the biggie out of the way first, shall we?:</p><blockquote><i>In early 2011, as this book was going to press, a swelling protest movement deposed the leaders of Tunisia and Egypt and was threatening the regimes in Jordan, Bahrain, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. The outcome is unpredictable, but the protesters have been almost entirely non-violent and non-Islamist, and are animated by a desire for democracy, good governance, and economic vitality rather than global jihad, the restoration of the caliphate, or death to infidels. Even with all these winds of change, it is conceivable that an Islamist tyrant or radical revolutionary group could drag an unwilling populace into a cataclysmic war. But it seems more probable that "the coming war with Islam" will never come. Islamic nations are unlikely to unite and challenge the West: they are too diverse, and they have no civilization-wide animus against us.</i> (p443)</blockquote><br />...Oops. Well, he did hedge his bets, I suppose.<p>Where he didn't hedge his bets, and where he consequently rather lost me a bit, was when he focused on the US a bit more specifically. When I mentioned to a friend a few weeks ago that I was reading Pinker, she clucked her tongue at me and said, "Oh dear - does he think sexism is over yet?" That's overstating it a bit, but the impression I got was, well, <i>yes</i> - it really is as if he thinks sexism is pretty much winding up, and the civil rights movement put paid to racism and racist violence decades ago. After 500+ pages of meticulous research, it seemed like a glaring oversight to just assume that the various -isms had just upped and finished since 1980. No, it didn't seem like a glaring oversight: the quickly glossed-over suggestion that racism in the US is a relic of days gone by made me think there were things Pinker wasn't telling me. This is a 1100-page book, of which the last 300 pages are entirely citations, and here I am accusing the author of leaving things out. Well, I'm gonna, 'cause I feel like he has. No fifth star for you, Steven.</p><p>And yet I'm still mostly on his side. I'm no <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/13/john-gray-steven-pinker-wrong-violence-war-declining">John Gray</a>, whose arguments seem to be of the "when you say 'it's got better', I hear 'everything's fine', which it's not" and "I know tribal people and they don't fight each other, therefore science" varieties (and, I might add, get neatly steamrollered by Pinker himself <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/20/wars-john-gray-conflict-peace">here</a> - I do so love a good academic spat in the Guardian...). Earlier this year, I proofread an essay criticising Pinker (don't ask how I arrived there; terribly unlikely circumstance is how), apparently on the twin bases that how could you possibly <i>know</i> that 15th century middle England executed more people than were executed in 21st century Oxford; and the ever-classic "but NUCLEAR!"</p><p>It plays with an idea that I don't think I'll ever fail to be interested by: it's why I loved <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21023409-the-wake">The Wake</a> so much last year, and the idea is of a magical past where everyone was nice to each other and had conversations at the dinner table, and none of these horrible new-fangled innovations existed yet to ruin everything. I love this idea! I love what it makes us do, how it makes people react, how intoxicating they (we) find it, how they'll fight so hard to show that it's real - and yet it never was. It's the ultimate bittersweet hope, the most incredible Escher-like illusion, and I just find that the most fascinating thing. There never was an Eden! There never was a perfect 1950s family, or a perfect 1880s family, or however far back you'd like to go! The government never was more competent, and people never had more common sense! The world of your childhood was nowhere near as good as this one, you just weren't looking at the crap bits! The best thing about <i>The Better Angels of Our Nature</i>, or I think, is the same thing that means it's going to wind up people who want to be wound up by it: it's a testament to things getting better, faster. Which if you ask me they absolutely, irrefutably are. Ask yourself this: whenabouts in history would you rather live?</p><p>I mean, I still think he's a bit overoptimistic in places. But at least I'll agree that his views, my views, and the best the world can be are tending to converge. Plus he's a great writer, you know. Stay for the prose, frankly.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/7232207?shelf=books-i-have-taken-to-dinner">books-i-have-taken-to-dinner</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/7232207?shelf=i-also-read-nonfiction-occasionally">i-also-read-nonfiction-occasionally</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/7232207?shelf=recommended-to-me">recommended-to-me</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/2876105-marc"></a></section><section><p>3,023 reviews1,011 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2376179738">May 22, 2018</a></section><div><p>Anyone who follows me on this site knows that I rarely give high scores to books; I like to make very clear distinctions and to indicate what is just good and what is outstanding. And this book is one of those that belongs to the top category: not because it is a perfect one (see below), but because of the breadth, the depth, the insightful, well-founded, nuanced and yet daring way in which Steven Pinker has tackled the very delicate subject of violence throughout human history.<p>It is not feasible to give a thorough presentation of this book. Because it actually is several books together: 1. a global, especially quantitative approach to physical violence in human history in which Pinker establishes that there’s a steady but very clear decline; 2. a tentative explanation of that decline on the macro-level, in which he focuses on the processes of humanization and civilization; and finally 3. a thorough analysis on the microlevel of good and evil in man in general, with particular attention to biological and psychological aspects that promote or reduce violence (our demons and our angels).</p><p>For me, Pinker's presentation is absolutely convincing, both in his observations and in his analysis. It is in line with my inner conviction (which of course is based on personal perception, rational analysis, as well as emotional orientation), but it also fits in with much of what I have read over the past years, especially on history. Pinker is 100% right that we have to get rid of romantic nostalgia and cultural pessimism (“the past was better, now we go from bad to worse”), which is no more than a reactionary reflex, motivated by emotional (especially fear), ideological and religious blindness. For him it is no coincidence that modernity (with its emphasis on rationality) has gone hand in hand with a humanitarian and civilization-revolution that has led, among other things, to a marked reduction in violence worldwide. And that is true, despite the daily flow of negative news coverage on conflicts and injustices that still plague our world.</p><p>Yet, as already indicated, this is not a perfect book. For example, I have some reservations about Pinker's tendency to give great emphasis on evolutionary-biological aspects in his search for explanations; I understand that, because that focus has become a trendsetter in his field of study (social psychology in the broadest sense of the word) and has certainly clarified many things. But the sometimes implicit suggestion of Pinker that these are ultimate clarifications (necessary ànd sufficient) seems rather exaggerated to me. Fortunately, he nuances in other places.</p><p>Second caveat: Pinker regularly warns against statements about future developments, and cites the well-known saying that social scientists better not make any predictions, because they already have so much trouble dealing with the past. Yet Pinker in this book regularly formulates optimistic expectations for the future and that is strange. At the moment, 2018, for example, the world looks slightly different than when he wrote this book (2009-2011) and his unbridled belief in the further advance of liberal humanism and rationalism isn’t that probable any more.</p><p>Third reservation: Pinker continually illustrates his observations with both general statistical material and specific experiments. What is striking is that these studies are mainly Western (in particular American) oriented. Pinker does make attempts to break out geographically and culturally, but still, his evidence is almost entirely Western (American-European). And that involves a great risk of bias. Also his focus on our recent history (after the second world war), an era of globalization and enormous advances in affluence, technology and science, can also cause a bias (although we will only be able to estimate this in a few decades). </p><p>And finally a fourth reservation: especially in the concluding paragraphs, the lyricist in Pinker gets the upper hand and he ventures into a statement of faith in rationalism. Of course, he presents strong arguments that support his theory that the decline of violence in human history ultimately is due to the further advance of reason. But just at that moment he leaves his cautious, nuanced style behind him and his language becomes almost religious (in favor of rationalism); on this instance (after almost 700 pages) he introduces the concept of "modernity", without much clarification, and that’s a bit problematic.</p><p>Pinker has garnered a lot of praise with this book, but also a huge wave of criticism, both on historical details, on the validity of his statistical material, on his psychological-biological approach and on his ode to rationalism and liberal humanism. The critics of this book certainly have a point in some of those cases. But if you look at the 700 pages in their entirety and go through them thoroughly, then you can hardly accuse Pinker of simplism, naivety or deception: he constantly warns about exaggerated expectations; nothing is definitive, and a relapse is always possible, he regularly states. But at the same time his overall conclusion is very outspoken: "<i>while this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, (our) species has also found ways to bring the numbers down, and allow a greater and greater proportion of humanity to live in peace and die of natural causes. For all the tribulations in our lives, for all the troubles that remain in the world, the decline of violence is an accomplishment we can savor, and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible.</i> "(p. 696)</p><p>This book is a tough chunk, which takes a lot of effort to wrestle through, and one certainly has not to agree with everything, but it seems to me that this book deserves its place among the most important ones published in the early 21st century! (4.5 stars)</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2876105?shelf=evolution">evolution</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2876105?shelf=globalisation">globalisation</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2876105?shelf=history">history</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1360651-joseph-d-walch"></a></section><section><p>181 reviews3 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/244302775">March 22, 2012</a></section><div><p><blockquote> <b>But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. <br />--The Federalist, No. 51, James Madison</b></blockquote><p>This is easily one of the best books of 2011, and I suppose it must already be earmarked as a Pulitzer finalist. It’s about violence, but so much more than that since it strikes at the very core of human nature, the human condition, government, economics, and moral philosophy. Stephen Pinker starts with a simple premise—proving the decline of violence in modern times. This apparently is so controversial to some that he meticulously plots the decline of violence with great historical and statistical detail—this is the descriptive ‘what’ that Dr. Pinker illustrates in the first 2/3rds of the book. The writing is absorbing even if it rings a mildly irreverent tone that betrays a subtle anti-religious bias (especially vis-à-vis politico-religious violence of the Roman Catholic and Old Testament societies—he was a roommate of Harold Bloom after all and is a dedicated humanist) that includes some humorous satire and contemporary references to lighten the mood of such a grim topic. Indeed, his graphic descriptions of torture, rape, suffering and grotesque sadism is enough for even the most macabre minds. Stephen Pinker is a true evolutionary scientist who is adroit in the heuristic of categorization and you can find lists, and lists of lists to aid in understanding the narrative he describes. <br />For example, the declining trend of violence is broken down into these historical themes: </p><blockquote><b>1)	The Pacification Process</b>—our evolution from hunter/gatherers into political, agrarian societies. <br /><b>2)	The Civilizing Process</b>���included the consolidation of feudal economies into larger kingdoms and empires with central authority, trade and economic specialization.<br /><b>3)	The Humanitarian Revolution</b>—17th and 18th century that marked the that included the Age of Reason and the European Enlightenment<br /><b>4)	The Long Peace</b>—a result of a Kantian trifecta of 1) Democracy, 2) Trade and 3) International organizations<br /><b>5)	The New Peace</b>—arising out of a U.S. led post-cold war globalized world <br /><b>6)	The Rights Revolutions</b>—exhibited a more finely filtered intolerance of violence on smaller scales that included violence against minorities, women, children, and animals.</blockquote><p>Within these historical themes we see five major historical forces that helped snuff out violence:</p><blockquote><b>1)	The Leviathan</b>—this includes a Hobbesian social contract which grants to the state a full monopoly on the use of violence from within<br /><b>2)	Gentle Commerce</b>—closely connected to #4 this force increases economic incentives for cooperation <br /><b>3)	Feminization</b>—results in a decline of authoritarian/patriarchal based societies and the empowerment of women as intellectual equals who tend to be more risk-averse and less violent <br /><b>4)	The Expanding Circle</b>—from a mixture of globalization, commerce, and increased access to information this purportedly increases sympathy and helped usher in the Rights revolution that even extended to animals <br /><b>5)	The Escalator of Reason</b>—leading to higher levels of intelligence and emotional empathy in conjunction with more sophisticated foundation for managing moralized concerns in favor of the flourishing of all humanity</blockquote><p>The second part of the book is what really interested me and seeks to elaborate the psychological factors that dictate our behavior depending on their interplay with our environment and circumstance. Here the statistical reasoning is a little more squishy and correlational residuals are not quite as well characterized—perhaps leading to creeping confirmational bias. Put aside these minor critiques of this part of the book, the ability to marshal data from such varied fields of study as anthropology, economics (including game theory), social psychology, and cognitive neuroscience into a coherent and powerful explanation of the decline of violence. </p><p>Factors that influence violence are broken down into two categories of human nature: Demons that incite to violence and Angels that slaken the thirst for blood. The demons include the primal urge to dominance, revenge, sadism including the banality of evil, and ideologically driven moralized violence. On the other side of the ledger are qualities such as empathy (or more importantly sympathy, Dr. Pinker distinguishes the two), self-control, our moral sense, and	reason. Here, the meat of the book can be found in the chapters on the moral sense. Stephen Pinker adapts from the ethics, moral foundations, and relational models of moral reasoning of other people like Shweder, Haidt, and Fiske. First, to understand the psychology of moral reasoning (as opposed to objective moral truth itself), we are to understand that moralized beliefs are more than just the avoidance of something distasteful, but is a ‘distinctive mode of thinking about an action’. Thus, moralized beliefs are universalized (should apply to everybody), actionable, and punishable. These beliefs spring from relationships since, in Pinker’s view, evolution acted upon the population and there is no such thing as a philosophically independent human being. Moralized norms generally include relationships, a context (at home, in the street, at church, at work, at the beach, etc.), and are centered around a resource (information or knowledge, food, money, land, sex, labor, etc.). These relationships upon which socioeconomic moral reasoning is based are divided into 4 categories:</p><blockquote><b>1)	Communal Sharing</b>—the most basic tribal foundation for moral reasoning emphasizing in-group loyalty, also includes sacred or pure values that are shared within a group and reinforced through rituals and periodic but specific contextual references.<br /><b>2)	Authority Ranking</b>—e.g., military, paternalistic, totalitarian/fascist, divine right etc.<br /><b>3)	Equality Matching</b>—gifts, tit-for-tat, first relational moralized norm to recognize individual autonomy, fairness, and reciprocal altruism<br /><b>4)	Market Pricing/Rational-legal</b>—much more complex relational model of morality that incorporates universal ethical principles, a high level of individual rights, rule-of-law, social contract orientation, and requires a high level of literacy and numeracy along with a grasp of information technology and access to data on price, costs, benefits, risks, alternatives, etc.</blockquote><p>As an explanation of the basis of moralized norms this seems quite well-developed and accurate. As I read through this chapter, the current debate over the allocation of scarce health care resources came to mind as a good illustration of this relational model of moral reasoning. The argument is usually centered on the diametric poles of the relational models between communal sharing of universalized health care to rational-legal/market pricing model. Here again we see that moralized norms require more than facile affirmation of one or the other relational models since the specific contexts and resources are important. Which relational model should be employed in the state of emergency, or when the resource is a human organ in which a dead individual does not benefit, or when the allocation of the resource in the community is considered a sacred good such as the right to life-sustaining medicine. </p><p>Personally, I see a need for a hybrid system that protects sacred values of life, and the protection of the vulnerable (e.g., the elderly and children) with market-pricing and equality matching for preventative or non-emergent care should the patient choose--respecting the autonomy of the patient to make the most rational choice given the risks, costs, benefits, and alternatives. The difficulty with market-based health care, just like the difficulty of running a democracy that this market-based/equality matching system is only functional for the government of a citizenry that is based on the moral foundation of reciprocal altruism and rational-legal system of checks and balances. Like a functioning democracy, a market-based health care system requires high literacy and numeracy rates as well as the dissemination of pricing/cost information (something that the AMA has consistently blocked by restricting access to ICT coding for purposes of pricing across hospitals, specialties and regions). This leads to corruption in which supposed medical principles (e.g., doctors and hospitals who have a fiduciary and moral duty to remain financially disinterested in patient decisions) have the ability to obfuscate their own cost and market prices. With these established cartels, it's not difficult to enrich oneself by choking off a few grains of sand at strategic locations in the billions-dollar health care economy. In this model, there is no difference between the orthopedic surgeon recommending back surgery (that evidence from the Dartmouth ATLAS study shows actually does more harm than good), and the Goldman Sachs executives who traded in collateralized debt obligations, which they 1) controled the price through financial cartels, and 2) were at the same time shorting (had proprietary knowledge that they were bad investments and thus were insuring at low cost against loss of these supposed AAA-rated investments). </p><p>Some favor total universalization of health care based on moral norms, but I simply think this ancient hunter-gatherer communal-based economy is insufficient for the maximization of public good by actually rationing health care resources away from those who by definition need it most (e.g., through price controls and misallocation of scarce resources). Just because other industrialized nations have atavistic central rationing of health care as a vestigial throw-back to the devastation of the post-WWII days when virtually every single resource was rationed (e.g., labor, currency, food, shelter, etc.) is not sufficient rationale for a complex and advance economy like the U.S. to regress to the communal-sharing model of health care delivery.</p><p>Finally, Stephen Pinker is an evolutionary psychologist and a progressive and here his confirmation bias shines through quite strongly in my view. Much has been made of the Flynn effect that made the claim that IQs are actually increasing as people today are evolving on an organic and biological level to be more intelligent than those who came before us just a few decades ago. I and not quite persuaded by the data just yet. Furthermore, there is an assumption that modern western elites who exert social control are currently and likely to continue in the progressive beneficial model; this may be a bit too optimistic. The utility of some form of the Hobbesian social contract for the government monopoly of violence and justice is pretty clearly established by Dr. Pinker, however, caution is warranted in today’s modern age when an fewer and fewer of our ‘best-and-brightest’ sociopolitical/cultural prophets can do increasingly greater damage. This is a view that Pinker seems to acknowledge, but dismiss this line of thinking by citing historical data that the introduction of nuclear weapons or other WMD are uncorrelated residuals in the decline of violence. However historical data do not necessarily determine future relationships between the concentration of greater technical power into the increasingly fewer hands of elite social engineers and the decline of violence.</p><p>With the exception of those minor critiques, however, I am sure this book will contribute greatly to our cultural understanding of the psychology of violence, and by extention, peace. The ideas found here will no doubt be debated everywhere from college bowl sessions up to the halls of congress. This can only be a good thing since the overriding theme of the book is a very well-qualified optimism for the flourishing of humanity.</p><p>Update: 3-22-2012, I increased my review to 5 stars because I have found myself going back to my Kindle version of this book over and over again to review it. It has been a sublime pleasure to breath in the expert wordcraft, and the section on the Demons and Better Angels is like a symphony of well-conducted harmonious truths that come together in very a gratifying way. As a fervent believer, I found it fit very nicely into my worldview even though it is written from the perspective of just as fervent a non-believing skeptic. Such a task is very difficult to do since it takes painstaking effort to extricate one's ego (believer and nonbeliever alike) in the search for more objective reason. I say 'reason' because as Heidegger would say: facts and truth presuppose interpretation.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1360651?shelf=great-scientists">great-scientists</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1360651?shelf=history">history</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1360651?shelf=nonfiction">nonfiction</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/9628169-charles-haywood"></a></section><section><p>488 reviews677 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1239424464">August 10, 2015</a></section><div><p>This is a sprawling mess of a book. Flashes of arguably brilliant insight alternate with meandering musings. Fascinating narrow conclusions are drawn from carefully parsed evidence—and then sweeping conclusions are drawn from highly dubious evidence. Historical insights are used incisively in an argument—then the next argument is undermined by total historical illiteracy. At the end, the reader is left uncertain whether he has read 800 pages of genius, 800 pages of authoritative-sounding-but-meaningless fluff, or something in between. But I’ll go with the last one.<p>	Other reviews available online cover most of the ground from nearly every possible angle, so I’ll confine myself to a few, reasonably fresh, points. There is plenty positive to say about the book, but it’s all been said by others, so I’ll mostly steer away from praise, with the note that the entire book is a mixed bag.</p><p>The only truly fresh point I have is really not substantive, but is interesting and perhaps shows some tendencies in the book. This is that Pinker makes a bizarre claim about table manners. First, Pinker states that historically people were terrified of being stabbed at the dinner table. Maybe. But in any case, to introduce this concept he spends a lot of time talking about how, as a child, he questioned the Western modern “pointless prohibition” in table manners against using one’s knife to move food onto one’s fork. He concludes that such a prohibition is a type of knife taboo preventing spontaneous stabbings at the dinner table. But I have never heard of such an etiquette prohibition. I cannot find any reference to it in any etiquette manual. I cannot find any reference to it on the Internet. In fact, all etiquette references to knife use I can find specifically REQUIRE using a knife to move food onto one’s fork, in lieu of fingers. As far as I can tell, this “rule” is purely a figment of Pinker’s imagination, and maybe an oddity around his house growing up. Why no editor questioned this, I don’t know. It doesn’t really undercut Pinker’s hypothesis in any material way, but it’s just strange, and maybe symptomatic.</p><p>It’s important to note that for Pinker, violence means not only actions like war, homicide and assault, but more generally any cruel action with a physical component. For Pinker, war and torture are on the same continuum (though not the same thing) as corporal punishment of children and men having fistfights over insults. Reductions in both are considered progress, rather than the first group being considered progress and the second group being considered the sissification of a moribund society. In fairness, though, Pinker does have limits to this continuum—he concludes that some “reductions in violence,” like the elimination of dodgeball for children and the grossly inflated fears of child kidnapping, are silly and not progress at all.</p><p>Pinker uses no primary sources and the secondary sources he uses are mostly popularizations, many of dubious accuracy, suggesting that he relies little on fresh research and puts his faith in fresh perspectives. Similarly, most of his analysis is analysis by anecdote. Yes, he does have a fair amount of statistics in the first part of the book. But those statistics are confined to two general groups: improvements in European civilization (largely taken, with full attribution, from Clark’s “A Farewell To Alms”), and the prevalence and damages of war. Other than that, it is anecdotes all the way down. And as Lincoln apocryphally said of Spiritualists, for people who like that sort of thing, it’s just about the sort of thing they’d like. But the result is, as with Spiritualism, much of what Pinker has to say is less proof than belief.</p><p>And to be clear: Pinker’s conclusions are, fundamentally, predicated on his belief system. For Pinker, his belief system has two related pillars: that religion is evil, and that progress is inevitable, as long as we realize that religion is evil. Pinker is a big believer, whether he admits it or not, in the Whig view of history. He views its driver as the removal of religion from human life. In Pinker’s rosy view of the future, everything (at least in European-origin societies) is getting more moral, as people realize that morality has nothing to do with religion, but automatically arises from “the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games.” Of course, Pinker’s desired end state of empathy, minimal violence, and human happiness is exactly that prescribed by Christianity (and not, contrary to myth, by all religions). The Eschaton is nigh, says Pinker!—just without any eschatology. Pinker thinks that we can all ultimately behave like Francis of Assisi but be totally without religion. Maybe. If history is any guide, though, probably not—no atheist society has ever flourished on Earth. But hey—maybe the future will be different!</p><p>There are many possible criticisms of Pinker’s belief system. One threshold criticism is that Pinker’s violent opposition to religion clouds his judgment badly. Pinker is very anti-religious, and not in an educated, thoughtful way, but in the same way the Ku Klux Klan is violently anti-Catholic. A second threshold criticism is that Pinker is entirely focused on Europe, and his core hypothesis, that we’re becoming less violent people, is confined entirely to advanced modern societies that are both European in their culture and Christian in their ethos, whether or not they are Christian in their observance. Pinker adduces little or no evidence, other than post World War II global statistics of wars, that non-European societies are becoming less violent, and he fails to consider alternative hypotheses for the reduced violence of European societies, such as that they are moribund and declining, in the Lotos Eater phase of their existence. (Again, to be fair, Pinker does draw a pretty clear picture of reduction in European intra-societal violence from 1200 or so on, long before anyone could claim European civilization became moribund as it is today.)</p><p>Pinker’s obsession with demonstrating that religion only creates evil leads him into nearly continuous gross historical and logical errors. He repeats the silly canard (fabricated by 19th Century American Protestants to smear Roman Catholics) that Giordano Bruno was executed for believing in heliocentrism, a position accepted today by exactly nobody who knows anything (although repeated by noted flim-flam man Neil deGrasse Tyson in the recent re-make of “Cosmos”). He gullibly buys into the Black Legend hook, line and sinker. He actually cites for the cruelty of Pope Paul IV “the ‘Inquisition’ coffee table book.” He specifically cites, in-line with the text, as his major source for “the human toll . . . . in medieval and early modern Christendom” a book called “The Great Big Book of Horrible Things.” He confuses the First Crusade and the People’s Crusade. He cites the Anabaptists as “pacifist forerunners of today’s Amish and Mennonites,” apparently unaware of their activities in Munster (which would actually have reinforced his hypothesis). He explicitly equates as identical the judicial murder of Thomas More with random, on-the-spot beheadings of entire companies of dancing girls who displeased an Indian potentate. And on and on.</p><p>Pinker says with a straight face “Christian ideology was hostile to any commercial practice or technological innovation that might eke more wealth out of a given stock of physical resources.” His source for this is a quote from popular historian Barbara Tuchman, to the effect that the medieval Church rejected interest and that St. Jerome said “a merchant can seldom or ever please God.” Of course, the cite lends little support to his conclusion, and the conclusion is ludicrous. In reality, the adoption of new commercial practices and technological changes up until the Renaissance was led by or cooperated with by religious entities, in large part to expand the productivity of the vast lands owned by the Church. These advances ranged from corporate, long-time-horizon management of land by monks to a wide variety of technological advances, such as improvements in plowing, threshing and grinding.</p><p>Pinker also ignores that the medieval Church was the primary instrument of opposition to medieval violence. He talks about how the Church celebrated saints who were gruesomely martyred, implying that rather than being used to show heroism, such examples were somehow used to show how violence against others was good. He ignores the pacifism of the Church (complete until about 1000 A.D., incomplete thereafter, when feudalistic concepts infiltrated, leading in part to the Crusades). He ignores the Peace of God. And so forth. For Pinker, religion is an unmitigated bad, and when it is gone, we will all be happy and free. And he tailors his facts and analysis to fit his conclusion.</p><p>On the other hand, even with its lacks, the book has many good points. It’s refreshing in its lack of ideology (apart from the ideology of atheism). Pinker does not shrink for ideological reasons from addressing unpleasant points. For example, when he talks about the decline in infanticide, he directly addresses whether it is correct to say infanticide has dropped at the same time that abortion has increased by at least the same amount, since abortion logically is indistinguishable from infanticide. (He concludes, in essence, that people don’t feel that abortion is infanticide, and anyway abortion rates have recently dropped too, which he interprets as reinforcing his hypothesis.) Most writers would have simply said that abortion is not the same thing as infanticide and moved on, afraid of being denounced by their liberal friends and no longer being invited to the right dinner parties.</p><p> At the same time, Pinker does manage to pretty frequently fall into occasional silly left-wing tropes. For example, when talking about the demonization of political opponents, he talks about the “victims of Communist atrocities”—but then feels obliged to add also “the victims of their opposite number, the right wing-dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Indonesia and El Salvador.” Equating 100 million people exterminated as part of a deliberate ideological program of Communism with maybe 100,000 killed in civil wars is silly, but pretty much par for the course among leftist types. But, to be fair, given his general ability to resist being politically correct, it’s hard to fault Pinker’s occasional lapses in this area.</p><p>	Finally, and oddly, most of the bad reviews on Amazon of Pinker’s book are not objecting to his anti-religious bigotry. Instead, they object to an underlying premise of his thesis—that prior to recorded history, violence was extreme and endemic. I had thought that this was unexceptional—all primitive societies were horrifically brutal and had stratospherically high rates of battle death. This has been common knowledge since Lawrence Keeley, using detailed anthropological data, exploded the myth of the Noble Savage. But apparently there are a large number of, or at least a small number of loud dead enders in this area, who maintain that pre-historical peoples were gentle, meek and mild, gathering nuts and berries hand-in-hand while singing paeans against sexism and racism, in contrast to eeeeevil modern societies. It’s really not worth even considering such silliness, but it’s interesting that fantasists of this sort exist and are willing to attach their names to their fantasies.</p><p>Anyway—this book may be worth reading if you have a ton of extra time, or if you’re particularly interested in the topic. It has certain parallels to studies of the Great Divergence, and once you realize that what Pinker really means is that Europeans have reduced violence over time, leading to improved societies relative to the rest of the world’s societies, it has even more parallels. But unless you’re interested in reading this bookstop for some specialized reason, you’re probably better off spending your time doing something else.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/26055396-sense-of-history"></a></section><section><p>356 reviews389 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2377510927">August 8, 2020</a></section><div><p>A lot of ink has already been spilled on the question of whether Pinker's claim that the violence of man has diminished enormously in the past centuries and especially in the past decades, is inaccurate or not; in other words whether the quantitative (statistical) support of this claim is correct. I am not able to judge the statistical aspect, but I am quite convinced by the material that he has put together, also in graphs (which he obviously always borrowed from others). What strengthens me in this conviction is that Pinker is very careful with that material, always indicating how reliable or unreliable the statistics are, sometimes warning for less strong numbers or for the interpretation given to the data. But it is absolutely impressive how Pinker substantiates and defends his theses, and also supplements them with narrative material (strong stories, which of course have a more subjective side, but make things more concrete; but also classic, narrative studies). The latter I find a commendable approach, to back up the statistical analyzes; it is a kind of methodological reality check, to see if the conclusions based on the numbers do reflect reality. Of course, this is not obvious, because the stock of narratives in theory is inexhaustible, but if this is done in a balanced and nuanced manner, then it is definitely an advantage, and that is certainly the case with Pinker.<p>Here’s a quote that describes his central claim and at the same time indicates how cautious Pinker actually remains: : “<i>The numbers tell us that war, genocide, and terrorism have declined over the past two decades – not to zero, but by a lot. A mental model in which the world has a constant allotment of violence, so that every cease-fire is reincarnated somewhere else as a new war, and every interlude of peace is just a time-out in which martial tensions build up and seek release, is factually mistaken. Millions of people are alive today because of the civil wars and genocides that did not take place but that would have taken place if the world had remained as it was in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The conditions that favored this happy outcome – democracy, prosperity, decent government, peacekeeping, open economies, and the decline of antihuman ideologies— are not, of course, guaranteed to last forever. But nor are they likely to vanish overnight.</i>”</p><p>Especially the final chapters, with an elaborate psychological analysis of man regarding good and evil, and in particular violence, sketches an anthropological image (not always very flattering) of man that offers a special added value to anyone who focuses on history, and especially the reasons of human behavior. Pinker dives quite deeply into the current state of science, and it requires some perseverence to follow the accumulation of hypotheses and experiments. But it is worthwhile as a historian to wrestle through this because it gives a fairly comprehensive picture of human existence that makes human action much easier to understand.</p><p>Of course, Pinker places himself very clearly in a context of progress, based on the use of reason. You may have reservations about that, but I always find it a plus when an author puts his arguments on the table, open for scrutiny. And Pinker does so! Absolutely recommended reading.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/26055396?shelf=anthropology">anthropology</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/26055396?shelf=global-history">global-history</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/26055396?shelf=world-history">world-history</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/2199404-andy"></a></section><section><p>1,320 reviews456 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/318540843">August 26, 2019</a></section><div><p>"The Better Angels of our Nature" is an impressive intellectual feat, and the snarky tone was entertaining, but it was a bit like reading the phone book (800 pages of lists within lists). Despite the size of Pinker's tome, the nitty-gritty of peace-making is given short shrift, even though I think this is the most important issue.<p>I don't care too much about the decline in violence over many centuries. I already don't want to live in the Middle Ages, and I couldn't if I wanted to. What matters for all of us living today is whether the current "long peace" is sustainable, and on this Pinker disappoints. </p><p>The answer to this question requires a thorough analysis of why it is currently so unimaginable that, for example, Germany would attack France, as it did in WWI and WWII. A tremendous amount of active, deliberate effort was put into fighting the entropy that would make that possible, but Pinker glosses over this with abstractions. There's a huge story to tell about everything from the Marshall Plan to the European Union to soccer matches b/w sister cities in neighboring countries. </p><p>I'm not a professional historian so I can't address some of the other critiques on Goodreads about whether this book is all B.S. or not.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/2658311-notgettingenough"></a></section><section><p>1,015 reviews1,163 followers</p></section></div><section><section><p><b>Read</b></p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/381583974">August 1, 2012</a></section><div><p>Pinker has disappointed me for so long that it is no surprise to me to discover that this is the work of a charlatan. Here on goodreads try <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/166376-david">David Giltinan's review </a>.<p>But also <a href="http://www.zcommunications.org/reality-denial-steven-pinkers-apologetics-for-western-imperial-violence-by-edward-s-herman-and-david-peterson">http://www.zcommunications.org/realit...</a> is worthy of a read.</p><p>Is his basic message pretty much that if first world white people aren't dying, then violence is decreasing? And has this been greeted with great approbation in - ummm - the first white world? Oh deary me.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2658311?shelf=haven-t-read-but">haven-t-read-but</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2658311?shelf=sociology">sociology</a></ul></section></section></article></div></div>||||I|||| * Home
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 The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

 Steven Pinker

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 Believe it or not, today we may be living in the most peaceful moment in our species' existence. In his gripping and controversial new work, New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker shows that despite the ceaseless news about war, crime, and terrorism, violence has actually been in decline over long stretches of history. Exploding myths about humankind's inherent violence and the curse of modernity, this ambitious book continues Pinker's exploration of the essence of human nature, mixing psychology and history to provide a remarkable picture of an increasingly enlightened world.
 Genres Nonfiction History Psychology Science Philosophy Sociology Politics
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 806 pages, Paperback

 First published October 4, 2010

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 Steven Pinker

 66 books 9,341 followers
 Steven Arthur Pinker is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science. Pinker is known for his wide-ranging explorations of human nature and its relevance to language, history, morality, politics, and everyday life. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as the New York Times, Time, and The New Republic, and is the author of numerous books, including The Language Instinct , How the Mind Works , Words and Rules , The Blank Slate , The Stuff of Thought , The Better Angels of Our Nature , The Sense of Style , and most recently, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress .

 He was born in Canada and graduated from Montreal's Dawson College in 1973. He received a bachelor's degree in experimental psychology from McGill University in 1976, and then went on to earn his doctorate in the same discipline at Harvard in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, then became an assistant professor at Harvard and then Stanford University. From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. (Except for a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1995-6.) As of 2008, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard.

 Pinker was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in 2004 and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in 2005. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv, McGill, and the University of Tromsø, Norway. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003. In January 2005, Pinker defended Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, whose comments about the gender gap in mathematics and science angered much of the faculty. On May 13th 2006, Pinker received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.

 In 2007, he was invited on The Colbert Report and asked under pressure to sum up how the brain works in five words – Pinker answered "Brain cells fire in patterns."

 Pinker was born into the English-speaking Jewish community of Montreal. He has said, "I was never religious in the theological sense... I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew." As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969. His father, a trained lawyer, first worked as a traveling salesman, while his mother was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has two younger siblings. His brother is a policy analyst for the Canadian government. His sister, Susan Pinker, is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and the author of The Sexual Paradox and The Village Effect .

 Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too divorced. He is married to the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, the author of 10 books and winner of the National Medal of the Humanities. He has no children.

 His next book will take off from his research on "common knowledge" (knowing that everyone knows something). Its tentative title is: Don't Go There: Common Knowledge and the Science of Civility, Hypocrisy, Outrage, and Taboo .

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 Miquixote
 270 reviews 45 followers
 May 24, 2017
 Breathtakingly mindless for 2/5 of the book, blowhard the whole way through.

 Sometimes a good joke is more revealing than 800 pages of blowhardness. Pinker gives himself away with this quote by George Carlin on page 622: I think motivation is overrated. You show me some lazy prick who's lying around all day watching game shows and stroking his penis, and I'll show you someone who's not causing any fucking trouble!...

 ...I hope I am not the only one who thinks it is not necessarily a good thing to be reduced to lazy pricks watching game shows and stroking our penises...

 Anybody with a modicum of a background in anthropology, history, sociology and economics should be laughimg themselves silly (if it weren't so disturbing how much influence Pinker has)...

 Pinker proposes 5 ways that have reduced violence and can continue to do so: the Leviathan, Gentle Commerce, Feminization, The Expanding Circle, and the Escalation of Reason. The final 3 I have no argument against. But I have issues with the first 2. The state gets a monopoly on violence and capitalism is caricatured as gentle.

 But there have been moments when violence spiked and recently, so Pinker has to explain it. Pinker conveniently blames Marxism (and leftism in general is caricatured the whole way through) as the singularly destructive ideology of modern times (without acknowledging the dangers of his own classical liberal ideology) and throws in 'a few other individuals' to the mix as the responsibles for the genocides of the 20th century, and the increase in violence in 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Fascism is acknowledged only as the twin of dialectial Marxism. Classical liberalism gets the nod as the ideology that reduces violence (of course Pinker would never admit that classical liberalism is even an ideology though). There is no comprehensive study of how fascism and communism came to be. It is really lazy stretch to say that fascism was just a few flukes of individual psychology, and not give credence to the idea that both fascism and communism came about from the specific conditions of a social system in crisis. Neither is it mentioned that big business actually financed and promoted fascism in Italy and Germany. That would complicate things too much.

 So, nothing about communism coming into being as a reaction to capitalism... it is simply assumed that capitalism has been an overwhelmingly positive contribution to the world, since 'violence has declined since its advent, minus a few inconvenient peaks of violent wars and genocides' which, as I have already said, he attributes to Marxism and a few accidentally placed crazy individuals. Nothing either about theory, philosophy, economics, anthropology, activism owing anything at all to Marx's ideas. Marx isn't even worth the time of day to Pinker, except as an explanation for violence. This should raise the question, really can any intellectual who tries to analyze the history of modern times be taken seriously if they haven't taken the left seriously? how can you call yourself an intellectual if you just shrug off the whole left side of the policial spectrum as ideological nonsense?

 So leftism gets all the blame for the bad stuff, but the increased rights that accompanied the 20th century are not attributed at all to leftist ideas or practice. They are accounted for as simply natural by-products of classical liberalism (ie. capitalism). The Expanding Circle of Empathy, the Escalation of Reason and the Feminization of society have nothing at all to do with leftist ideals. Class struggles never happened. Activists weren't leftists, they were classical liberals. These rights eventually became 'common sense'. If there any battles they were set forth by non-violent classical liberals, and always as peacefully as possible.

 There are plenty of examples of serious breaches of truth here. According to Pinker, Martin Luther King apparently rejected Marx completely. Something patently false: 'King disagreed with Marxist materialism, but he found certain elements of Marxism's economic critiques of capitalism quite insightful' (I May Not Get There With You: the True Martin Luther King, Eric Michael Dyson). In fact, you would be hard-pressed to find any successful activist who doesn't find certain elements of Marxism insightful. But none of that is mentioned here because Pinker is not at an activist, he is status quo, out of touch with reality, pure and simple.

 It is also fairly embarrassing for Pinker to not acknowledge how far from anything even remotely leftist or Marxist several so-called communist and their undoubtely genocidal regimes were. Something akin to blaming Jesus for the Crusades. It is not said that it is a far more convincing argument that Stalinist Russia and Maoist China were actually STATE-CAPITALIST regimes. And indeed ideological twins of fascism, but not at all in the sense that Pinker argues. But if he tried to go there, his simplistic view of everthing would implode.

 Most people who rave against communism base their assumptions on secondary sources. It is clear that Pinker hasn't understood Marx (or even remotely leftist politics). As a fairly well-read leftist, it is obvious to me that there hasn't been a communist state to this day, as much as the leaders of those states have claimed to be. Neither is it mentioned how many different interpretaions of communism there are. He lumps the left all together. But if Pinker were to do so honestly, it would be quite a stretch to suggest that leftism is not about equality, freedom and the destruction of totalitarianism, oppression and alienation. In fact, you would think leftism was fascism the way Pinker describes it. Pinker comes across as a reactionary anti-communist suffering from the Red Scare, still inhabiting the frigid mental landscape of the Cold War.

 But hey, when you are an authority in Harvard, sweeping caricatures and generalizations are allowed. There’s more. According to Pinker, dialectics are simply mysticism and a justification for violent struggle. Class struggle is of course also blown off as mystical dialectical hogwash. Well, that is some feat blowing off dialectics, considering how many of the greatest philosophical works in world in the last 2 centuries have had to deal with the idea of dialectics (because of its intellectual force), but the eminent Steven Pinker waves it off with his magic wand and without anything at all to back it up.

 He also blows off 'intellectuals' in general because 'they are attracted to extreme ideas'. But he wholly contradicts himself when he proposes the superior intellectual value of classical liberalism. Which of course isn't extreme, it is just the obvious rational choice that doesn't even need to be intellectually defended. How arrogant can you get?

 It's also fairly wacky when he argues that 'intelligent people overwhelmingly tend to be liberals'. Based on IQ test scores and surveys of people with high scores he concludes that the smartest people are liberals and the other lesser ones are leftists and conservatives. But what about the smartest of the smart (the intellectuals) being attracted to extremes? This should leave you wondering if these arguments are for real? Apparently so.

 I am not familiar enough with the statistics that Pinker inundates us with to know if 'violence' has actually dropped or not consistently, progressively and continuously throughout history. But our propaganda alarm bells should sound when anyone makes a statement like that. According to Pinker, it is obvious that primitive tribes were the most violent humans ever. I have read some fairly convincing arguments otherwise, but I think it is likely the differences in opinion are going to come in the very definition of violence. The definition of violence by Pinker is dictionary strict, and very limited. Humans sometimes have to fight to survive. Pinker doesn't substantiate any difference in self defense and aggression, justice is mocked, freedom is not even covered. But when class struggle is just vain ideology to him, what can you expect?

 Neither does he take on the prison industrial complex, although he does acknowledge the importance of caging up of the maximum amount of people that are considered most likely to fight back and apparently thinks it a necessary evil if there are 'a few too many' (as deterrence). Apathy or depression is not even mentioned. But of course if you look it up in a dictionary, violence isn't any of those things.

 Since only 100,000 have been killed in Iraq(a disputed low-flying number) and there were at least 1,5 million in Vietnam, apparently US foreign policy is getting way more compassionate. Of course nothing is even mentioned of thinly-covered up US intervention all over the world (like in Latin America). An ignorance easily corrected by leafing through books like 'Killing Hope' by William Blum (on the ongoing American holocaust). A book Chomsky says is 'far and away the best book on the subject'. But the book has leftist leanings, and is therefore intellectually irrelevant to a religiously loyal status quoer.

 Democracy is hailed as a reducer of violence, and justifiably so. However he also has an extremely limited idea of democracy. There is a crisis of democracy right now because of a lack of participation (the Manufacturing of Consent and Public Opinion) and fast-growing awareness of it. What about acknowledging the advent of a type of coercion that creates ignorance, apathy and depression? This is not considered as an element of violence of course. It would even appear to be a positive thing, if it can reduce those violence stats and keep us wanking. Even if certain types of coercion cannot be defined as violence, why not acknowledge it for what it is?


 As said, Pinker targets ideology as a main cause of violence. When ideologies clash it often creates even more violence. Obviously. But it would seem Pinker is unaware of the current ideology’s potential for violence (and many have argued quite well that it is the main present cause of violence today). Currently the ideology of capitalism is being questioned by a large variety of people (because of its weaknesses). If and when that increases there may just be an increase in violence again, and not only from the Leviathan state that Pinker raves so much about.

 Of course Pinker would blame the new ideology if that happened, instead of the old one and all its weaknesses that brought it to the conflict. This is ironic because he does spend some time criticizing conservative ideology for its inability to adapt to progressive change. I argue that Pinker betrays exactly that attribute despite his humanist claims. Liberals and conservatives are the only two electable parties (because neither is so different from the other and neither is at all threatening to the current status quo). But for Pinker to have his moral authority he should also be arguing that if capitalism doesn't work well enough or starts to create bigger problems than it solves (ie. environmental destruction and huge gaps in wealth and debt), it is the one that may actually PROPAGATE violence. But then again we might just sit around watching game shows and stroking our penises. If Pinker is right, that would be ideal.

 Perhaps this can be avoided if the old ideology adapts peaceably. But neither should anyone who analyzes history or anthropology honestly assume that the current ideology is forever. Of course capitalism hasn’t always been there, has only been there for a tiny amount of history, but Pinker sidesteps that. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. The thing is that a large amount of us aren’t convinced it ain’t broke.

 But perhaps Pinker’s main point is that we are less likely to adapt violently no matter what the change. Perhaps so, but denying or misunderstanding certain causes of violence (gross inequality and oppression which lead to new ideologies) will not help the matter. The so-called mystical class struggle and violence around the time of Karl Marx and the following century were actually consequences of the inability of capitalism to adapt to its structural weaknesses. If there were enough reforms the violence caused may not have been necessary, or rather it could have convinced the masses it wasn't necessary to challenge the system.

 However, the inflexibility and fundamentalism of classical liberalism would seem to have actually CAUSED the majority of violent conflicts. One doesn't have to be a Marxist to see that the capitalist system did not adapt appropriately (or peacefully) to the class awareness (or if you prefer inequality awareness) that was developing. Pinker calls 'class awareness' ideology though. A more peaceful adaptation did not come until after World War 2 (with Keynesianism) IN REACTION to THE CLASS AWARENESS. But this has been progressively taken apart since around 1980. The fear of class war retribution has diminished. With the recent austerity measures only being the latest in a series of measures to increase the wealth of the rich at the expense of the middle class and poor.

 But that doesn't mean that a self-defense type of violence will not develop in the near future if the current system doesn't adapt appropriately (rising homelesseness or unemployment could escalate things). The fact that violence actually went down during the 30s Great Depresssion is almost gleefully mentioned by Pinker though. So there really isn't a guarantee that violence will increase. In fact, it would seem that the elite powers are getting impetus from implementing their austerity measures because of Pinkeresuqe ideas of how non-violent we have become.


 Anyhow, if Pinker is right and the world is better off being wankers than trouble-makers, then our intellectuals should be the best wankers. And so for that reason a wanker cannot read trouble-making literature, or leftist perspectives, one cannot at least acknowledge their intellectual validity and consider them. Pinker doesn't acknowledge these debates because he is pushing his own ideology, or rather absurdly and falsely pushing the idea of the 'end of ideology' (which is actually a thinly-veiled support for the current neoliberal utopian ideal). One that is as unsustainable and unrealistic as any utopia or ideology. Keep wanking.

 The book was long and tiresome in many parts, but also very rewarding in the sense that it is an incredibly revealing look at how corrupt and anti-intellectual academics can be. Pinker is arrogant, puffed-up, self-promoting and irresponsible in his ideologizing (ironic isn’t it?) here. In Pinker's mind, it would seem he has earned the right to step right out of his specialty of psychology and linguistics and make sweeping generalizations in anthropology, history, sociology and economics.

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 Warwick
 809 reviews 14.4k followers
 April 26, 2013
 VIOLENCE HAS DECLINED, AND I WILL KICK THE LIVING SHIT OUT OF ANYONE WHO SAYS IT HASN'T

 Disappointingly, Pinker strikes a slightly less confrontational tone than that, but the basic idea is the same. His thesis is that violence of every kind, from international warfare down to murder and corporal punishment, has been on a steady decline throughout human history, up to and including the present day – and not only does he make this case in considerable detail, but he goes on to give a very wide-ranging discussion of possible political and psychological causes for what's happened. This book is big, and it needs to be: it's built around a vast accumulation of raw evidence. Historical, statistical, sociological, neurobiological, and anecdotal – and I'm slightly confused by some of the negative reviews here, because although you might not like all of his conclusions, it's not easy to argue with the facts when they're laid out in this much detail.

 Not convinced? Wondering if village life in the 30s can really have been as bad as dodging rapists in today's inner cities? Well, prepare for approximately 8,266 graphs and charts proving you wrong in every direction. Leafing through them is at first daunting, then fascinating, then astonishing, and eventually wearying. But they keep coming!



 The decline in some forms of violence is so dramatic that the figures have had to be plotted on a logarithmic scale, so vertiginous is their descent. Hitting kids – gone from normal to unacceptable in barely a generation. Murder rates? Dropping like a knackered lift. Paedophiles and child abduction? Statistically speaking, if you wanted your child to have a better-than-average chance of being abducted and held overnight by a stranger, ‘you'd have to leave it outside unattended for 750,000 years’. Terrorism, surely? Nope; in fact ‘the number of deaths from terrorist attacks is so small that even minor measures to avoid them can increase the risk of dying’ – one study suggests that 1,500 more Americans died in the year after 9/11 because they started driving rather than flying.

 Okay then, what about WAR. ‘As of May 15, 1984, the major powers of the world had remained at peace with one another for the longest stretch of time since the Roman Empire.’ This is important, because inter-state warfare is much, much more deadly than the small-'n'-nasty invasions and civil wars that are more common today. And even they are becoming less frequent and less individually deadly.

 Don't get me wrong, this is not a happy-clappy book about mindless optimism, and he is assiduous in stressing that the situation could easily change.

 The point is not that we have entered an Age of Aquarius in which every last earthling has been pacified forever. It is that substantial reductions in violence have taken place, and it is important to understand them.


 Pinker takes a good, long look at several possibilities, and (to my mind at least) identifies three major factors behind the decline. The first is the growth of democracy, which strongly correlates with lower rates of violence across the board, and we get the figures to prove it. The second is the revolution in communications, firstly during the Enlightenment, and then more recently with the birth of the mass media age. Again, huge numbers of studies are adduced to make the point.

 The third factor is what he calls ‘feminization’: women are just less violent than men, and the more involved they are in a society the more peaceful it is. ‘We are all feminists now,’ he concludes, after a typically detailed examination of changing attitudes to, and rights of, women through history. (He is talking about the West here, but even elsewhere the trend is unmistakeable.) Studies suggest that this is not just a consequence of changing attitudes, but a cause of them, particularly given that ‘the one great universal in the study of violence is that most of it is committed by fifteen-to-thirty-year-old men.’ Pinker hones in on the obvious implications:

 Would the world be more peaceful if women were in charge? The question is just as interesting if the tense and mood are changed. Has the world become more peaceful because more women are in charge? And will the world become more peaceful when women are even more in charge? The answer to all three, I think, is a qualified yes.


 When he's finished considering social movements and political changes, he pokes inside your brain. We have pages and pages of various neuro-sociological experiments where people were strapped to an MRI machine and told to slap a puffin in the face, or something, so that various lobes and cortexes could be identified and examined. The question is whether there are anatomical, or evolutionary-psychological, causes for violence, and if so how easily they can be overcome. We get a lot of impressive-looking diagrams like this (I may have remembered some of the details wrong):



 Pinker is very interesting on the Flynn Effect , which, if you're not aware of it, is the upward trend in general intelligence observed around the world in standardised testing since such things began. Many people that have written on this subject are skeptical that folk nowadays can really be smarter than anatomically-identical humans of a few generations ago, despite what the tests say – but Pinker, after a careful examination of how thought processes are influenced by changing social norms, is not afraid to draw his conclusions, at least in the ethical sphere:

 The other half of the sanity check is to ask whether our recent ancestors can really be considered morally retarded. The answer, I am prepared to argue, is yes. Though they were surely decent people with perfectly functioning brains, the collective moral sophistication of the culture in which they lived was as primitive by modern standards as their mineral spas and patent medicines are by the medical standards of today. Many of their beliefs can be considered not just monstrous but, in a very real sense, stupid.


 Obviously we are into speculative territory here, but I actually found it very heartening and thought-provoking to see someone prepared to follow the evidence that far.

 How's it written? His style is exact without being dense, although he is not averse to the odd cliché (‘capital punishment itself was on death row’), and from time to time his desire to cloak the science in colourful imagery leads him into some awkward prose:

 The age distribution of a population changes slowly, as each demographic pig makes its way through the population python.


 Yikes. Also…and this may sound like a weird thing to pick up on, but once I noticed it I couldn't take my eyes off it…he is absolutely obsessed with telling the reader to ‘recall’ things he's already said.

 Recall the mathematical law that a variable will fall into a power-law distribution…
 Recall from chapter 3 that the number of political units in Europe shrank…
 Recall that there were two counter-Enlightenments…
 Recall that the statistics of deadly quarrels show no signature of war-weariness.
 …and recall that duelling was eventually laughed into extinction.
 Recall that the chance that two people in a room of fifty-seven will share a birthday is ninety-nine out of a hundred.
 England and the United States, recall, had prepared the ground for their democracies…
 Recall that for half a millennium the wealthy countries of Europe were constantly at each other's throats.
 Cronin, recall, showed that terrorist organizations drop like flies over time…
 And recall the global Gallup survey that showed…
 Recall that narcissism can trigger violence…
 Recall that the insula lights up when people feel they have been shortchanged…
 Patients with orbital damage, recall, are impulsive…
 Recall from chapter 3 the theory of crime…


 Just how much stuff are you expecting me to remember, Pinker?! And surely someone who wrote three books on language has a fucking thesaurus handy?

 There are a couple of minor errors, too, that an editor should have caught. The Polish city of Wrocław is printed in my edition as ‘Wroctaw’; and he also refers to some statistics gathered in the ‘town of Kent’ (there are dozens of towns in Kent, which in the dataset concerned is a county).

 However, and despite my sometimes flippant tone in this review, the truth is that I thought this was a magnificent book – convincingly argued and truly multidisciplinary, so that I felt like I was getting a synthesis of the important studies carried out in half a dozen different fields. It's a big, serious argument that deserves proper consideration, and one that'll give you some ammo to argue back next time you're feeling cynical about the relentless news headlines. I think it's a clear 4.5 – and since Goodreads won't let me do that, I'm inclined to bump it up rather than down.
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 Riku Sayuj
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 December 8, 2014

 The Skeptic’s Peace

 Pinker warns the reader upfront that the book is huge, and with more than 800 dense pages there is no question about it. It is so wide-ranging that it is fortunate it has such a memorable title - the reader might have easily lost track of where it is all supposed to be heading. Individually, any single section of the book is a throughly entertaining masterpiece, but as a whole, in terms of coherence, and on how the thesis and the direction of the arguments hold together, the book is not as much of a delight.

 But it is an ambitious book and is in some respects a new sort of history - almost a moral history of the world and Pinker deserves praise for the attempt. The next such historian to come along has been given much to work with.

 Pinker is very convincing about the fact that violence has indeed declined; he is even persuasive on why it was but bound to happen. But when it comes to explaining the phenomenon (which he spends most of the book convincing us is real) based on his strength (psychology and evolutionary biology), he comes up slightly short. Pinker says all the right things and spares no punches and doesn’t flinch from taking on the worst arguments the critics might throw at him but his arguments still seem to lack that knockout blow.

 This is not to say that the arguments are weak. Pinker does a remarkable job in his survey of history, of stats and of a multitude of ideas. The scholarship is immaculate, the intentions are noble and the conclusions are plausible but I would still wager that Pinker would fail to convince the majority of his readers.

 Why? Because he ignores the contingent nature of history and he forgets that the 'better angels' has not only made us a more moral society but has also made us a more skeptical society. I was disappointed that Pinker does not explore the preventive powers of sheer skepticism.

 My own thesis, which was evolving as I read Pinker’s, is ultimately that the skeptical mentality is what the ‘civilizing process’ (and the years of bloody wars) has ultimately given us - a conviction that there are no easy answers, no ‘final solutions’. And that is a powerful deterrent to most forms of drastic action, since now it is harder to justify them. This to me is the real cause for optimism (of the measured and skeptical sort, as is our wont now).
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 David
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 February 15, 2012
 This seems like a stunning misstep by the normally brilliant Steven Pinker. His ability to write with extraordinary force and clarity has been demonstrated repeatedly in two separate areas of expertise -- linguistics and cognitive science. Unfortunately, the brilliance of his earlier books in those areas is nowhere in evidence in this regrettable dog's breakfast of a book.

 I found it almost unreadable - poorly argued, undisciplined, self-indulgent, and - despite its grotesquely bloated length (800 pages) - support for its main thesis is woefully inadequate, dependent on a highly selective interpretation of existing data and completely unconvincing. Pinker can sling the statistical jargon (Poisson processes, power laws, the gambler's fallacy, the Gini coefficient) like a pro, but all the jargon in the world cannot make up for his recurrent habit of over- or mis-interpreting data whose limitations he consistently glosses over.

 The jacket cover breathlessly promises "more than a hundred graphs and maps". Any graph is open to misinterpretation. Three of the most common ways of doing so are (i) selective interpretation (ignoring or explaining away the data that don't fit one's preconceived ideas) (ii) inappropriate extrapolation beyond the range of available data and (iii) failure to acknowledge the data's limitations, such as likely sources of bias, or extreme sparsity of information.

 Pinker commits each of these errors, with such numbing frequency that one loses all respect. We are seriously asked to draw conclusions from a graph of the "rate of battle deaths in state-based armed conflicts between 1900 and 2005" (Figure 6-1) while being instructed to ignore the figures for the first and second world wars . After all, "the world has seen nothing close to that level since". This kind of rubbish insults the intelligence. Or you could look at Figure 7-28. Lest you be distracted by the actual data, Pinker has helpfully superimposed some very impressive looking solid lines documenting his cheerful belief in the rise of vegetarianism. These are much darker than the actual data points, presumably in the hope that the reader might be distracted from noting their complete lack of fit to the data. Worried about racially motivated killing of black people? Here are the yearly data (number of such killings) from 1996 to 2008:

 5,3,3,4,3,3,3,4,1,2,1,1,1

 Pinker's gleeful trumpeting of a five-fold reduction seems to rest on a pretty flimsy foundation to me. Not to mention being a little premature.

 But nothing as inconvenient as facts, or their absence, can stand in the way of a man who has already decided he knows the answer. The threat of nuclear holocaust? Exaggerated, because - as any fool can see - nuclear weapons have never been used in wartime since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One imagines this argument must be of great comfort to those who survived those particular "anomalies". Just as Pinker's breezy insistence that the only meaningful way to interpret the number of people killed in a given conflict is relative to the world's population at the time is surely meaningless to anyone who has lost a family member in battle. It's at best breathtakingly insensitive; some would find it deeply offensive.

 To anyone who respects the scientific method, this is a horrifyingly bad book, one which completely obliterates Pinker's credibility. Don't waste your time.
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 Nebuchadnezzar
 39 reviews 361 followers
 March 18, 2012
 When an academic steps outside his or her field of expertise, it's best to brace yourself for a torrent of nonsense. Steven Pinker, whose work in linguistics and psychology I greatly enjoy, has made a habit of using that work as a springboard to foist his pet political theories on the public. Whereas his previous attempt in The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature was a vehicle for his ideological ramblings, it was at least not based on a gaping statistical flaw and had some value in refuting common misconceptions, even if it did so in a fundamentally dishonest way.

 Whatever redeeming qualities to be found in Better Angels are far outweighed by the failure of Pinker's thesis. Has violence actually declined? If not, the rest is window dressing. Pinker quickly notes that the reader will be skeptical of his thesis off the bat -- we are inclined to believe the world is getting more violent due to our constant exposure to it in the media, which is biased toward reporting bad news, criminality, etc. No doubt he is correct in this. It is well known that crime rates in the United States have been in decline for the past 20-30 years yet many continue to believe that crime is on the rise. This likely comes from a bit of selective reporting mixed with confirmation bias; the proverbial man searching for his keys under the streetlight.

 The main reason I was immediately skeptical about this thesis was that I had seen it before! The general thrust of Pinker's argument appears in a brief section in The Blank Slate and a TED talk he adapted that into a few years back. ( http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinke... ) Here he totally mangles basic anthropology and archaeology. The chart he presents is a misinterpretation of data from Lawrence Keeley's War Before Civilization -- anyone familiar with the societies he presents knows that most of them are not nomadic hunter-gatherer bands but partly or fully sedentary and horticulturalist, e.g., the Gebusi and Yanomamo. (As an aside, I find the use of Keeley ironic as he argues against a biological view of warfare in the book while Pinker is an ardent supporter of this view.) Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha devote an entire section to deconstructing this Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality (a book not without its own problems, as Ryan and Jetha play Rousseau to Pinker's Hobbes). (An adapted excerpt can be found here: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/s... )

 Using modern hunter-gatherer societies (or at least what Pinker thinks are hunter-gatherer societies) as stand-ins for pre-historic societies is a rookie mistake. The degree to which modern hunter-gatherers have been displaced and influenced by industrial societies and nation-states has been one of the big debates over the last half-century in anthropology. Thus, whether they are representative of some "state of nature" at all is highly questionable. (See this brief summary of the "hunter-gatherer revisionist debate" by Thomas N. Headland for an overview and references: http://www.sil.org/~headlandt/huntgat... ) Pinker notes this at one point but then completely forgets about it in taking his own cooked numbers at face value.

 Even if we accept Pinker's definition of violence, the whole undertaking itself is an exercise in guesswork and absurdity. There were no census programs or bureaus of statistics throughout much of history. Written records of war often inflate or deflate the body count depending on whose side you're reading from (and as we know, winners write the history books) and the archaeological record is spotty in a large number of places. Perhaps we can get fairly accurate body counts here and there, but there are large swaths of history that we essentially have to just guess at. Fortunately, the good folks at Quodlibeta, actual historians, have broken down a good deal of the historical and statistical flaws in the book (starting here): http://bedejournal.blogspot.com/2011/...

 Considering he has been "refining" this argument since The Blank Slate (read: futilely polishing a turd), Pinker seems unlikely to back down. His FAQ released to "respond" to criticism completely dodges the fact that he's pulled a good deal of his numbers straight from his nether region. (See Quodlibeta again for an appropriately snarky take-down: http://bedejournal.blogspot.com/2011/... ) At some point, it begins to stretch credulity that he doesn't realize there's a hole big enough to drive an eighteen-wheeler through in this argument. (This does, however, make the book a useful litmus test to see which critics will gush how "thoroughly researched, amply documented, and strongly argued" something is as long as you flash a few fancy charts 'n graphs and pseudo-intellectual smoke and mirrors their way. Unfortunately, it seems that the answer is "A whole lot of them.")

 Once you realize the entire book is a house of cards that's more or less already collapsed, the rest of it becomes an incredible grind. As above, the rest is just window dressing, a game of make believe. Sure, there's some interesting parts about, say, the psychology of aggression and a few delicious nuggets and tidbits of trivia along the way. Digging through the rough for them seems a rather pointless exercise, though, especially where it's already been done better. Large chunks of his argument are recycled from other authors such as Peter Singer and Lynn Hunt .

 The end result is a whiggish history where sense and nonsense blend together seamlessly, thus negating any use the layperson might find in it. The presentation of history too often crosses into the cartoonish, being loaded down with ad hoc theorizing deployed to save the book's overarching narrative. Pinker's goal is, at base, to push his ideology, his own brand of secular humanism he claims to be based in "Enlightenment values." It is an ideology whose values I happen to largely share, but history demonstrates that anything can be taken too far. This is why Pinker is forced to downplay or omit the excesses of the Enlightenment such as the French Revolution with its Jacobins and Cult of Reason.

 The irony here is that Pinker reveals himself to be as much of a romantic as his ideological opponents. The doomsayers appeal to a mythical past to buttress their claims (Arthur Herman has written an amusing account of this phenomenon in The Idea of Decline in Western History ), but the optimists of modernity similarly appeal to a mythical future. While the notion that the kids these days are just rotten and the world is going to hell in a hand-basket has been with us for millennia, one of the central narratives of modernity has been a belief in a steady incline. With an increasingly global economy and the inevitable advance of science and technology, the high priests of modernity preach time and again, we are surely on our way to the best of all worlds. Predicting the future direction of humanity, though, has proven to be a fool's game, a bit of off-track betting for the intellectual class.

 While Pinker never commits to this teleological narrative wholesale, he does bang the drum for the steady march of progress quite a bit throughout the book. Obviously, while I don't pine for the days of King Cotton or colonial Africa, I don't find much comfort in the fact that while the number of debt and sex slaves has exploded in absolute numbers, their proportion of the total population has decreased. Oh, how marvelous!

 What Bjorn Lomborg did for environmental issues, Pinker has done for the history of violence.
 hack-jobs-and-bullshit history politics-and-political-philosophy
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 Kate Savage
 643 reviews 111 followers
 January 22, 2014
 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.”
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 Tom LA
 585 reviews 217 followers
 November 23, 2022
 I love optimistic books, and there is a lot of optimism in the almost 800 pages of "The better angels of our nature". At the same time, I find it impossible to give a single opinion about this behemoth of a book, because I found some of its elements truly excellent, some ok, and some absolutely scream-out-loud dreadful, so I'll try to explain.

 In brief:

 - the great: the quality of the writing is superb. This is one of the best books I've ever read in terms of clarity of exposition and effectiveness of the writing. Also, at the very beginning the author outlines the structure of the book, which gives you a clear mental map of what you're getting into. As a plus, Pinker peppers his prose with anecdotes, jokes and references to pop culture (a bit like Malcolm Gladwell) that enliven the experience. I know some may not enjoy that. I do.

 - the good: the analysis of the decrease in violent behavior throughout history is deep and overall fairly convincing. Pinker acknowledges the fact that we are missing a lot of crucial data (about deaths and violence in the past), and he's received a lot of criticism for presenting a thesis that's partially based on guesswork, but I think there is a lot of value in making the layman (like me) think about these topics, and at least in trying to find some general patterns. Some reviewers hated his methodology, or the way he handles some piece of data - all fair. I think it all makes for a healthy discussion.

 - the not so good: is that Pinker didn't make much of an attempt to present a truly global perspective on the subject: in this book, Western world = The World. China, India, Africa, South America... marginal "who knows?" footnotes. "Religion" = Christianity. He explains that European history has the most available data, but I'm not the only one to think that he could have made a much better effort in this regard.

 - the dreadful is where Pinker lets his underlying personal New Atheist agenda seep through without any restraint. Sadly, this lowers the level of the book in many parts to pure tripe, in particular when it comes to the very subjective reasons behind the apparent decrease in violence throughout history.

 On page 642 Pinker spells out exactly what the main problem with his own book is: " Even the scientists are piling on. Human beings are led by their passions, say many psychologists, and deploy their puny powers of reason only to rationalize their gut feelings after the fact ". Ironically, that is precisely what he ended up doing with this book.

 To be clear, this has nothing to do with Pinker's titular argument in favor the decline of violence, which as I said I found fairly convincing and rational. No, Pinker's emotional, irrational underlying argument is the following:

 1) Enlightenment humanism, secularism and atheism are the only cultural forces for good in the world.
 2) Religions have been purely a destructive, negative force throughout history, therefore our planet will be a much better place when religions have completely disappeared.

 THAT is where the author's heart is.

 " As if biology didn't make things bad enough, the Abrahamic religions ratified some of our worst instincts with laws and beliefs that have encouraged violence for millennia ".

 Incidentally, I just found out that Pinker and Richard Dawkins are buddies and share the same New Atheist credo. That gave me a sudden bout of nausea... Dawkins, the Grand Master of Missing The Point himself!

 Watching Pinker zig-zag his way through his own version of world history where religion has caused only mayhem and suffering is like watching a professional skier slalom down through the obstacles. You have to admire his incredible ability to make it through without tripping over every few seconds.



 For example: in Pinker's world, the " Rights Revolutions show that a moral way of life requires a decisive rejection of instinct, culture, religion, and standard practice. In their place is an ethics that is inspired by empathy and reason and stated in the language of rights. [ ] This conclusion, of course [but OF COURSE!], is the moral vision of the Enlightenment and the strands of humanism and liberalism that have grown out of it. The Rights Revolutions are liberal revolutions ".

 Under this light, it becomes hard to reconcile and explain how Martin Luther King, perhaps the greatest protagonist in the "Rights Revolutions", was a Baptist preacher who dedicated his life to worship, prayer and to following Jesus Christ as a role model. But no worries! Slalomist Pinker turns his skis swiftly and manages to dismiss MLK's adherence to Christianity almost completely!

 What a feat, ladies and gentlemen!! Here he goes:

 " MLK, as a graduate student in theology, was, of course, conversant with the Bible and orthodox theology. But he also read renegade theologians such as Walter Rauschenbusch, who criticized the historical accuracy of the Bible and the dogma that Jesus died for people's sins. King then embarked on a serious study of the social and ethical theories of the great philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle down to ... [etc. etc.].". "King was profoundly inspired by Gandhi's theory of nonviolent resistance not as a moralistic affirmation of love, as nonviolence had been in the teaching of Jesus ".

 And now - pay very close attention. After this microscopic cherry-picking, later on, on page 677 comes the master stroke. Here’s how Pinker references his ridiculously insufficient excursus through MLK's cultural influences:

 " As we saw, Martin Luther King rejected mainstream Christian theology and drew his inspiration from Gandhi, secular Western philosophy, and renegade humanistic theologians ".

 Wait wait wait ..... we "saw" what??? The only thing you said was that he read some books, that is all we "saw". We never "saw" that MLK "rejected mainstream Christian theology"! Oh, what a number he just pulled there. Of course, an anti-christian MLK would fit perfectly in Pinker's nice little box. If only it wasn't a complete fabrication! Maybe, if we stretch it a bit, King was a "liberal Christian", but still very deeply and fully embracing Christian theology. www.sfgate.com/news/article/Writings-...

 For King, his Christian faith was far more than a source of soaring rethoric. It was the boundless reservoir of the colossal courage he would need to risk his life day after day. Frankly, I find Pinker's statements about MLK's faith quite offensive.

 So it is with unbelievably misguided violence (pun intended) that Pinker strips our history of any trace whatsoever of the positive influence of religion and religious people on the world, while focusing only on the stereotypical negative stories (of course, confusing "religion" with "corrupted clergy").

 As I said above, what Pinker really means with Religion is Christianity, because it's the only one he keeps referring to, and he doesn't seem to know much at all about Hinduism or Buddhism.

 " Very little good has come from these ancient tribal dogmas. [List of stereotypical pub-banter-level bad things that the Church did] Defenders of religion claim that the two genocidal ideologies of the 20th century, fascism and communism, were atheistic. But the first claim is mistaken and the second irrelevant ".

 Pinker is often leaving rationality aside to go FANTASTICALLY off the rails like this. Aside from the fact that he is wrong, what is even the point of this argument? What value does a defense of atheism bring to this book?

 Pinker then constructs a couple of sentences aimed at resolving and clarifying why he has chosen to completely ignore religion in the 800 pages of "The better angels of our nature":

 " Religion plays no single role in the history of violence because religion has not been a single force in the history of anything. [Says the erudite expert on religion, as we have just seen] The vast set of movements that we call religions have little in common but their distinctness from the secular institutions that are recent appearances on the human stage ".

 Ok. So, let me get it straight: you find it reasonable to metaphorically pee on 100% of what goes under "religion" because you say it's always been so diverse and multifaceted that its overall impact on history is, in the end, completely irrelevant? There is no fundamental golden rule, no consolidated drive for empathy and compassion, no focus on respect for human life across the main religions? The declaration of Human Rights has been inspired exclusively by Enlightenment humanism, and not at all by Christian values? You are actually using the horrors committed by a small part of the clergy to invalidate all the positive messages of religion and, more importantly, the useful and positive initiatives that most religious institutions pursue throughout the world (and very rarely make it to the news - like these www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/17/100... ) ?

 After these statements, it's not surprising that the author forgets to articulate how "secular ideas" possess this ideal quality of being "a single force in the history of something" that religions do not have. As if everyone who was ever inspired by secular ideas behaved in the same way and went exactly in the same direction - the BEST direction, of course.

 Here Pinker goes on to perform some more professional skiing to get around other obstacles, like the excesses of the French Revolution, Cult of Reason etc., at the risk of losing his pants:



 I thought people who kill, or in general use violence, do it in the name of anything at all: good, bad, old, new, religious beliefs, political beliefs, and science- or reason-based beliefs (a small example: the interpretation of Darwinism by the Columbine killers).

 More in general, I wonder: was it really that difficult for Pinker to admit that all types of cultural movements, religious and non-religious, have been influencing each other and impacting the history of violence in many different ways? Why did he need to defend secular ideologies as if they'd never been the inspiration for violence or violent acts? And why did he pinpoint all these cultural movements as a cause "in themselves" for violence and war? How would communism IN ITSELF or atheism IN ITSELF or Christianity IN ITSELF cause atrocities and wars? They are ideas: words on paper. None of these ideas was ever a specific order to commit atrocities. I've always thought that, in reality, bad or deranged people are the ones who read those words and bend them to their basic, animal desires.

 But again, Pinker is a human being himself, and each human being needs to worship something - we are powered by emotions, not by reason. As much as he tries to tackle this immense subject with pure rationality, his personal opinions come through loud and clear and crash to a pulp any of his efforts to sound objective and fully rational.

 So, in the end, to go back to the main official thesis of this book: violence has probably decreased, overall. We can talk forever about the type of statistics used by Pinker in this book, but it seems he could be right, and I hope he is.

 As for the reasons behind the decrease, as discussed, Pinker gets irrational about it, for understandable reasons (his wife). Here is his own explanation from his website: " It was only through the intellectual influence of my wife, the philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, that I understood the logic connecting them. She explained to me how morality can be grounded in rationality, and how secular humanism is just a modern term for the world view that grew out of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment (in particular, she argues, from the ideas of Spinoza). To the extent that the decline of violence has been driven by ideas, it’s this set of ideas, which I call Enlightenment humanism, which has driven it, and it offers the closest thing we have to a unified theory of the decline of violence ".

 A crucial passage here is "To the extent that the decline of violence has been driven by ideas". No one knows how much this is! It could be 0.2%! But Pinker certainly thinks the history of ideas has been much more impactful on reality than what it actually has been.

 This is a common misjudgement of academics: many of them tend to give far too much practical importance to ideas, books and cultural movements, and too little to money and power.

 If violence has decreased, I see no evidence that the decrease has been directly and mainly caused by the advent of the Enlightenment ideas, as Pinker is trying to convince us with this book. Those ideas were certainly a big piece of the puzzle, a great inspiration, just like many other ideas have been a positive inspiration. But fundamentally, I think what needs to be credited most of all is: military technology, increased wealth and global commerce, a change in the cost / profit scenarios of violence, the increased spread of information, and therefore better risk assessment tools. Maybe, but only maybe, we could also add to this list some steps forward on the path of evolution of our collective consciousness.


 --------------------------

 Here is a good book that quietly destroys the myth of Enlightenment perfection: "In defense of Faith", by David Brog

 Here are some interesting articles that talk about Pinker's world view:

 On his view of scientism:
 http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013...

 On his New Atheist credo:
 http://www.patheos.com/blogs/scienceo...

 On his (mis)understanding of religion:
 http://bedejournal.blogspot.com/2008/...
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 David Rubenstein
 801 reviews 2,502 followers
 January 9, 2014
 In this book, Steven Pinker explores a very controversial thesis, that is, violence is declining. Different types of violence are declining on multiple time scales. It would seem like the twentieth century had some major wars and plenty of genocide to make his thesis sound rather foolish. But in the first seven chapters he shows lots and lots of statistics to back up his thesis. In the eighth and ninth chapters he also explores the scientific reasons for violence and the reasons for increasingly non-violent behavior.

 The book is very comprehensive--it is quite long and detailed. The first chapters are not particularly "heavy" reading, but towards the end of the book, it can be tough-going--but fascinating throughout.

 Pinker tackles the main objection to his thesis--the three worst dictators of the twentieth century (Hitler, Stalin, Mao) were responsible for an immense amount of violence, deaths and misery. Some of the reviewers here at Goodreads have remarked that Pinker underestimates the number of deaths that are attributable to Mao. Perhaps he did grossly underestimate the numbers--I really don't know.

 Pinker makes an interesting point about the recent theory, raised in the book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything , that crime in the United States declined in the past few decades, because of the legalization of abortion in 1973. The idea is that the reduction in unwanted children led to fewer violence-inclined youths. Pinker argues that after 1973, the proportion of children born to vulnerable women actually increased, rather than decreased.

 One of the reasons for the decline in violence is the increase in literacy and reading. Pinker argues that the transmission of new ideas in books has acted as a liberal force in society. He shows that during the Middle Ages, most people were religious and believed in the literal truth of the bible. Heretics were everywhere, and were persecuted in wars, massacres, pogroms, executions and torture. Nowadays, while religious people "believe" in the bible, most do not take such a literal interpretation. They don't think that it is moral to invade a city and kill--or take as slaves--every single person. A higher value is placed on human life, because of the "shift from valuing souls to valuing lives ." Pinker writes,
 The theory that religion is a force for peace, often heard among the religious right and its allies today, does not fit the facts of history.
 Later, he writes,
 The world has far too much morality.
 Very true indeed.

 Pinker shows how game theory plays a big role in the evolution of morality. In fact, he defines morality as the opportunity for positive-sum games. In so much of history, people played in zero-sum or even in negative-sum games. For example, war is usually a negative-sum game, in the sense that so many people die and suffer, that the gains to the victor are completely overwhelmed by the losses to both sides.

 Nowadays, the language of violence is often cloaked in "bureaucratese", in words like purges, deportations, bombardments, pacification, rectification, ethnic cleansing, collateral damage, and rendition. These euphemisms help to self-exculpate the perpetrators of violence, and make violence seem to be justified or involuntary.

 Pinker discusses in some detail the factors that he believes have led to decreased violence in recent times. He talks a lot about the concept of Leviathan from the book by this name by Thomas Hobbes. According to Pinker, the presence of a legitimate, strong central government helps to reduce violence, at least on a personal basis. People are less inclined to violence when they think that punishment is likely. (Not always true, but usually.)

 He describes how "gentle commerce" helps to "turn zero-sum warfare into positive-sum mutual profit ... sweetening the outcome of mutual pacifism with the mutual gains of exchange." Pinker also shows how "feminization" has helped to move society "... away from a culture of manly honor, with its approval of violent retaliation for insults, toughening of boys through physical punishment, and veneration of martial glory."

 One of the most interesting--and potentially useful--parts of the book is his analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The root of the problem is that there are so many sacred concepts on both sides. A sacred concept is one that is not subject to negotiation--it is completely off the table . People will not compromise on their sacred values, but they might compromise on so-called "pseudo-sacred" values. Pinker describes evidence that both sides might be willing to declare compromises through symbolic concessions, even though they are not actually willing to perform on their compromises. Pinker writes,
 To find anything that softens the opposition of Israeli and Palestinian fanatics to what the rest of the world recognizes as the only viable solution to their conflict is something close to a miracle.
 It all has to do with the symbolic framing of a peace agreement.

 There are certain parts of the book that might make a squeamish reader cringe--there are some short descriptions of barbaric tortures. If you can get through (or skip) those parts, then you will find a fascinating theory developed from the point of view of scientific scholarship--sociology, psychology, and evolutionary biology. As with all of Steven Pinker's writings, this book is fascinating, comprehensive, and sure to be controversial. He has (most of) the facts behind him, and it is difficult to argue against his major points.
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 Kevin
 269 reviews 564 followers
 November 17, 2022
 This book asserts that violence has decreased. I can set this aside as a worthy discussion. However, that is just the hook to catch readers. The purpose here is spreading ideologies to explain why violence has decreased.

 The Bad :
 Well, it turns out Pinker puts much of his faith in the status quo (i.e. power) as directly responsible, i.e. the State ("Leviathan") and Capitalism ("Gentle Commerce").

 Let us consider status quo bias:
 1) One can argue that it is resistance to power that has brought much of the decrease in violence we see today! After all, slavery and colonialism were the most profitable Capitalist ventures, backed and enabled by the growth of States. Elites sure are innovative at co-opting grassroots demands (and then smugly taking credit for it!), like the liberal elite property-holders who did all they could to thwart democracy ("mob rule") until it became advantageous to run as "democrats" (while power migrated from the political sphere to the private economic sphere of one-dollar-one-vote).

 2) Even if such violent power structures were capable of forcing an increase in material production, must we assume they are the only options? Have we really reached " The End of History " in finding the optimal social system, as another status quo shill put it? (Indeed, we might soon reach the end of history given climate change and other destruction of crucial Earth systems, but never mind that; Pinker just picks out the "science" that conforms to status quo triumphalism)
 ...Euro/Americentric Liberal elitists and their useful idiots (Pinker?) place their faith in "the Enlightenment" (similarly, the "Founding Fathers") as the foundational social movement in human history, but we should look beyond Orwellian history, towards accounts that do not just assume whatever is written by the victors is the totality of reality. The autonomous communities not requiring and openly resisting the violent shepherding by authority are indeed written out of history...

 I tried to re-read these 800+ pages to give a thorough unpacking, but frankly there are better uses of one's time. I am thankful for The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions which brings an accessible dose of decolonization ideologies to expose just how atrocious Pinker's ideologies are.

 ...and these beautiful (negative) reviews, enjoy!
 Brilliant review #1
 Brilliant review #2
 Inception of spicy reviews
 ...and one more
 ...in fact, there's an entire book ( Reality Denial: Steven Pinker’s Apologetics for Western-Imperial Violence ), co-written by Edward S. Herman (who also lead the co-writing of that famous Chomsky book on foreign policy media: Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media )

 The Missing :
 I used to first recommend the following critiques on power and appraisal of popular resistance and decision-making for Western audiences given their accessibility. They are still useful:
 - Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky
 - The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement

 However, to appreciate why socialism in 20th century revolutions took place in the Global South/periphery is to build the historical context of the violence of global capitalism . This is crucial to avoid becoming the smug Western armchair critic that sees everyone else as primitive/violent/"totalitarian"/"anti-democratic"/"not real socialism", while at the same time failing to prevent the exportation of bombs and embargoes, or achieving economic democracy at home. Where to start?

 1) I'm accumulating a playlist on Global South Socialism, featuring Vijay Prashad , Michael Parenti , Utsa Patnaik , Max Blumenthal , etc.: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...
 --Highlights include:
 i) Michael Parenti :
 -on Cuban Revolution: https://youtu.be/npkeecCErQc
 -full: https://youtu.be/O8k0yO-deoA?t=27
 ii) Vijay Prashad
 -on ideological censorship : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jKcs...
 -"The Many Lives of Communism in the Third World": https://youtu.be/NZXh2Guebhg?t=104
 - Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations
 - The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World
 - The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South

 2) Books on the history of global capitalism not glossing over its violence and contradictions:
 -accessible intros:
 - Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (has reformist blind-spots towards empire, but very accessible intro to the history of economic development where long-term productivity gains require nurturing/protection from ruthless short-term market competition)
 - The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry
 - Capitalism: A Ghost Story
 - A People's History of the United States (history from below instead of by the winners)
 - A People's History of the World
 ...deeper dives:
 - Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present
 - Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
 -- Debt: The First 5,000 Years
 - Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital

 3) Capitalism as the end of history?
 -Intro on capitalism's dynamism being at the same time its volatility: Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails
 -Structural alternatives? Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present
 -Capitalist growth on a finite planet:
 - Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
 - Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System
 -Capitalist State as a tool to manage class conflict:
 - A Brief History of Neoliberalism
 - The State and Revolution
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 Jan Rice
 509 reviews 427 followers
 September 29, 2016
 Steven Pinker has written a monster of a book. He has used his intelligence to crunch a huge volume of material. He has made a number of great points to which I'm sure to be referring often.

 Yet despite all the insights and accompanying drum rolls, I am suspicious of the dramatic hypothesis, the grand prediction that humankind has learned in any permanent sense to be kinder and gentler. That hypothesis is a welcome change from all the dystopian predictions, and I do think I, and western civilization in general, has it pretty good right here and now in terms of space to survive and thrive. I just don't think it's necessarily a permanent pinnacle. And when people are thumping their chests and seeing themselves as representing that pinnacle, well, that's concerning--even though he insists his views are scientific and not in the least messianic. So, if Steven Pinker had been a little more humble and had spoken of current times as pretty nice for some without necessarily approaching the best of all possible worlds, I could better countenance him. But Steven Pinker can be hard to take and he doesn't do humble.

 Here's a cartoon making fun of Obama from the right--and of the notion that violence has declined. But, as when we see ten feet of snow and sneer at "global warming," everything is not always as it appears!


 --Ramirez, 06-17-2014

 On the other hand, given all the predictions of doom for the world that are in circulation, it's good to hear thinking from the other angle for a change. We need it. Having leaned too far one way, maybe the only way to get back in form is to lean the other way. And that's why, when I finish complaining, I'll be touching on some of Pinker's many surprising assertions, despite not being a Pinkerite.

 But, first, here are some more of my objections.

 Steven Pinker has thrown so many ideas and hypotheses into this book, and he's such a fast talking, smooth intellect that it's hard to evaluate all of it--as though he were some rogue trader wheeling and dealing beyond the capacity of his would-be supervisors. You can't help but be impressed by his moves even when they're too fast to follow and you know he's sometimes pulling a fast one.

 Steven Pinker doesn't do justice by his opponents. I remember the Platonic principle I learned in Plato at the Googleplex --that you haven't refuted an argument unless you have it in its best articulation. Straw men won't do. We hear references to opposing ideas and their proponents but in this book it's assumed that Pinker's views represent the "normal" and "best" views. I mean his views that the current commercial economy and individualism do represent the best of all possible worlds. I may even agree with him, but my point is that not everyone does.

 One of Pinker's main arguments for the decline of violence is that a lower percentage of humans suffer violence now than in the early modern period, medieval times, the Renaissance, or in antiquity or prehistory. Yes, a lot of people suffered violence in the 20th century, but, according to him, a lower percentage. But, if more people suffer now but are a lower percent of the total population, is that really less violence? Did anybody ask the particular sufferers? If each human is an end in him- or herself, and a greater number are suffering, can that really be considered evidence for the decline of violence?

 Actually, I took that line of argument--asking what the individuals themselves would have had to say--straight from Pinker's mouth:

 Ho Chi Minh was correct when he prophesied, "Kill ten of our men and we will kill one of yours. In the end, it is you who will tire." 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 proverbial ten men how they felt about this), and the United States eventually conceded the war of attrition despite having every other advantage. (p. 309)(my italics)


 Something similar happens--the author's doing what he himself reprimands others for--in the area of religion. Over and over, Pinker comes down hard on religion, blaming it for the violence and excesses of earlier eras. Yet he has to employ the most fundamentalist interpretations and he has to ignore aspects that run counter to that thesis, and all in a field that is outside his area of expertise. He has to take things literally and his interpretations as the one-and-only interpretations, laid down once and for all, for example, to take a common and conventionally-made criticism:

 The overriding principle was that animals exist for the benefit of humans. In the Hebrew Bible, God's first words to Adam and Eve in Genesis 1:28 are "Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." (p. 458)


 And he has to pick out only the aspects of scripture that he finds distasteful. And use whatever "God said" in some Bible verse as if an actual historical event to compare to "other" historical events. Apparently he must even keep the King James flavor ( moveth ).

 Expounding on the meaning of seemingly arbitrary and bizarre but nevertheless rigidly required manners and rules of etiquette, Pinker studies their history. But studying the history of religion that way wouldn't advance Pinker's argument, while blindness to any such thing does, so he leaves it in the dark. " What you see is all there is ," as Daniel Kahneman , another cognitive psychologist, says. My early impression from the quotes that were up when I started out was that most casual readers were reading The Better Angels of Our Nature primarily to hear Steven Pinker diss religion and reinforce their own views.

 In an apparent spirit of fairness, Pinker disses the New Testament, too, but he reserves most of his ire for the Hebrew Bible. Let that be a lesson for you, Christians who disrespect your Old Testament. You are doing the work of atheists for them.

 Speaking of cognitive psychology, Pinker pretty much worships at the alter of reason. Doing otherwise wasn't something that was going to advance his thesis; the reader will have to look elsewhere for the limits of reason and for the understanding of consciousness as a system of attention rather than as some pristine space for free choice.

 One more criticism: I was surprised by a clear inconsistency on Pinker's part. This author loves local authority, and, on the national level, Leviathan --a central government large and powerful enough to reserve violence to itself and wield it in an increasingly disinterested and just manner--as an alternative to a wild, wild west scenario of every man for himself. Yet when it came to the international level he argues correlationally for a "Democratic Peace" theory, calling the "empire" theory of peace "cynical." (p. 281) Huh?

 And going back to religion for a minute, what about God and religion as a means to call up a symbolic "Leviathan," long before there could be an actual central government in that role. He hints as much on p. 539, quoting from Martin Daly and Margo Wilson's 1988 book Homicide on the subject of our retention of a "just deserts" approach to justice as opposed to adopting a purely utilitarian "deterrence" approach:

 From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, this almost mystical and seemingly irreducible moral imperative is the output of a mental mechanism with a straightforward adaptive function: to reckon justice and administer punishment by a calculus which ensures that violators reap no advantage from their misdeeds. The enormous volume of mystico-religious bafflegab about atonement and penance and divine justice and the like is the attribution to higher detached authority of what is actually a mundane, pragmatic matter: discouraging self-interested competitive acts by reducing their profitability to nil.


 Pinker himself goes on to argue that just deserts itself may serve a deterrent function, and that if we were to get rid entirely of the just deserts, "retributive" aspect, making the justice system "too narrowly utilitarian," then "malefactors would learn to game it. Just deserts can close off that option."

 I think it is here, in those words, and in waffling sprinkled throughout the book on the subject of religion, that Pinker concedes the value of of the very phenomenon against which he becomes so exercised. But he doesn't get that he has done so.

 I got the impression that Steven Pinker really, really wants his theory that our better angels have won to be true. More on that at the end...

 Now to some of his thought-provoking assertions and conclusions:

 Prehistorical hunter-gatherer times were not some idyllic period during which the world was populated by noble savages free from the corrupting influence of civilization. On the contrary, life was nasty, brutish and short; those times were dominated by sneaky, murderous, rapacious raiding parties. Things had to settle down considerably before anybody could write or read any books, people! Yes, it was two steps forward, one step backward for eons; people lost health and strength when they traded in hunting and gathering for agriculture--but still!

 Nor were medieval times some idyllic period over which to nostalgically yearn. That would be "cutting off your nose to spite your face," nose-snipping being one common response to a slight. Honor was priceless but life was cheap. The way we feel now--that our bodies belong to us and are ours to care for--a perception that seems to reflect "reality" but is of recent, modern derivation. It is an attitude we anachronistically think always existed. Instead, individualism developed gradually. With modern times we no longer belonged to some warlord or king; and with the spread of trade we had to get inside the head of the prospective trading partner and see others as we see ourselves..as we see others....

 The biggest problems for a society come with an overload of young males. And, yet, the confounding preference for male babies that drives female infanticide in many cultures!

 Infanticide itself is far from being some aberration attributable to the impact of modern stress and alienation. Infanticide was the norm from time immemorial--if it helped the survival of current young whose viability was already established, circumstances being such that a mother could care for only so many.

 This kind of thinking--some people don't want to hear it! It's enough to garner threatening letters for poor scientists.

 Genocide is not a disease of modernity either. We've just learned to recognize it, that's all. Life used to be a permanent holocaust for nameless multitudes, in slavery and through the impact of war and violence. No one thought anything was wrong with it unless it happened to you, says Pinker. Murderous death was supposed to represent the verdict of history, of God, in accordance with a way of thinking only lately subject to question.

 In this day of competition for victimhood (at best a two-edged sword!), silence in the aftermath of genocide seems inconceivable, but if genocide was a just verdict , no wonder that, at first, Holocaust survivors couldn't talk about it. I am told that changed for American Jews in consequence of the 1967 Six Day War. Did that raise the possibility of an alternative verdict?

 I want to digress here on how views on the suffering of violence are shifted around in religious narratives. Some ideas have begun to consolidate themselves while I've been working on this review but since they are off the beaten path of the review I'll hide them. For a long time I've been aware that religion takes the suffering of violence and turns it upside down. Egypt deported you? Then it's God hearing you and redeeming you! You're crucified? Look again and it's the salvation of the world! Can't we say that, generally speaking, people do look at suffering (or failure) as a verdict?--and it takes a twist to turn that around.

 In particular I came back to Galatians 3:13 in which Paul turns around the crucifixion of Christ from the "curse of the law" to a blessing. That has always bothered me because Deuteronomy 21:22-23 doesn't say being hanged (or crucified) is a curse. (The Jewish Study Bible and the NRSV share an editor; the translations and footnotes are very similar.) It says that leaving the body out and unburied is the curse (affront to God)--basically the same as for Sophocles' Antigone and her brother whom Cleon considered a traitor and wouldn't let her bury, to the misfortune of all. In biblical times--meaning Hebrew biblical times--stoning was the method. The final redaction was around the time of the Exile, when crucifixion didn't yet loom large. The Hebrew bible--"the law" in Paul's terms--recognized that, atypically, some traitor-types might be hanged or impaled; in that case, leaving the body exposed might well be part of the punishment. So the bible, to circumscribe such practices, said the body must not be exposed and left overnight to become carrion. The bible, in other words, sided with the morals of Sophocles' Antigone. That is what Deuteronomy is saying.

 But, by post-testamental--make that intertestamental times, if you're from a Christian tradition--that had changed. The sadistic execution method of crucifixion had become unfortunately well-known, and, by then, that's what people thought of when they read those Deuteronomy verses. Here's an article I came across--the first few pages, anyway: http://www.tsm.edu/sites/default/file... So, I think Paul thought what he thought and wrote what he wrote--and isn't the part about suffering a bad end as a curse typical? Isn't turning that upside down what religions do? But, "the Law" didn't say that being crucified is a curse.

 No gas chambers? We may think genocide requires modern technology, but it doesn't. Just lock a town's population in a building and come back in two weeks. Think of the sieges of the ancient world, or of chariots, the advanced weapons of a long-ago day.

 And, now--political correctness. For Pinker, PC is the residue of changes that have occurred and that we've therefore forgotten about.

 During the transition to modernity, people did not fully appreciate that they were undergoing changes aimed at reducing violence, and once the changes were entrenched, the process was forgotten. When Europeans were mastering norms of self-control, they felt like they were becoming more civilized and courteous, not that they were part of a campaign to drive the homicide statistics downward. Today we give little thought to the rationale behind the customs left behind by that change.... ...(A) civilizing offensive can leave a culture with a legacy of puzzling customs, peccadilloes, and taboos. ... The code of etiquette bequeathed by this and other Rights Revolutions is pervasive enough to have acquired a name. We call it political correctness.


 He also thinks we become amnesiac about the degree of change. We forget what the past was really like. We say little has changed. That is related to PC, enabling us to keep our guard up against the return of "the bad old days," and it also enables activists to exhort us to do more. In other words, exaggeration. If we had to acknowledge how much better things are, could we get away with it? People say racism is just as bad as it always was, but it isn't. Same for antisemitism. Not so far.

 My husband was taking a Greek course last fall. In Georgia, people over 65 can take college courses for free within the state university system if there is space--isn't that nice? In connection with his course we could attend some lectures on antiquity, and at one the doctoral candidate made reference to the Greek "dark ages" (from about 1200-800 BCE). There was an African-American woman of uncertain age--meaning not young (but younger than I, as nearly everyone is getting to be) in the audience. I mention her ethnicity for any light that may shed on her reply, and what she did, during the question-and-answer period, is take issue with the "dark ages" designation, for, she said, we shouldn't make such a designation given that this is such a dark age.

 That exemplifies the point Pinker was making re forgetting what the past was really like and exaggerating the problems of the present, even as we all sat safe, secure, comfortable and diverse, discussing our esoteric subject.

 That segues to the Moralization Gap.

 Say I've done something to you. From your point of view, you were my victim. Our perspectives are going to be very different. Mine will be that whatever I did wasn't all that serious. At any rate it was a long time ago. Did I really have a choice? What can one expect, anyway? My stance is going to tend toward you should get over it already, and, while you're at it, stop being so over-sensitive. Meanwhile, you don't see it that way, not by a long shot. Whatever it is lives on in your memory and your heart. For you, not forgetting is more than common sense; it's a sacred trust.

 In short, the Moralization Gap is about the impact of self-interest on our views and dealings with each other, a potentially fruitful method of analysis for understanding the dynamics of a situation and why it's so hard to get along.

 According to Pinker the scientist is usually going to side against the past as a living cause and with what's over being over. So, in other words, he's assuming whatever it is is over.

 One can envisage still more angry letters and protests against that poor scientist.


 Why does Pinker need to believe at all costs in his Enlightenment values? It occurs to me that for a philosophe who is not from the religious majority it's distinctly unpalatable to consider what it would be like if the hands of the majority tradition were to be untied. What would happen to his vaunted authority then?

 And yet when he goes on and on with his criticism of the Hebrew bible, it sounds like sucking up to that majority, as if to say "Listen to me: I'm putting them down; I'm not like them." And, in that way, he's reminiscent of Marx.


 Here's a 2008 article by Jerry Muller asserting the triumph of ethnonationalism. If Muller's assertions are correct, they undermine Pinker's general hypothesis. ( Foreign Affairs allows non-subscribers one article a month and two if you register.) http://www.foreignaffairs.com/article...
 Here, critics try to refute Muller but don't succeed: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/article...

 Finally, don't think that all that's here is all there is. This review isn't very systematic. Or comprehensive; for example, there's game theory and the Prisoner's Dilemma in the evolution of cooperation. Or the concept "self-determination of peoples" as instigator of blood baths....["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>
 audio history morality-justice
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 Faruk Ahmet
 5 reviews 32 followers
 July 22, 2016
 Loathing is the word. It infuriated me. You'd think that after all these years one would stop being surprised by this style of typical new-atheist/liberal argumentation but when I see this much cherrypicking, oversimplification, handwaving and western supremacism shoved into a single book, I still get all worked up. And of course, it doesn't help that they call themselves "The Brights" and "The Enlightened" etc. I mean, who does that? Even if I was intellectually convinced by their arguments, I still wouldn't wanna hang around these jerks.

 His main thesis is simple and for anyone brought up after the 19th century, overly familiar: We were savages, then we were saved by Science and Reason. Not all of us, of course, only Europeans and Americans at first, but thanks to Capitalism (or as he labels it, the gentle commerce ), everywhere else is catching up slowly, too. One time this evil thing called Communism had suddenly sprung up out of nowhere and caused many deaths and suffering but it was ultimately defeated by the Allies of Light. Etc.

 "If you'd suggest occupying another country today, everyone would laugh at you and they'd think you were crazy; it is a thing of the past", he says (paraphrasing). So what about Iraq or Afghanistan? Panama, Bolivia, Vietnam, Libya and countless other bloody conflicts and interjections by the Western forces, mainly USA? Oh, they are not "wars", he says, but merely unfortunate but "defensive" actions taken by civilized nations to protect their democratic ways. Isn't it incredibly telling that in an EIGHT-HUNDRED-page book about the history of world politics and violence, the word "imperialism" is not uttered at all. Not even once.

 There are a myriad of graphs and numbers stuffed inside. But the way he handles them and the way he chooses the sources he gets them from is so blatantly manipulative that it's cringe-inducing. A source repudiates his claims about "The Long Peace" and "the waning of war", and draws a bleak picture of the condition the world is in outside TheCivilizedNations? Well they are extremist, communist, leftist fanatics, you can't trust their data. Here, we have a government-funded organization that prints out numbers that fit my theory beautifully; surely they're the trustworthy ones. In one of the most embarrasing moments of the book, « we are seriously asked to draw conclusions from a graph of the "rate of battle deaths in state-based armed conflicts between 1900 and 2005" (Figure 6-1) while being instructed to ignore the figures for the first and second world wars »**. Why should we ignore two world wars, while looking at the history of wars, you ask? Because "after all, the world has seen nothing close to that level since". It was a fluke. This is kinda like saying "please don't call it murder just because there's a body lying on the floor with a knife in the back, since it's not like we see something like that everyday". Forgive me for the vulgar language, but this reminds me of a lovely Turkish idiom: "If my aunt had balls, she would be my uncle".

 Well, I could go on and on (like this occasionally biased and contrived -leftists!- but very detailed and informative review does ) but you get the gist. In the end, it's not that I find the claim that violence in general is getting comparatively subsided (and it's at least partially thanks to Western Civilization) completely worthless. It doesn't even have to be a glorious, total, irreversible change of paradigm to be worth praising. If we are living in a marginally better, more peaceful world, we should know about it, and understand the why and the how so we can push it further. If it really turns out that the Westerners are morally superior and more evolved or something, so be it; it's not the premise that bugs me at all, but if it takes this much deceptive and manipulative "scholarship" to prove a point, maybe we should at least raise an eyebrow in mild suspicion before patting our world of gentle commerce in the back, you know.

 **Quote from David's review , because I'm too lazy to look it up myself.
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 fourtriplezed
 443 reviews 90 followers
 December 14, 2018
 What an interesting read! If the idea is to give the reader food for thought this book more than nourishes.

 My approach to this book was a bit different than is usual. I have tended to write a review and then read others. Not in this case. I read many good reviews and few that were critical so was very open to being a critic. I am of the opinion that a few did not take note of what Pinker wrote. He got some numbers wrong was a fairly common complaint. He may have and admits as much. A few times he made it clear that his numbers were estimates based on researchers who are respected in the field. “…. so there is no single correct estimate” he writes on page 60 of my copy. Page 168 “….. no one knows exactly how many were killed…..” when discussing holy slaughters. In fact Pinker supports scepticism as he suggested on page 217 when discussing the Enlightenment.

 As a westerner living a very comfortable life in Australia I was intrigued to read a comment by US politician John Kerry on page 417. “We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorist are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance. As a former law-enforcement person, I know we’re never going to end prostitution. We’re never going to end illegal gambling. But we’re going to reduce it, organised crime, to a level where it isn’t on the rise. It isn’t threatening people’s lives every day, and fundamentally it’s something that you continue to fight, but it’s not threatening the fabric of your life” He was right of course but he became “unfit to lead” and had to back pedal as the reality is that the authorities may well have reduced and contained crime, by cripes don’t tell the people that because the media will not be happy unless they are able to make you feel bad about just about every part of your life. Less violence? How dare that be considered when there is news to sell. And take it in your stride as you are not going to get hit by the Mafia? Bah!

 This book covered a variety of female issues and after conversation elsewhere I even read On Rape by Germaine Greer. Hardly an area I knew much about. Glad I did. Perhaps blokes my age, 60ish, need to get of their fat arses and not think they rule the world as Pinker has given a very good case that the rise of feminist thought has been good for our collective health. While reading this I came across this item on the repulsive practise of female circumcision. Yes the item says caution is required but it is good to read that progress is taking place.

 https://www.theguardian.com/global-de...

 This book has some fascinating sub chapters and one on page 572 called Whence The Rights Revolution? should thrill the hearts of all book readers. Among other things is a fivefold increase in books published from 1960 to 2000. The information we are getting seems to just make us collectively smarter when it comes to treating each other with a little bit of respect and not get on our high horse and want to smash the face in of our neighbours be they next door or in the nation next door.

 So does Pinker say we are in for even less violence in the future? No! In fact he makes it abundantly clear that one bit of lunacy can change everything. I personally am very unsure we have rosy future. I am like the next father of children and worry about the environment, that a loony with a nuke will go mad but the book itself is in fact not really about that. It is about the data that shows violence has dropped and gives several reasons why. Disagree with the reasons by all means but also enjoy the fact you have more chance of dying in a car crash than by a terrorist attack no matter what the newspapers tells you.
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 knig
 223 reviews 195 followers
 September 24, 2012
 I have a peripheral awareness that Pinker awakens red penitus in a goodly proportion of his stalwart readers: but I don’t know why. I shan’t delve into this before I write up ‘better angels’: don’t want to be distracted by ‘noise’.

 800 pages of socio-economic postulating: always an inexact science, is going to rub someone the wrong way hither or thither. We see what we want to see, and 800 pages of the ‘humanities’ is like waving a red flag to a bull: plenty of scope to flare up, statistically speaking, and isn’t that just what we love to do best: exploit the ‘Moralizing Gap’ to justify our own world view:we’re brushed up dammit: well, OK, we may not be able to prove a point statistically, mathematically, economically, biologically or physically, but give me the humanities, I say: and see if I know my oochie from my achie.

 The subject centre stage here is violence, (mainly in the westen hemisphere, where data is more readily available)and the overarching conclusion is that it has decreased over time: in terms of war, rape, homicide and any other conceivable physical violation against the person.

 No one, as far as I am aware, has disagreed with this overall premise, although certain definitions of violence are under debate : e.g. the high prevaleence of infanticide has been supplanted with high levels of abortion, so in this particular area Pinker’s hypothesis does not hold up: but this is and other instances are outliers in the more general scenario of violence reduction.

 Pinker’s starting premise is the biological impulse, the Darwinian hegemony for survival . This type of thinking will either resonate or repel. But it is an important point because if you’re going to go down the route of biological justification, then its inadmissible to switch and bait halfway through as Pinker does. And he does so by positing the issue of excessive violence in terms of biological necessity, but resolves its decrease through ambiguous channels such as self control, empathy, reverse morality and, incongruously, and ultimately, the Flynn effect.

 Hence the incompatibility? How can something which starts off as nature be dampened by nurture? Huh? Huh?

 On the surface, all of the theories Pinker posits withstands microscopic examination: the Civilizing Process (e.g. the contract between man and state) does indeed explain the decline in violence: prior to Henry II introducing the state vs Jane Doe as opposed to Joe Bloggs vs Jane Doe, violence was the only way out: you smacked your feudal neighbours about, or you lost out. The aristocracy were just as likely as the hoi polloi to ‘engage’ in a good brawl. After the change in law, it wasn’t so beneficial. The upper and middle classes modified their behaviour. The lower classes persisted (and persist), because they have never fully bought into the state-citizen contract (and to be fair, neither has the state, on their behalf). Other influencing factors intervene: commerce, the integration of minorities in spheres of influence which engender the ‘rights revolution’, the pacifying influence of women, the clear demarcation of national borders, the influx of democracy, the redefinition of moral values.

 And you know what: its all true. All of it. All of these trends decreased violence. And not one person can nary say it didn’t. But how exactly:well, Pinker’s final analysis is: mainly, Reason. Now, I’ve cut and pasted this next section from Peter Singer in the New York Times book review, because he rightly summarises Pinker’s position and I am too lazy to. I’m saving my fire for the constructive anlaysis after:

 ‘Pinker’s claim that reason is an important factor in the trends he has described relies in part on the “Flynn effect” — the remarkable finding by the philosopher James Flynn that ever since I.Q. tests were first administered, the scores achieved by those taking the test have been rising. The average I.Q. is, by definition, 100; but to achieve that result, raw test scores have to be standardized. If the average teenager today could go back in time and take an I.Q. test from 1910, he or she would have an I.Q. of 130, which would be better than 98 percent of those taking the test then. Nor is it easy to attribute this rise to improved education, because the aspects of the tests on which scores have risen most do not require a good vocabulary or even mathematical ability, but instead test powers of abstract reasoning. ......

 Pinker argues that enhanced powers of reasoning give us the ability to detach ourselves from our immediate experience and from our personal or parochial perspective, and frame our ideas in more abstract, universal terms. This in turn leads to better moral commitments, including avoiding violence. It is just this kind of reasoning ability that has improved during the 20th century. He therefore suggests that the 20th century has seen a “moral Flynn effect, in which an accelerating escalator of reason carried us away from impulses that lead to violence” and that this lies behind the long peace, the new peace, and the rights revolution. Among the wide range of evidence he produces in support of that argument is the tidbit that since 1946, there has been a negative correlation between an American president’s I.Q. and the number of battle deaths in wars involving the United States. ‘

 Here is where I wade in now: First of all, surely the Flynn effect is fallacious? There has been much debate about the accuracy of IQ tests in general, and how they are loaded with prescribed sense-data which automatically ‘disqualifies’ intelligent people who have not been immersed in the culture of this sense data. Second, the mode in which abstract reasoning is included in standardised tests is very easily a ‘learnable’ rather than an ‘applicable’ commodity, whose sequences have been incorporated in thousands of ephemeral ways in the educational system to begin with, and routinely tested over time. To use the Flynn effect as some overarching proof that we are ‘smarter’ than our predecessors is a travesty. But no more so than Pinker’s next theory, that ‘Reason’ has finally got the upper hand and carried us away ‘from impulse led violence’. This must be intuitively wrong, even to a philosophical novice. How can Reason deal with a biological impulse? In fact, when has Reason ever successfully ‘eliminated’ a biological impulse? Need I remind Pinker about the painful, unnecessary and degrading experiments in say trying to ‘reason with homosexuals’ that they have other choices? Conversely, I’m pretty certain no amount of reasoning will sway my biological sexual impulses either. Obviously countless other examples pertain. Pinker!!!
 And yet violence has gone down. How to explain this, then? Given I don’t buy Pinker’s theory, I’m going to have to have a go at this myself. Why not?

 First, Pinker concedes the impulse to violence is biologically driven. Then, buried deep within the 800 page text is a study by Preston and de Waal in 2002 ‘aversiveness of conspecifics in pain’, which basically translates into primates (and humans) having a natural inbred revulsion to inflicting violence on other primates/humans (backed up by Stanley Milgram’s shock experiment and the Trolley Problem). On a separate note, there is also the well known concept of ‘crowd mechanics’: or how we all fall into rank when the mob rules. My personal theory here is that, based on the studies above, it is possibility that violence was ‘overexaggerated’ in early history to begin with, due to lack of behaviour limiting controls. Perhaps in the wild these might be say greater geographical distances between competing primate groups. In human history, perhaps it was the state contract which modified an unnaturally rampant exhibition of violence between competitors in close proximity.(picture two pitbulls in a ring: excessiveness, eh?) Effectively then, an ‘overly violent’ population was stabilised to its natural levels. But this is not the whole story. ‘Better Angels’ shows we have gone one further, and overt violence is now perhaps below what might be considered the natural equilibrium. How did this happen?

 Well, it didn’t. The first thing that I must concede if I am to accept that violence is a biologically driven impulse, is that it simply can NOT have been dissipated, and certainly not by Reason. The question then is, where did the violence go? Its not easily seen as a subject-object agreement, so what happened? Its been redirected, I think. We’re not rid of it, we’re simply rechanneling in a ‘non statistical’ way. Its not with a little trepidation I’m going to mention the xBox and film now. I realise I might be relegated to cuckoo territory (my only consolation is I’ll be sharing it with Pinker though!).

 In the first half of the last century we had two world wars to keep us busy (and I think anybody would agree a combined total of over 40 million casualties is enough to keep anyone’s bloodthirsty instinct at bay), in the 60s there was the Vietnam war and the most intense cold war stand off ever (Bay of Pigs), and from the eighties onwards, we have: well, video games. The xBox (and read here all its technical predecessors and contemporaries) cuts across class, race, age divide and unite men (yes, men) in an indiscriminate guts and glory campaign. Usage is phenomenal., and all inclusive. If you’re old enough to hold the controller: you’re in. Its the new passage of initiation: four year olds sat next to fourteen year olds next to forty year olds: killing, massacring, rampaging, destroying and eviscerating (apparently the only taboo is raping: there is no button for it. Says Pinker). If its not the xBox its organised sport in a way well, in a way sport hasn’t been organised ever before. Not for nothing do we have the football hooligans and the mandatory Saturday matches. And finally. Film. This is something I’ve been ‘doing’ for the last month and a half: I’ve traversed the chronological gamut of film, and I find that the level of violence in film ‘now’ is phenomenal compared to anything found before the 1960s, with ever escalating etudes since. Its gotten so bad, that at the moment we are in a new era of image making: and I call it gender segregation. The majority of current offerings seem to run across gender biased lines: mindless violent action for the men, where the directors don’t even pretend to be aiming for all round inclusivity, tempered with a backlash for women: just as silly a regression in stereotypical ‘romcom’ where no allowances are made for the non chicklit minded. Cinema is divided, in a way it never was prior to the 1960s onwards. Which serves no one well. But apropos of violence: this is where its all happening. Behind the scenes, where the victims are not ‘real’ people, and the statistics don’t register. Which means, of course, that the problem of violence hasn’t gone away.

 It will resurface in all its glory. Just give it the right time and place.

 2012
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 Richard
 1,131 reviews 1,007 followers
 February 10, 2017
 Steven Pinker certain ranges widely in intellectual circles. Although he is nominally a professor of psychology at Harvard, but even with specialties (per Wikipedia) in experimental psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, he somehow dove into history to present one of the best TED Talks, back in 2007: Steven Pinker on the myth of violence (watch those nineteen minutes, if you haven't already).

 Wonderfully, he has now followed that presentation up with an entire volume.

 Peter Singer wrote the glowing review of this book for the New York Times, and that somewhat lengthy essay is itself well worth reading: Is Violence History? .

 Update — the Autumn 2011 issue of the excellent pop sociology quarterly The Wilson Quarterly also enthusiastically recommends the book (with minor caveats) in Peace on Earth .

 Update — Just got this from the library; must read within three weeks since the number of holds will prevent me from renewing. Curiously, the podcast I was listening to on the way to the library was on a related topic. The U.C. Berkeley School of Law professor (and socioologist) Franklin Zimring wrote an article back in August on the precipitous decline in crime in New York City, and was interviewed by the charming SciAm editor Steve Mirsky, The City That Became Safe: What New York Teaches about Urban Crime and Its Control . Check it out!

 Update — just stumbled on a brief Q&A with the Economist here . Poked around and found a review, also covering A History of Violence: From the End of the Middle Ages to the Present , titled Punchline ; and a summation by the Economist blogger Buttonwood at A Cause for Celebration .

 Yet another update — since I bought the book, I'm hoping to read it again after I finish a few others. Meanwhile, I've found a few other reviews and interviews.

 The philosopher Nigel Warburton interviews Steven Pinker on the Social Science Bites podcast. A transcript of the interview is here , along with a downloadable PDF or audio MP3.

 Pinker was interviewed on the Charlie Rose Show .

 A review of the book on the GuardianUK Observer column by John Naughton, Steven Pinker: fighting talk from the prophet of peace .

 An audio interview from the GuardianUK's Science Weekly podcast.

 A text interview with author Sam Harris (who is Pinker's friend and wrote the introduction to Pinker's book), Twilight of Violence .

 A vigorously negative review (albeit simplistic and misguided, in my quick, and as-yet contingent appraisal) by the philosopher John Gray in Prospect Magazine, Delusions of peace .

 Finally, the book's Wikipedia page has additional citations in the praise and criticism sections.
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 Scott
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 September 10, 2017
 Are you afraid of being of being attacked or murdered? Do you think our society is becoming more violent and less safe? If you watch the news, read the papers and listen to politicians it would be logical to be afraid of the seemingly rising tide of violence and criminality in the world. However, Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature will show you your feelings are misguided- crime and violence in society is lower than it has ever been, and our often idealized past (even the recent past) was a very violent and scary place.

 Before you read this book (and you should read it) be aware that it is Looooong. Weighing in at 832 pages The Better Angels of our Nature is no reading Everest, no Tolstoy, but each of those pages is a heavy bit of paper, drowning in a kudzu of fascinating facts and info that has spread to near every sentence. It was a long march to the final page, but trust me, it was worth it.

 This is a fascinating and constantly surprising read. Pinker presents the perfect antidote for the doom, gloom and bolt-your-doors crime hysteria present in the media. I already knew that we live in a comparatively safe era of history- the lack of recent Viking raids on my apartment block is noticeable - but Pinker makes it clear that this is by far the safest period of human history that there has ever been. Present-day developed nations make even the 1970s and 80s look like a time when to step outside was to enter a gritty urban version of the hunger games, complete with roving packs of armed rapists (the sexual violence stats for those decades are genuinely horrifying).

 The United States, sadly, is still more violent than Europe or Australasia, but even with all the shootings and killings of recent years the cold hard statistics show that Americans are still safer than ever. This completely flips the established narrative in politics and the media, and the hard data shows that suicide is a greater threat than murder, or even from war and natural disasters combined. The average person in twenty-first century society is more likely to die by their own hand than they are by the hands of others.

 The reality of contemporary crime and violence is completely contrary to the apocalyptic vision presented by fearmongering politicians and news outlets and The Better Angels of our Nature , or at least a summary of Pinker’s findings, should be compulsory reading for anyone standing for public office. Pinker's book stands as an engaging testament to how much progress we have made in making our broader human society far less violent.
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 Daniel Clausen
 Author 9 books 455 followers
 November 2, 2017
 Steven Pinker’s "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined" is a big ambitious book. Perhaps too big, perhaps too ambitious. And perhaps, too sprawling for its own good. One could opt for a Peace Studies reader and get a more eclectic taste of what research is out there. Would it be as comprehensive as this book? Maybe, maybe not, but you would get the benefit of tasting the many kinds of literature through many different voices.

 Here, we get a great deal of peace science, behavioral science, religious literature and more, all sifted through one scientific (and often brilliant) voice. Much research is included in this volume, and the many references often drown out the voice, but the voice is also in control of how we receive the literature.

 So, what is the book -- polemical argument, scientific memoir, or reference volume? I doubt it knows the answer.

 The point of the book is simple: to outline how violence has decreased, and to answer why so that we may learn from our successes and continue to replicate them.

 The book might strike some as counter-intuitive -- in the time of Rwanda, Darfur, Iraq, mass-casualty terrorism, runaway gun violence in the US, and much, much more, it would seem like our times are just "another bloody century". Surely, if we subtract the effects of nuclear weapons in deterring warfare between major powers, and on top of that, if we discount the way modern battlefield medicine has led to a decrease in fatalities from warfare (many are still wounded and crippled), then our century can't be that much more peaceful than others. And there is also the other issue, the possible historical contingency of our own "long peace" (much like the long relative peacefulness between the Napoleonic wars and the first World War). One really bloody hegemonic war between nuclear powers might be all that's needed to eliminate our current gains.

 And yet there is a surprising body of evidence that suggests that violence has decreased that spans across multiple disciplines. Pinker makes the case that this trend is deep, enduring, and possibly sustainable. Ancient and medieval societies took genocide, rape, mutilation and other types of violence as given. All of these forms of violence were permissible as long as customs and traditions were adhered to.

 For me, the most interesting aspects of the book are the tracking of the rights movements and the civilizing processes. These are truly fascinating aspects of the evolving peace that I was not fully aware of. I think for many of the scholars coming to this book with some background in peace studies or studies of violence, they will have a similar reaction to mine. I know that...and I know that...and I know that...but ah!, I didn't know that!

 This speaks to the benefit of having such a comprehensive volume. Peace researchers who are aware of one of type of literature might be bored by some chapters of the book, and yet, find themselves enthralled by others.

 Overall, a fantastic read and one that I would readily recommend to others.
 books-of-2017 international-relations-classics
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 Max
 337 reviews 288 followers
 January 12, 2018
 Pinker goes into voluminous detail to show us that violence has steadily declined in human society since prehistoric times. In this well-structured work rich with statistics, charts, and the ideas of influential scholars he identifies six prevailing trends: The Pacification Process, the Civilizing Process, the Humanitarian Revolution, the Long Peace, the New Peace, and the Rights Revolutions. Turning from history to psychology he identifies five inner demons that lead us to violence: Predation, dominance, revenge, sadism, and ideology. Then he identifies four better angels: Empathy, self-control, morality and reason. He gives us a brief review of violence in human history before explaining each trend and the underlying psychology. Below is my recap.

 The first trend, the Pacification Process , explains the decline of violent deaths as a percentage of the population from the time of prehistoric tribes to today’s modern nation states. Incessant feuding and raiding between tribes gave way to organized societies that enforced laws and weighed more carefully the consequences of war. The decline has been steady but not smooth with large conflicts and exterminations causing big blips in the trend line but not breaking it.

 The second trend, the Civilizing Process , explains how people acquired manners and standards of behavior that were less prone to violence. Pinker attributes much of both processes to Hobbes Leviathan, the state. From 5000 fiefdoms in 15th century Europe came 30 nations in 20th century Europe. As these states grew in size, so did strong central authority. Laws, rules and norms on behavior were imposed to ensure loyalty and stability decreasing internal violence. Increased commerce created interdependence between states also engendering stability and reducing the benefits of interstate conflict. The degree of violence in a country or even a region in the US is best explained by acceptance of the rule of law. The rule of law is not accepted where governments are weak or by people in remote regions or by people who feel discriminated against. In these situations street law replaces government laws, honor systems prevail and personal disputes are much more likely to end in violence.

 The third trend, the Humanitarian Revolution , developed from the Enlightenment which began in the seventeenth century led by philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. The Humanitarian Revolution challenged sadism, despotism and cruel punishments for people and animals. The invention of the printing press had resulted in an explosion of books and rapid increase in literacy. Reading, particularly popular novels which induced vicarious emotion, led to shared ideas, values and perspective crossing traditional community lines. People from different backgrounds congregating in cities and increased international trade contributed to the Humanitarian Revolution as did the Civilizing Process. Prior to the Humanitarian Revolution the world was brutish and cruel. Pinker goes into great detail about many popular tortures that were widely enjoyed such as burning witches and dangling cats over fires for evening fun. Communities even purchased prisoners from other jurisdictions so they could hold executions for public entertainment. Reading this section is like reading about a completely different world. Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror provides good background.

 The fourth trend Pinker calls the Long Peace . He is referring to the relatively peaceful period since WWII. He also points to the long period of relative European peace between the Napoleonic Wars and WWI. Pinker goes back further amassing a plethora of statistical measures to posit that the trend of the world since at least the fifteenth century is towards fewer wars and fewer war deaths as a percentage of world population. This holds true even considering the huge casualties of WWI and WWII and other deadly calamities. Pinker believes nationalism and territorial conquest are on the decline as Enlightenment values such as human rights take hold. The humanitarian influence is strongly reinforced by the now readily available real-time graphic pictures of war. He sees hope in the number of countries that have stopped conscription and the slower than expected rate of nuclear proliferation. He goes back 200 years to Kant who pointed out three forces that promoted peace – democracy, international trade, and international organizations. All three have experienced recent dramatic growth supporting Pinker’s trends of pacification, civilizing, and humanitarianism to support peace.

 The fifth trend is the New Peace . This encompasses the period following the end of the Cold War in 1989 up to the time Pinker wrote the book, published in 2011. Pinker analyses different types of wars (interstate, non-state, and civil), mass exterminations (racial and political) and terrorism to show the world has continued to become more peaceful. He points out how our perceptions have changed. Compare the 5,000 Americans and 100,000 Iraqis that have died during this period in Middle Eastern conflicts to the 58,000 Americans and 1,000,000 or more Vietnamese who died in that conflict. What shocks today would have seemed far less significant just decades prior. Once, even genocide didn’t raise the eyebrows of those not affected. Pinker discusses modern exterminations including the Armenian genocide, Soviet collectivization, the Holocaust, Chinese land reform, and Rwandan genocide. Political instability, ethnic divisions and ideology all play roles leading to authoritarianism and genocide. Terrorism has always afflicted the world. But reliable statistics are available only going back to the 1970’s. Western Europe has seen a steady decline of terrorism as has the US with major exceptions: 9-11 in 2001 and to a lesser extent the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Pinker points out with the exception of 2001 and 1995 “more Americans were killed each year from lightening, deer, peanut allergies, bee stings, and ‘ignition or melting nightwear’ than by terrorist attacks.” So the recent trend, despite all the histrionics, is toward less violence, but it only takes one megalomaniac with nuclear weapons to undo all the trend lines.

 The sixth trend Pinker calls the Rights Revolutions , which were primarily due to the increase in access to information exposing people to new ideas and different viewpoints. Contributing are democracies which promote access and prosperity which allows people to focus beyond necessity. Pinker describes five Rights Revolutions:
 Civil Rights : From the lynchings of the American South to the pogroms of Russia, racial and religious violence has persisted throughout history. In America only since Truman integrated the armed forces in 1948 and Johnson signed the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 did change begin to take hold. Today most Americans accept diversity and respect differences.
 Woman’s Rights : Rape and wife beating have been endemic in every society. Women were regarded as property. Rape was considered a crime against the husband or father. Not until the late middle ages did Western views begin to change and so.me cultures still haven’t. It wasn’t until the 1970’s that states in the U.S. began to pass laws against husbands raping their wives. As late as the 1970’s women were denied credit unless their husbands signed. A 1974 law made that illegal. Change has been dramatic in the last fifty years with the “me too” movement the latest iteration of progress.
 Children’s Rights : Until recently 10-15% of all children were killed shortly after birth. Infanticide has been regularly practiced by all types of societies. Mothers did it to ensure the survival of other children. Men did it because they did not believe the child was theirs. Both men and women did it because the child was a girl. For children that survived, beating or at least spanking them was considered good parenting until the last half of the twentieth century. Today the danger may be that parents are obsessively controlling their children’s lives and taking “safety” precautions that are counterproductive. Children should be allowed to learn how to play without adults around. Parental influence has its limits. Children take on the values and vernacular of their peers.
 Gay Rights : As late as 1969 homosexuality was illegal in every U.S state except Illinois. That gay and lesbian marriage is now legal and widely accepted in the U.S. is to me the most unanticipated of all the gains in human rights in my lifetime.
 Animal Rights : Abuse of animals like abuse of humans has a long history and only in the last decades has the issue come to the forefront. Rising concern over the humane treatment of pets, farm animals, and laboratory animals has spawned action groups and regulations to protect animals. Cock fighting and dog fighting are outlawed many places and even bullfighting is on the decline. This is a far cry from primitive, ancient and medieval societies where torturing animals for fun was widely practiced.

 Next Pinker describes the psychology that predisposes us to violence. He describes the Moralization Gap, self-serving biases used to justify our actions and feelings. This gap enables perpetrators and victims to create widely different narratives of the same event. He even digs into brain structure to explain how violent and anti-social impulses are generated and to further discredit the concept of pure evil. The ingredients for evil lurk inside all of us. One is reminded of Solzhenitsyn’s observations that, “…the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” and “To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good...” Pinker identifies what he terms the five demons that drive violent behavior:
 Predation is exploitive, practical violence done for personal gain.
 Dominance is characterized by actions that tell others - Don’t mess with me, I’m in charge. Narcissistic (grandiose, needs admiration, lacks empathy) political leaders are particularly violence prone. Thwarted narcissists feel humiliated leading to envy and rage. Virulent nationalism and tribalism can form in the presence of group narcissism.
 Revenge is a common urge and major cause of violence. Empathy, dependence and close connections can modulate revenge.
 Sadism , inflicting pain for pleasure, is hard for most of us to understand. It can grow out of predation and punishment. It is largely an acquired taste. People in control of others can slide into sadism.
 Ideology justifies violence as a means to an end for the greater good. People in tightly knit groups feed off each other making violence seem reasonable. When the group is dominant others behave like sheep and pretend to believe. Euphemisms, gradualism, diffusing responsibility, distancing from and denigrating victims are common techniques that lead to moral disengagement.

 Lastly Pinker reviews four “Better Angels”, those traits that mitigate violence:
 Empathy , often used in the sense of sympathy or compassion, has several meanings. One is perspective taking which refers to seeing things from someone else’s point of view. Another is theory of mind, trying to figure out someone else’s thoughts and emotions. Empathy is typically applied disproportionately to individuals in the same community, or who share our values, or are cute. Thus empathy does not embody fairness. Expanding our perception of interconnectedness with others can expand our circle of empathy and altruistic behavior.
 Self-Control often means delaying gratification. It’s fair to discount future benefits but many of us discount them far too much. Individual self-control is rooted in brain structure and function including the workings of hormones and neurotransmitters. But it can be cultivated. The Civilizing Process by setting behavioral norms has helped us make substantial improvements over the centuries.
 Recent Biological Evolution (not a better angel) has been proposed based on varying demographics in birth and death rates, but there is not adequate proof for this. The Humanitarian Revolution, The Rights Revolution and significant recent declines in crime have happened too rapidly for biological evolution to be a factor.
 Morality and Taboo have shifted. Pinker reviews several models. The shift has been from morals based on purity, community and authority which appeal to social conservatives to those based on fairness, individual autonomy and rationality which are values embraced by social liberals. The shift is reflected in recent changes in minority, women’s and gay rights.
 Reason despite newsworthy examples to the contrary is on the rise. It reduces violence by identifying the absurd, promoting self-control and even morality. It introduces the concept of proportionality which is essential to fairness. For whatever purpose reason originally developed, its continued expansion to other areas is only natural. IQ test do show people are getting smarter, at least in the area of abstract reasoning, a skill that is developed as educational levels, science, technology and a symbol rich environment have increased. This does not mean underlying general intelligence has increased only the way it is applied has changed. The development of abstract reasoning promotes cooperation, liberalism, economic literacy and democracy; all of which help reduce violence.

 To put this all together Pinker looks, “for common threads in the Pacification Process, the Civilizing Process, the Humanitarian Revolution, The Long Peace, the New Peace and the Rights Revolutions. Each should represent a way in which predation, dominance, revenge, sadism, or ideology has been overpowered by self-control, empathy, morality, or reason.” He identifies forces that turned out not to be important to the six trends: Weaponry and disarmament, resources and power, affluence, and religion and ones that did matter: The Leviathan, gentle commerce, feminization, the expanding circle of sympathy and the escalator of reason. It is popular to opine nostalgically on the good old days and extol the simpler more natural life of past centuries and eons, but as Pinker points out those past times for most people were harsh, bitter and much more violent.

 Pinker makes a convincing and well documented case that we have gone from a society where violence is the accepted and expected norm to one where violence has diminished to the point that we look on it as an aberration. He takes pains to not predict the future even though the many statistical trend lines Pinker presents imply that we might expect more of the same in the future. I’m not swayed by statistical implications for the future but his analysis of the forces at play give me hope. Pinker’s thesis is not uncontroversial. However, despite its detractors, it has won many awards and significant endorsements. But even if you don’t buy in to Pinker’s conclusions, there is much food for thought. This book is for readers with a serious interest. It is well written and clear but there is a lot to digest and I think most readers will be best served by patience and allotting the time necessary to take it all in. It is, as widely claimed, a very important book that can change the way you look at the world and the human animal that is dictating its future.
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 Lois Bujold
 Author 154 books 37.5k followers
 June 27, 2013
 After a steady recent diet of short-attention-span theater internet surfing, it was very interesting to dive into a dense read that took me a week to chew through. (I am not a very fast reader, but I'm usually faster than that.) The exercise of following a really long, complex, sustained argument was probably good for me.

 Seven chapters of convincing examination of historical evidence to the best approximation that could be managed, all of which jibes well with what I know or have experienced of history, followed by three chapters of attempts to figure out the why of the what. Pinker was pretty good about fencing off his facts from his hypotheses with suitable disclaimers. Several times he more-or-less interrupts his narrative to give the reader tutorials on basic statistics, in a desperate bid to bring his audience up to speed so that they can understand his data and how he massages it to get it to yield up more understanding. I was very interested in the brief survey of recent formulations in neurology and cognitive psychology that he used to underpin his arguments.

 I was also reminded of a classic little book from the 50s, How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff, which should really be required reading for every voter and consumer. (It has been reprinted in paperback and is now available on Kindle, I'm pleased to note.) Pinker, I think, is trying very hard to tell the truth with statistics; that little book would help ground one's evaluation either way.

 I was charmed by how many of my own humanist beliefs about history and human nature were supported variously, not to mention how many of the jokes and cultural references I got, but naturally, I would be; Pinker and I are of the same generation and share a certain amount of world-view, after all. I am pretty fond of the modernity that cocoons me and has repeatedly saved my life, and he does not underrate it, either. Not everything worked for me in his arguments, but enough did for going on with. He footnotes the hell out of everything, which I appreciate. Along the way he dropped recs for what sounds like a lot of potentially interesting further reading, should I find energy for it. (31 pages in very small print of sources one could go check up, ditto.)

 Highly recommended.
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 Blaine Snow
 137 reviews 84 followers
 July 8, 2016
 This book is sure to anger or confuse just about everyone who cares about the world today, but particularly those who love to hate the idea of cultural progress: "What? You gotta be kidding - violence has declined over time? No frikin' way - just look at the news." But be assured - after you read only a few pages of this book, you'll be reminded of what life used be like in the foreign country called The Past and you just might change your tune and recognize how, for large sectors of the world's population, life today is less violent, less brutal, and less cruel.

 Pinker's basic thesis is that, no matter how you look at the data, no matter what time frame, no matter what part of the world or what era, and no matter what form it takes, violence, cruelty, and brutality in human society has declined over time. With over 700 pages of detailed charts, data, and references to other such studies (such as the books "Homicide" by Daly/Wilson and Keeley's "War Before Civilization"), Pinker demonstrates the astonishing fact that, despite the continued violence everywhere in the world today, much of today's world lives in a time of relative peace and safety unknown to past generations. It's not an argument that violence has been eliminated but that there is a pacification and civilizing process at work in history in which violence in its many forms has been decreasing over time. It is especially an argument for the success of secularism, modernity, liberalism, the democratic state, and societies based in law and order, an argument many just don't want to hear. Many of my friends simply refuse to read it because they're unwilling to challenge their adherence to some version of the narrative that "the world is going down the toilet" and that some version of modern western culture is the reason why. They may be right in some sense but they're not in terms of what Pinker is talking about.

 When you are able (willing?) to separate out just how Pinker is framing "violence" from your overall view of violence in today's world, his argument becomes crystal clear. He is quite aware that there still exists cruelty, slavery, and horrific brutality in today's world but, like the difference between the institutionalized, culturally-sanctioned slavery of the past and the clandestine forms of human trafficking of today (not to mention the sheer numbers difference), there really has been progress here as there has in so many other areas.

 Pinker's book deals mostly with human-on-human violence and to a lesser extent, human-on-animal violence. While the evidence he presents points to an ongoing decline in the former, it could be argued that human>animal and human>natural world violence has actually increased as human populations increased. The question for Pinker is: have certain privileged parts of the world's population gained a relatively violence-free society at the expense of the continued violation-destruction of nature, of plant and animal species?

 Edited: Jan2016
 all-time-favorites history-cultural social-science-theory
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 Barnaby Thieme
 497 reviews 225 followers
 May 13, 2021
 I was recently listening to a BBC interview with two historians on the An Lushan rebellion, and the interviewer read a passage from Pinker's book in which he argued that this Chinese civil war was important evidence for his thesis that human violence used to exist on a scale we would now find hard to believe. When the interviewer read some of Pinker's death statistics about the rebellion, both of them spontaneously burst into laughter and one of them asked "What on earth is his evidence for that?"

 What, indeed? Pinker relies throughout this book overwhelmingly on the death statistics for major historical events compiled by a librarian and published to his personal website in his spare time. Pinker explains that he finds the hobby website impressive, and argues that as a librarian, he can utilize source material better than most academics, i.e., than trained historians. If you think I'm joking, look for yourself .

 No, I'm afraid this book is the joke, and it makes a joke of its credulous audience, making specious, anti-empirical, and fatuous arguments fueled by intellectual narcissism.

 What if the situation were reversed? That is, what if a history professor wrote an eclectic book on cognitive linguistics that was fundamentally at odds with the consensus of trained experts in the discipline, and that relied largely for support on a single source, which was itself entirely the work of an amateur?

 I think such a book would quite likely be universally regarded as a laughingstock. However, we live in a generation in which the increasing consensus among intelligentsia holds that scientists hold the answers to questions that used to be addressed by the humanities, and so Pinker's book is not only accepted as plausible, but widely lauded and championed, including by people who should know better, like Bill Gates. Indeed, many of its chief boosters seem to be techno-utopians already deeply committed to the notion that gains in technology are a rising tide that lifts all boats. This is a work that flatters its secular humanist audience by suggesting we have learned our lesson and, by and large, moved past our brutish origins, carried on the wings of science, progress, and bourgeois values.

 Apparently scientific progress doesn't include historiography, which anyone is qualified to do.
 hated history
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 Owlseyes
 1,634 reviews 257 followers
 May 25, 2022
 "War is peace"
 in: NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR, by George Orwell


 Magic Mirror, do tell me, which one is Rosier Pinker??

 I still don’t figure it out, in what planet psychologist Pinker lives on. I have watched him many times insisting on “things are getting better”. Due to his studies on violence, he sees there is less violence amongst humans. He adds to this optimistic picture: “we’re getting more humane”.







 One thing is reported, numerical cases of violence, in wars, in crime etc. Another different thing, is the human nature. Despite his studies going back in thousands of years, he just doesn’t report on the POTENTIAL for violence; I mean, atomic weapons still exist today (in big numbers, and in several nations), as well as chemical and biological ones. Should an atomic war conflagrate (say, in the Korean peninsula) (God forbid!), The Day After the next day the book of Pinker would be just obsolete. Yes, you cannot cope with (the idea of) the numbers killed. Pinker, the one who had affirmed “nuclear weapons are useless”, would be instantly refuted. For good.



 Deep down in the human nature, violence does exist. Let’s not put some sort of pink rosy camouflage, in the human nature. I've been thinking about Africa in this and the past century; Mao's China and Russia under Stalin, and other examples, which should make Pinker think thrice, at least,... about demons.

 I would like Pinker to comment on the Mandalay Bay hotel shooting, in Las Vegas, the past October. And on similar cases.



 (decline? what decline??)

 UPDATE

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCm9N...
 Here Pinker is good with numbers; yet, he didn't include mass shootings in the US. How many since the Mandalay Hotel have occurred up to the present moment??

 UPDATE (for 2018 and 2019, for Pinker to check it out)

 https://www.motherjones.com/politics/...


 UPDATE

 "It's Insane We're Having A 'Debate' Over Whether It's Acceptable To Assault A Journalist" (1st of July 2019) Pinker wrote on Twitter, regarding what happened in Portland. Yes, by Antifa people. Pinker is slowly waking up apropos VIOLENCE.

 UPDATE

 This is an important interview because Pinker goes nuclear. 😛

 https://www.forbes.com/sites/rainerzi...


 UPDATE

 How much of a "humanist"?

 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/aut...

 https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nyti...

 UPDATE

 ( This is for Pinkerites)

 https://www.theguardian.com/science/2...

 UPDATE

 Besides the war in Ukraine (it's been 3 months!), much sadly, I would like to add the Texas shooting.
 https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05...

 ---
 "For when they might say, "Peace and security," then suddenly destruction comes upon them, as the labor pains to her having in womb; and they shall not escape."
 in: 1 Thessalonians 5:3
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 Amirography
 198 reviews 123 followers
 May 15, 2017
 Mind-blowing book! I have never read a book about history and statistics that was this interesting. I love how Steven Pinker argues with countless studies and a great logical validity.
 This book is a must-read book for anyone interested in sociology, history, politics and environment. This book breaks the long romanticized picture of the past which has been filled with nostalgia and confirmation biases.
 cognitive-science next philosophy
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 Mehrsa
 2,234 reviews 3,663 followers
 January 15, 2023
 there are some missing connections and it's an ethnocentric view of violence. Like did enlightenment ideas also diminish violence in the East?
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 Fiona
 319 reviews 344 followers
 January 2, 2016
 Did this really take two and a half years to read? I see that it did. I picked it up after a new-ish boyfriend press-ganged me into seeing Pinker talking about his new book - this one - in Edinburgh, and thinking that it sounded fascinating and potentially relevant to a PhD I was considering doing. Well, the PhD idea is discarded, and as for the boyfriend, I swapped Pinker for Susanna Clarke and moved in with him. He finished my book first.

 The premise of The Better Angels of Our Nature is that the world is getting less violent. I read about the first half fairly slowly, as it marched through prehistory and the Middle Ages, with graph upon graph and source upon source - I mean, that's pretty uncontentious, isn't it? That there are far fewer beheadings and settlement-on-settlement raids and Hundred Year Wars as we get through history past the Enlightenment. Knowing next to nothing of east Asian history, I was interested to read about things like the An Lushan Rebellion and a brief history of belligerent Mongols. There are parts on international armed conflict, on genocide, on civil war. I spent a year studying humanitarian law. It felt like a lot of the coursework from that year, albeit a bit rearranged. So far so good, Mr. Pinker; I accept where you're going with this.

 I put the book down, for a very long time. Then in November 2015 two things happened in quick succession: the Paris bombings, followed quickly by the vote in the UK Parliament to bomb Syria. I'm in Scotland, and a more dyed-in-the-wool pacifist you'll not find. So I picked this back up, to keep reading the sections about armed conflict in the twentieth century, because I wanted to be reminded (convinced?) that the world is broadly heading in the right direction.

 I mean, it is. It is; but we're not anywhere near out of the woods yet. And we probably won't be in my lifetime. But maybe we will. Pinker's point is not that violence has gone away. He makes few predictions. (Five years down the line, his predictions on conflict in the Middle East have proved too optimistic. But hold that thought a moment longer.) He plots a direction, and the direction is more peaceful. It seems to involve more things being classed as atrocities and abuses - but that's because we're rightly outraged these days by things that nobody would have cared about fifty or a hundred or three hundred years ago.

 Finally he talks neuroscience and psychology. Do your thing, Steven; that's more your area than mine, so I'll take your word for it.

 Let's come back to the optimism of Mr. Pinker. Because he is very optimistic! Let's get the biggie out of the way first, shall we?:
 In early 2011, as this book was going to press, a swelling protest movement deposed the leaders of Tunisia and Egypt and was threatening the regimes in Jordan, Bahrain, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. The outcome is unpredictable, but the protesters have been almost entirely non-violent and non-Islamist, and are animated by a desire for democracy, good governance, and economic vitality rather than global jihad, the restoration of the caliphate, or death to infidels. Even with all these winds of change, it is conceivable that an Islamist tyrant or radical revolutionary group could drag an unwilling populace into a cataclysmic war. But it seems more probable that "the coming war with Islam" will never come. Islamic nations are unlikely to unite and challenge the West: they are too diverse, and they have no civilization-wide animus against us. (p443)

 ...Oops. Well, he did hedge his bets, I suppose.

 Where he didn't hedge his bets, and where he consequently rather lost me a bit, was when he focused on the US a bit more specifically. When I mentioned to a friend a few weeks ago that I was reading Pinker, she clucked her tongue at me and said, "Oh dear - does he think sexism is over yet?" That's overstating it a bit, but the impression I got was, well, yes - it really is as if he thinks sexism is pretty much winding up, and the civil rights movement put paid to racism and racist violence decades ago. After 500+ pages of meticulous research, it seemed like a glaring oversight to just assume that the various -isms had just upped and finished since 1980. No, it didn't seem like a glaring oversight: the quickly glossed-over suggestion that racism in the US is a relic of days gone by made me think there were things Pinker wasn't telling me. This is a 1100-page book, of which the last 300 pages are entirely citations, and here I am accusing the author of leaving things out. Well, I'm gonna, 'cause I feel like he has. No fifth star for you, Steven.

 And yet I'm still mostly on his side. I'm no John Gray , whose arguments seem to be of the "when you say 'it's got better', I hear 'everything's fine', which it's not" and "I know tribal people and they don't fight each other, therefore science" varieties (and, I might add, get neatly steamrollered by Pinker himself here - I do so love a good academic spat in the Guardian...). Earlier this year, I proofread an essay criticising Pinker (don't ask how I arrived there; terribly unlikely circumstance is how), apparently on the twin bases that how could you possibly know that 15th century middle England executed more people than were executed in 21st century Oxford; and the ever-classic "but NUCLEAR!"

 It plays with an idea that I don't think I'll ever fail to be interested by: it's why I loved The Wake so much last year, and the idea is of a magical past where everyone was nice to each other and had conversations at the dinner table, and none of these horrible new-fangled innovations existed yet to ruin everything. I love this idea! I love what it makes us do, how it makes people react, how intoxicating they (we) find it, how they'll fight so hard to show that it's real - and yet it never was. It's the ultimate bittersweet hope, the most incredible Escher-like illusion, and I just find that the most fascinating thing. There never was an Eden! There never was a perfect 1950s family, or a perfect 1880s family, or however far back you'd like to go! The government never was more competent, and people never had more common sense! The world of your childhood was nowhere near as good as this one, you just weren't looking at the crap bits! The best thing about The Better Angels of Our Nature , or I think, is the same thing that means it's going to wind up people who want to be wound up by it: it's a testament to things getting better, faster. Which if you ask me they absolutely, irrefutably are. Ask yourself this: whenabouts in history would you rather live?

 I mean, I still think he's a bit overoptimistic in places. But at least I'll agree that his views, my views, and the best the world can be are tending to converge. Plus he's a great writer, you know. Stay for the prose, frankly.
 books-i-have-taken-to-dinner i-also-read-nonfiction-occasionally recommended-to-me
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 Marc
 3,023 reviews 1,011 followers
 May 22, 2018
 Anyone who follows me on this site knows that I rarely give high scores to books; I like to make very clear distinctions and to indicate what is just good and what is outstanding. And this book is one of those that belongs to the top category: not because it is a perfect one (see below), but because of the breadth, the depth, the insightful, well-founded, nuanced and yet daring way in which Steven Pinker has tackled the very delicate subject of violence throughout human history.

 It is not feasible to give a thorough presentation of this book. Because it actually is several books together: 1. a global, especially quantitative approach to physical violence in human history in which Pinker establishes that there’s a steady but very clear decline; 2. a tentative explanation of that decline on the macro-level, in which he focuses on the processes of humanization and civilization; and finally 3. a thorough analysis on the microlevel of good and evil in man in general, with particular attention to biological and psychological aspects that promote or reduce violence (our demons and our angels).

 For me, Pinker's presentation is absolutely convincing, both in his observations and in his analysis. It is in line with my inner conviction (which of course is based on personal perception, rational analysis, as well as emotional orientation), but it also fits in with much of what I have read over the past years, especially on history. Pinker is 100% right that we have to get rid of romantic nostalgia and cultural pessimism (“the past was better, now we go from bad to worse”), which is no more than a reactionary reflex, motivated by emotional (especially fear), ideological and religious blindness. For him it is no coincidence that modernity (with its emphasis on rationality) has gone hand in hand with a humanitarian and civilization-revolution that has led, among other things, to a marked reduction in violence worldwide. And that is true, despite the daily flow of negative news coverage on conflicts and injustices that still plague our world.

 Yet, as already indicated, this is not a perfect book. For example, I have some reservations about Pinker's tendency to give great emphasis on evolutionary-biological aspects in his search for explanations; I understand that, because that focus has become a trendsetter in his field of study (social psychology in the broadest sense of the word) and has certainly clarified many things. But the sometimes implicit suggestion of Pinker that these are ultimate clarifications (necessary ànd sufficient) seems rather exaggerated to me. Fortunately, he nuances in other places.

 Second caveat: Pinker regularly warns against statements about future developments, and cites the well-known saying that social scientists better not make any predictions, because they already have so much trouble dealing with the past. Yet Pinker in this book regularly formulates optimistic expectations for the future and that is strange. At the moment, 2018, for example, the world looks slightly different than when he wrote this book (2009-2011) and his unbridled belief in the further advance of liberal humanism and rationalism isn’t that probable any more.

 Third reservation: Pinker continually illustrates his observations with both general statistical material and specific experiments. What is striking is that these studies are mainly Western (in particular American) oriented. Pinker does make attempts to break out geographically and culturally, but still, his evidence is almost entirely Western (American-European). And that involves a great risk of bias. Also his focus on our recent history (after the second world war), an era of globalization and enormous advances in affluence, technology and science, can also cause a bias (although we will only be able to estimate this in a few decades).

 And finally a fourth reservation: especially in the concluding paragraphs, the lyricist in Pinker gets the upper hand and he ventures into a statement of faith in rationalism. Of course, he presents strong arguments that support his theory that the decline of violence in human history ultimately is due to the further advance of reason. But just at that moment he leaves his cautious, nuanced style behind him and his language becomes almost religious (in favor of rationalism); on this instance (after almost 700 pages) he introduces the concept of "modernity", without much clarification, and that’s a bit problematic.

 Pinker has garnered a lot of praise with this book, but also a huge wave of criticism, both on historical details, on the validity of his statistical material, on his psychological-biological approach and on his ode to rationalism and liberal humanism. The critics of this book certainly have a point in some of those cases. But if you look at the 700 pages in their entirety and go through them thoroughly, then you can hardly accuse Pinker of simplism, naivety or deception: he constantly warns about exaggerated expectations; nothing is definitive, and a relapse is always possible, he regularly states. But at the same time his overall conclusion is very outspoken: " while this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, (our) species has also found ways to bring the numbers down, and allow a greater and greater proportion of humanity to live in peace and die of natural causes. For all the tribulations in our lives, for all the troubles that remain in the world, the decline of violence is an accomplishment we can savor, and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible. "(p. 696)

 This book is a tough chunk, which takes a lot of effort to wrestle through, and one certainly has not to agree with everything, but it seems to me that this book deserves its place among the most important ones published in the early 21st century! (4.5 stars)
 evolution globalisation history
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 Joseph D. Walch
 181 reviews 3 followers
 March 22, 2012
 But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.
 --The Federalist, No. 51, James Madison


 This is easily one of the best books of 2011, and I suppose it must already be earmarked as a Pulitzer finalist. It’s about violence, but so much more than that since it strikes at the very core of human nature, the human condition, government, economics, and moral philosophy. Stephen Pinker starts with a simple premise—proving the decline of violence in modern times. This apparently is so controversial to some that he meticulously plots the decline of violence with great historical and statistical detail—this is the descriptive ‘what’ that Dr. Pinker illustrates in the first 2/3rds of the book. The writing is absorbing even if it rings a mildly irreverent tone that betrays a subtle anti-religious bias (especially vis-à-vis politico-religious violence of the Roman Catholic and Old Testament societies—he was a roommate of Harold Bloom after all and is a dedicated humanist) that includes some humorous satire and contemporary references to lighten the mood of such a grim topic. Indeed, his graphic descriptions of torture, rape, suffering and grotesque sadism is enough for even the most macabre minds. Stephen Pinker is a true evolutionary scientist who is adroit in the heuristic of categorization and you can find lists, and lists of lists to aid in understanding the narrative he describes.
 For example, the declining trend of violence is broken down into these historical themes:
 1) The Pacification Process—our evolution from hunter/gatherers into political, agrarian societies.
 2) The Civilizing Process���included the consolidation of feudal economies into larger kingdoms and empires with central authority, trade and economic specialization.
 3) The Humanitarian Revolution—17th and 18th century that marked the that included the Age of Reason and the European Enlightenment
 4) The Long Peace—a result of a Kantian trifecta of 1) Democracy, 2) Trade and 3) International organizations
 5) The New Peace—arising out of a U.S. led post-cold war globalized world
 6) The Rights Revolutions—exhibited a more finely filtered intolerance of violence on smaller scales that included violence against minorities, women, children, and animals.


 Within these historical themes we see five major historical forces that helped snuff out violence:
 1) The Leviathan—this includes a Hobbesian social contract which grants to the state a full monopoly on the use of violence from within
 2) Gentle Commerce—closely connected to #4 this force increases economic incentives for cooperation
 3) Feminization—results in a decline of authoritarian/patriarchal based societies and the empowerment of women as intellectual equals who tend to be more risk-averse and less violent
 4) The Expanding Circle—from a mixture of globalization, commerce, and increased access to information this purportedly increases sympathy and helped usher in the Rights revolution that even extended to animals
 5) The Escalator of Reason—leading to higher levels of intelligence and emotional empathy in conjunction with more sophisticated foundation for managing moralized concerns in favor of the flourishing of all humanity


 The second part of the book is what really interested me and seeks to elaborate the psychological factors that dictate our behavior depending on their interplay with our environment and circumstance. Here the statistical reasoning is a little more squishy and correlational residuals are not quite as well characterized—perhaps leading to creeping confirmational bias. Put aside these minor critiques of this part of the book, the ability to marshal data from such varied fields of study as anthropology, economics (including game theory), social psychology, and cognitive neuroscience into a coherent and powerful explanation of the decline of violence.

 Factors that influence violence are broken down into two categories of human nature: Demons that incite to violence and Angels that slaken the thirst for blood. The demons include the primal urge to dominance, revenge, sadism including the banality of evil, and ideologically driven moralized violence. On the other side of the ledger are qualities such as empathy (or more importantly sympathy, Dr. Pinker distinguishes the two), self-control, our moral sense, and reason. Here, the meat of the book can be found in the chapters on the moral sense. Stephen Pinker adapts from the ethics, moral foundations, and relational models of moral reasoning of other people like Shweder, Haidt, and Fiske. First, to understand the psychology of moral reasoning (as opposed to objective moral truth itself), we are to understand that moralized beliefs are more than just the avoidance of something distasteful, but is a ‘distinctive mode of thinking about an action’. Thus, moralized beliefs are universalized (should apply to everybody), actionable, and punishable. These beliefs spring from relationships since, in Pinker’s view, evolution acted upon the population and there is no such thing as a philosophically independent human being. Moralized norms generally include relationships, a context (at home, in the street, at church, at work, at the beach, etc.), and are centered around a resource (information or knowledge, food, money, land, sex, labor, etc.). These relationships upon which socioeconomic moral reasoning is based are divided into 4 categories:
 1) Communal Sharing—the most basic tribal foundation for moral reasoning emphasizing in-group loyalty, also includes sacred or pure values that are shared within a group and reinforced through rituals and periodic but specific contextual references.
 2) Authority Ranking—e.g., military, paternalistic, totalitarian/fascist, divine right etc.
 3) Equality Matching—gifts, tit-for-tat, first relational moralized norm to recognize individual autonomy, fairness, and reciprocal altruism
 4) Market Pricing/Rational-legal—much more complex relational model of morality that incorporates universal ethical principles, a high level of individual rights, rule-of-law, social contract orientation, and requires a high level of literacy and numeracy along with a grasp of information technology and access to data on price, costs, benefits, risks, alternatives, etc.


 As an explanation of the basis of moralized norms this seems quite well-developed and accurate. As I read through this chapter, the current debate over the allocation of scarce health care resources came to mind as a good illustration of this relational model of moral reasoning. The argument is usually centered on the diametric poles of the relational models between communal sharing of universalized health care to rational-legal/market pricing model. Here again we see that moralized norms require more than facile affirmation of one or the other relational models since the specific contexts and resources are important. Which relational model should be employed in the state of emergency, or when the resource is a human organ in which a dead individual does not benefit, or when the allocation of the resource in the community is considered a sacred good such as the right to life-sustaining medicine.

 Personally, I see a need for a hybrid system that protects sacred values of life, and the protection of the vulnerable (e.g., the elderly and children) with market-pricing and equality matching for preventative or non-emergent care should the patient choose--respecting the autonomy of the patient to make the most rational choice given the risks, costs, benefits, and alternatives. The difficulty with market-based health care, just like the difficulty of running a democracy that this market-based/equality matching system is only functional for the government of a citizenry that is based on the moral foundation of reciprocal altruism and rational-legal system of checks and balances. Like a functioning democracy, a market-based health care system requires high literacy and numeracy rates as well as the dissemination of pricing/cost information (something that the AMA has consistently blocked by restricting access to ICT coding for purposes of pricing across hospitals, specialties and regions). This leads to corruption in which supposed medical principles (e.g., doctors and hospitals who have a fiduciary and moral duty to remain financially disinterested in patient decisions) have the ability to obfuscate their own cost and market prices. With these established cartels, it's not difficult to enrich oneself by choking off a few grains of sand at strategic locations in the billions-dollar health care economy. In this model, there is no difference between the orthopedic surgeon recommending back surgery (that evidence from the Dartmouth ATLAS study shows actually does more harm than good), and the Goldman Sachs executives who traded in collateralized debt obligations, which they 1) controled the price through financial cartels, and 2) were at the same time shorting (had proprietary knowledge that they were bad investments and thus were insuring at low cost against loss of these supposed AAA-rated investments).

 Some favor total universalization of health care based on moral norms, but I simply think this ancient hunter-gatherer communal-based economy is insufficient for the maximization of public good by actually rationing health care resources away from those who by definition need it most (e.g., through price controls and misallocation of scarce resources). Just because other industrialized nations have atavistic central rationing of health care as a vestigial throw-back to the devastation of the post-WWII days when virtually every single resource was rationed (e.g., labor, currency, food, shelter, etc.) is not sufficient rationale for a complex and advance economy like the U.S. to regress to the communal-sharing model of health care delivery.

 Finally, Stephen Pinker is an evolutionary psychologist and a progressive and here his confirmation bias shines through quite strongly in my view. Much has been made of the Flynn effect that made the claim that IQs are actually increasing as people today are evolving on an organic and biological level to be more intelligent than those who came before us just a few decades ago. I and not quite persuaded by the data just yet. Furthermore, there is an assumption that modern western elites who exert social control are currently and likely to continue in the progressive beneficial model; this may be a bit too optimistic. The utility of some form of the Hobbesian social contract for the government monopoly of violence and justice is pretty clearly established by Dr. Pinker, however, caution is warranted in today’s modern age when an fewer and fewer of our ‘best-and-brightest’ sociopolitical/cultural prophets can do increasingly greater damage. This is a view that Pinker seems to acknowledge, but dismiss this line of thinking by citing historical data that the introduction of nuclear weapons or other WMD are uncorrelated residuals in the decline of violence. However historical data do not necessarily determine future relationships between the concentration of greater technical power into the increasingly fewer hands of elite social engineers and the decline of violence.

 With the exception of those minor critiques, however, I am sure this book will contribute greatly to our cultural understanding of the psychology of violence, and by extention, peace. The ideas found here will no doubt be debated everywhere from college bowl sessions up to the halls of congress. This can only be a good thing since the overriding theme of the book is a very well-qualified optimism for the flourishing of humanity.


 Update: 3-22-2012, I increased my review to 5 stars because I have found myself going back to my Kindle version of this book over and over again to review it. It has been a sublime pleasure to breath in the expert wordcraft, and the section on the Demons and Better Angels is like a symphony of well-conducted harmonious truths that come together in very a gratifying way. As a fervent believer, I found it fit very nicely into my worldview even though it is written from the perspective of just as fervent a non-believing skeptic. Such a task is very difficult to do since it takes painstaking effort to extricate one's ego (believer and nonbeliever alike) in the search for more objective reason. I say 'reason' because as Heidegger would say: facts and truth presuppose interpretation.
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 Charles Haywood
 488 reviews 677 followers
 August 10, 2015
 This is a sprawling mess of a book. Flashes of arguably brilliant insight alternate with meandering musings. Fascinating narrow conclusions are drawn from carefully parsed evidence—and then sweeping conclusions are drawn from highly dubious evidence. Historical insights are used incisively in an argument—then the next argument is undermined by total historical illiteracy. At the end, the reader is left uncertain whether he has read 800 pages of genius, 800 pages of authoritative-sounding-but-meaningless fluff, or something in between. But I’ll go with the last one.

 Other reviews available online cover most of the ground from nearly every possible angle, so I’ll confine myself to a few, reasonably fresh, points. There is plenty positive to say about the book, but it’s all been said by others, so I’ll mostly steer away from praise, with the note that the entire book is a mixed bag.

 The only truly fresh point I have is really not substantive, but is interesting and perhaps shows some tendencies in the book. This is that Pinker makes a bizarre claim about table manners. First, Pinker states that historically people were terrified of being stabbed at the dinner table. Maybe. But in any case, to introduce this concept he spends a lot of time talking about how, as a child, he questioned the Western modern “pointless prohibition” in table manners against using one’s knife to move food onto one’s fork. He concludes that such a prohibition is a type of knife taboo preventing spontaneous stabbings at the dinner table. But I have never heard of such an etiquette prohibition. I cannot find any reference to it in any etiquette manual. I cannot find any reference to it on the Internet. In fact, all etiquette references to knife use I can find specifically REQUIRE using a knife to move food onto one’s fork, in lieu of fingers. As far as I can tell, this “rule” is purely a figment of Pinker’s imagination, and maybe an oddity around his house growing up. Why no editor questioned this, I don’t know. It doesn’t really undercut Pinker’s hypothesis in any material way, but it’s just strange, and maybe symptomatic.

 It’s important to note that for Pinker, violence means not only actions like war, homicide and assault, but more generally any cruel action with a physical component. For Pinker, war and torture are on the same continuum (though not the same thing) as corporal punishment of children and men having fistfights over insults. Reductions in both are considered progress, rather than the first group being considered progress and the second group being considered the sissification of a moribund society. In fairness, though, Pinker does have limits to this continuum—he concludes that some “reductions in violence,” like the elimination of dodgeball for children and the grossly inflated fears of child kidnapping, are silly and not progress at all.

 Pinker uses no primary sources and the secondary sources he uses are mostly popularizations, many of dubious accuracy, suggesting that he relies little on fresh research and puts his faith in fresh perspectives. Similarly, most of his analysis is analysis by anecdote. Yes, he does have a fair amount of statistics in the first part of the book. But those statistics are confined to two general groups: improvements in European civilization (largely taken, with full attribution, from Clark’s “A Farewell To Alms”), and the prevalence and damages of war. Other than that, it is anecdotes all the way down. And as Lincoln apocryphally said of Spiritualists, for people who like that sort of thing, it’s just about the sort of thing they’d like. But the result is, as with Spiritualism, much of what Pinker has to say is less proof than belief.

 And to be clear: Pinker’s conclusions are, fundamentally, predicated on his belief system. For Pinker, his belief system has two related pillars: that religion is evil, and that progress is inevitable, as long as we realize that religion is evil. Pinker is a big believer, whether he admits it or not, in the Whig view of history. He views its driver as the removal of religion from human life. In Pinker’s rosy view of the future, everything (at least in European-origin societies) is getting more moral, as people realize that morality has nothing to do with religion, but automatically arises from “the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games.” Of course, Pinker’s desired end state of empathy, minimal violence, and human happiness is exactly that prescribed by Christianity (and not, contrary to myth, by all religions). The Eschaton is nigh, says Pinker!—just without any eschatology. Pinker thinks that we can all ultimately behave like Francis of Assisi but be totally without religion. Maybe. If history is any guide, though, probably not—no atheist society has ever flourished on Earth. But hey—maybe the future will be different!

 There are many possible criticisms of Pinker’s belief system. One threshold criticism is that Pinker’s violent opposition to religion clouds his judgment badly. Pinker is very anti-religious, and not in an educated, thoughtful way, but in the same way the Ku Klux Klan is violently anti-Catholic. A second threshold criticism is that Pinker is entirely focused on Europe, and his core hypothesis, that we’re becoming less violent people, is confined entirely to advanced modern societies that are both European in their culture and Christian in their ethos, whether or not they are Christian in their observance. Pinker adduces little or no evidence, other than post World War II global statistics of wars, that non-European societies are becoming less violent, and he fails to consider alternative hypotheses for the reduced violence of European societies, such as that they are moribund and declining, in the Lotos Eater phase of their existence. (Again, to be fair, Pinker does draw a pretty clear picture of reduction in European intra-societal violence from 1200 or so on, long before anyone could claim European civilization became moribund as it is today.)

 Pinker’s obsession with demonstrating that religion only creates evil leads him into nearly continuous gross historical and logical errors. He repeats the silly canard (fabricated by 19th Century American Protestants to smear Roman Catholics) that Giordano Bruno was executed for believing in heliocentrism, a position accepted today by exactly nobody who knows anything (although repeated by noted flim-flam man Neil deGrasse Tyson in the recent re-make of “Cosmos”). He gullibly buys into the Black Legend hook, line and sinker. He actually cites for the cruelty of Pope Paul IV “the ‘Inquisition’ coffee table book.” He specifically cites, in-line with the text, as his major source for “the human toll . . . . in medieval and early modern Christendom” a book called “The Great Big Book of Horrible Things.” He confuses the First Crusade and the People’s Crusade. He cites the Anabaptists as “pacifist forerunners of today’s Amish and Mennonites,” apparently unaware of their activities in Munster (which would actually have reinforced his hypothesis). He explicitly equates as identical the judicial murder of Thomas More with random, on-the-spot beheadings of entire companies of dancing girls who displeased an Indian potentate. And on and on.

 Pinker says with a straight face “Christian ideology was hostile to any commercial practice or technological innovation that might eke more wealth out of a given stock of physical resources.” His source for this is a quote from popular historian Barbara Tuchman, to the effect that the medieval Church rejected interest and that St. Jerome said “a merchant can seldom or ever please God.” Of course, the cite lends little support to his conclusion, and the conclusion is ludicrous. In reality, the adoption of new commercial practices and technological changes up until the Renaissance was led by or cooperated with by religious entities, in large part to expand the productivity of the vast lands owned by the Church. These advances ranged from corporate, long-time-horizon management of land by monks to a wide variety of technological advances, such as improvements in plowing, threshing and grinding.

 Pinker also ignores that the medieval Church was the primary instrument of opposition to medieval violence. He talks about how the Church celebrated saints who were gruesomely martyred, implying that rather than being used to show heroism, such examples were somehow used to show how violence against others was good. He ignores the pacifism of the Church (complete until about 1000 A.D., incomplete thereafter, when feudalistic concepts infiltrated, leading in part to the Crusades). He ignores the Peace of God. And so forth. For Pinker, religion is an unmitigated bad, and when it is gone, we will all be happy and free. And he tailors his facts and analysis to fit his conclusion.

 On the other hand, even with its lacks, the book has many good points. It’s refreshing in its lack of ideology (apart from the ideology of atheism). Pinker does not shrink for ideological reasons from addressing unpleasant points. For example, when he talks about the decline in infanticide, he directly addresses whether it is correct to say infanticide has dropped at the same time that abortion has increased by at least the same amount, since abortion logically is indistinguishable from infanticide. (He concludes, in essence, that people don’t feel that abortion is infanticide, and anyway abortion rates have recently dropped too, which he interprets as reinforcing his hypothesis.) Most writers would have simply said that abortion is not the same thing as infanticide and moved on, afraid of being denounced by their liberal friends and no longer being invited to the right dinner parties.

 At the same time, Pinker does manage to pretty frequently fall into occasional silly left-wing tropes. For example, when talking about the demonization of political opponents, he talks about the “victims of Communist atrocities”—but then feels obliged to add also “the victims of their opposite number, the right wing-dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Indonesia and El Salvador.” Equating 100 million people exterminated as part of a deliberate ideological program of Communism with maybe 100,000 killed in civil wars is silly, but pretty much par for the course among leftist types. But, to be fair, given his general ability to resist being politically correct, it’s hard to fault Pinker’s occasional lapses in this area.

 Finally, and oddly, most of the bad reviews on Amazon of Pinker’s book are not objecting to his anti-religious bigotry. Instead, they object to an underlying premise of his thesis—that prior to recorded history, violence was extreme and endemic. I had thought that this was unexceptional—all primitive societies were horrifically brutal and had stratospherically high rates of battle death. This has been common knowledge since Lawrence Keeley, using detailed anthropological data, exploded the myth of the Noble Savage. But apparently there are a large number of, or at least a small number of loud dead enders in this area, who maintain that pre-historical peoples were gentle, meek and mild, gathering nuts and berries hand-in-hand while singing paeans against sexism and racism, in contrast to eeeeevil modern societies. It’s really not worth even considering such silliness, but it’s interesting that fantasists of this sort exist and are willing to attach their names to their fantasies.

 Anyway—this book may be worth reading if you have a ton of extra time, or if you’re particularly interested in the topic. It has certain parallels to studies of the Great Divergence, and once you realize that what Pinker really means is that Europeans have reduced violence over time, leading to improved societies relative to the rest of the world’s societies, it has even more parallels. But unless you’re interested in reading this bookstop for some specialized reason, you’re probably better off spending your time doing something else.
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 Sense of History
 356 reviews 389 followers
 August 8, 2020
 A lot of ink has already been spilled on the question of whether Pinker's claim that the violence of man has diminished enormously in the past centuries and especially in the past decades, is inaccurate or not; in other words whether the quantitative (statistical) support of this claim is correct. I am not able to judge the statistical aspect, but I am quite convinced by the material that he has put together, also in graphs (which he obviously always borrowed from others). What strengthens me in this conviction is that Pinker is very careful with that material, always indicating how reliable or unreliable the statistics are, sometimes warning for less strong numbers or for the interpretation given to the data. But it is absolutely impressive how Pinker substantiates and defends his theses, and also supplements them with narrative material (strong stories, which of course have a more subjective side, but make things more concrete; but also classic, narrative studies). The latter I find a commendable approach, to back up the statistical analyzes; it is a kind of methodological reality check, to see if the conclusions based on the numbers do reflect reality. Of course, this is not obvious, because the stock of narratives in theory is inexhaustible, but if this is done in a balanced and nuanced manner, then it is definitely an advantage, and that is certainly the case with Pinker.

 Here’s a quote that describes his central claim and at the same time indicates how cautious Pinker actually remains: : “ The numbers tell us that war, genocide, and terrorism have declined over the past two decades – not to zero, but by a lot. A mental model in which the world has a constant allotment of violence, so that every cease-fire is reincarnated somewhere else as a new war, and every interlude of peace is just a time-out in which martial tensions build up and seek release, is factually mistaken. Millions of people are alive today because of the civil wars and genocides that did not take place but that would have taken place if the world had remained as it was in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The conditions that favored this happy outcome – democracy, prosperity, decent government, peacekeeping, open economies, and the decline of antihuman ideologies— are not, of course, guaranteed to last forever. But nor are they likely to vanish overnight. ”

 Especially the final chapters, with an elaborate psychological analysis of man regarding good and evil, and in particular violence, sketches an anthropological image (not always very flattering) of man that offers a special added value to anyone who focuses on history, and especially the reasons of human behavior. Pinker dives quite deeply into the current state of science, and it requires some perseverence to follow the accumulation of hypotheses and experiments. But it is worthwhile as a historian to wrestle through this because it gives a fairly comprehensive picture of human existence that makes human action much easier to understand.

 Of course, Pinker places himself very clearly in a context of progress, based on the use of reason. You may have reservations about that, but I always find it a plus when an author puts his arguments on the table, open for scrutiny. And Pinker does so! Absolutely recommended reading.
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 Andy
 1,320 reviews 456 followers
 August 26, 2019
 "The Better Angels of our Nature" is an impressive intellectual feat, and the snarky tone was entertaining, but it was a bit like reading the phone book (800 pages of lists within lists). Despite the size of Pinker's tome, the nitty-gritty of peace-making is given short shrift, even though I think this is the most important issue.

 I don't care too much about the decline in violence over many centuries. I already don't want to live in the Middle Ages, and I couldn't if I wanted to. What matters for all of us living today is whether the current "long peace" is sustainable, and on this Pinker disappoints.

 The answer to this question requires a thorough analysis of why it is currently so unimaginable that, for example, Germany would attack France, as it did in WWI and WWII. A tremendous amount of active, deliberate effort was put into fighting the entropy that would make that possible, but Pinker glosses over this with abstractions. There's a huge story to tell about everything from the Marshall Plan to the European Union to soccer matches b/w sister cities in neighboring countries.

 I'm not a professional historian so I can't address some of the other critiques on Goodreads about whether this book is all B.S. or not.
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 notgettingenough
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 August 1, 2012
 Pinker has disappointed me for so long that it is no surprise to me to discover that this is the work of a charlatan. Here on goodreads try David Giltinan's review .

 But also http://www.zcommunications.org/realit... is worthy of a read.

 Is his basic message pretty much that if first world white people aren't dying, then violence is decreasing? And has this been greeted with great approbation in - ummm - the first white world? Oh deary me.
 haven-t-read-but sociology
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270 reviews45 followers     May 24, 2017   Breathtakingly mindless for 2/5 of the book, blowhard the whole way through.Sometimes a good joke is more revealing than 800 pages of blowhardness. Pinker gives himself away with this quote by George Carlin on page 622: I think motivation is overrated. You show me some lazy prick who's lying around all day watching game shows and stroking his penis, and I'll show you someone who's not causing any fucking trouble!... ...I hope I am not the only one who thinks it is not necessarily a good thing to be reduced to lazy pricks watching game shows and stroking our penises... Anybody with a modicum of a background in anthropology, history, sociology and economics should be laughimg themselves silly (if it weren't so disturbing how much influence Pinker has)...  Pinker proposes 5 ways that have reduced violence and can continue to do so: the Leviathan, Gentle Commerce, Feminization, The Expanding Circle, and the Escalation of Reason. The final 3 I have no argument against. But I have issues with the first 2. The state gets a monopoly on violence and capitalism is caricatured as gentle. But there have been moments when violence spiked and recently, so Pinker has to explain it. Pinker conveniently blames Marxism (and leftism in general is caricatured the whole way through) as the singularly destructive ideology of modern times (without acknowledging the dangers of his own classical liberal ideology) and throws in 'a few other individuals' to the mix as the responsibles for the genocides of the 20th century, and the increase in violence in 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Fascism is acknowledged only as the twin of dialectial Marxism. Classical liberalism gets the nod as the ideology that reduces violence (of course Pinker would never admit that classical liberalism is even an ideology though). There is no comprehensive study of how fascism and communism came to be. It is really lazy stretch to say that fascism was just a few flukes of individual psychology, and not give credence to the idea that both fascism and communism came about from the specific conditions of a social system in crisis. Neither is it mentioned that big business actually financed and promoted fascism in Italy and Germany. That would complicate things too much.  So, nothing about communism coming into being as a reaction to capitalism... it is simply assumed that capitalism has been an overwhelmingly positive contribution to the world, since 'violence has declined since its advent, minus a few inconvenient peaks of violent wars and genocides' which, as I have already said, he attributes to Marxism and a few accidentally placed crazy individuals. Nothing either about theory, philosophy, economics, anthropology, activism owing anything at all to Marx's ideas. Marx isn't even worth the time of day to Pinker, except as an explanation for violence. This should raise the question, really can any intellectual who tries to analyze the history of modern times be taken seriously if they haven't taken the left seriously? how can you call yourself an intellectual if you just shrug off the whole left side of the policial spectrum as ideological nonsense?  So leftism gets all the blame for the bad stuff, but the increased rights that accompanied the 20th century are not attributed at all to leftist ideas or practice. They are accounted for as simply natural by-products of classical liberalism (ie. capitalism). The Expanding Circle of Empathy, the Escalation of Reason and the Feminization of society have nothing at all to do with leftist ideals. Class struggles never happened. Activists weren't leftists, they were classical liberals. These rights eventually became 'common sense'. If there any battles they were set forth by non-violent classical liberals, and always as peacefully as possible.  There are plenty of examples of serious breaches of truth here. According to Pinker, Martin Luther King apparently rejected Marx completely. Something patently false: 'King disagreed with Marxist materialism, but he found certain elements of Marxism's economic critiques of capitalism quite insightful' (I May Not Get There With You: the True Martin Luther King, Eric Michael Dyson). In fact, you would be hard-pressed to find any successful activist who doesn't find certain elements of Marxism insightful. But none of that is mentioned here because Pinker is not at an activist, he is status quo, out of touch with reality, pure and simple.  It is also fairly embarrassing for Pinker to not acknowledge how far from anything even remotely leftist or Marxist several so-called communist and their undoubtely genocidal regimes were. Something akin to blaming Jesus for the Crusades. It is not said that it is a far more convincing argument that Stalinist Russia and Maoist China were actually STATE-CAPITALIST regimes. And indeed ideological twins of fascism, but not at all in the sense that Pinker argues. But if he tried to go there, his simplistic view of everthing would implode.  Most people who rave against communism base their assumptions on secondary sources. It is clear that Pinker hasn't understood Marx (or even remotely leftist politics). As a fairly well-read leftist, it is obvious to me that there hasn't been a communist state to this day, as much as the leaders of those states have claimed to be. Neither is it mentioned how many different interpretaions of communism there are. He lumps the left all together. But if Pinker were to do so honestly, it would be quite a stretch to suggest that leftism is not about equality, freedom and the destruction of totalitarianism, oppression and alienation. In fact, you would think leftism was fascism the way Pinker describes it. Pinker comes across as a reactionary anti-communist suffering from the Red Scare, still inhabiting the frigid mental landscape of the Cold War.  But hey, when you are an authority in Harvard, sweeping caricatures and generalizations are allowed. There’s more. According to Pinker, dialectics are simply mysticism and a justification for violent struggle. Class struggle is of course also blown off as mystical dialectical hogwash. Well, that is some feat blowing off dialectics, considering how many of the greatest philosophical works in world in the last 2 centuries have had to deal with the idea of dialectics (because of its intellectual force), but the eminent Steven Pinker waves it off with his magic wand and without anything at all to back it up.  He also blows off 'intellectuals' in general because 'they are attracted to extreme ideas'. But he wholly contradicts himself when he proposes the superior intellectual value of classical liberalism. Which of course isn't extreme, it is just the obvious rational choice that doesn't even need to be intellectually defended. How arrogant can you get? It's also fairly wacky when he argues that 'intelligent people overwhelmingly tend to be liberals'. Based on IQ test scores and surveys of people with high scores he concludes that the smartest people are liberals and the other lesser ones are leftists and conservatives. But what about the smartest of the smart (the intellectuals) being attracted to extremes? This should leave you wondering if these arguments are for real? Apparently so. I am not familiar enough with the statistics that Pinker inundates us with to know if 'violence' has actually dropped or not consistently, progressively and continuously throughout history. But our propaganda alarm bells should sound when anyone makes a statement like that. According to Pinker, it is obvious that primitive tribes were the most violent humans ever. I have read some fairly convincing arguments otherwise, but I think it is likely the differences in opinion are going to come in the very definition of violence. The definition of violence by Pinker is dictionary strict, and very limited. Humans sometimes have to fight to survive. Pinker doesn't substantiate any difference in self defense and aggression, justice is mocked, freedom is not even covered. But when class struggle is just vain ideology to him, what can you expect?  Neither does he take on the prison industrial complex, although he does acknowledge the importance of caging up of the maximum amount of people that are considered most likely to fight back and apparently thinks it a necessary evil if there are 'a few too many' (as deterrence). Apathy or depression is not even mentioned. But of course if you look it up in a dictionary, violence isn't any of those things. Since only 100,000 have been killed in Iraq(a disputed low-flying number) and there were at least 1,5 million in Vietnam, apparently US foreign policy is getting way more compassionate. Of course nothing is even mentioned of thinly-covered up US intervention all over the world (like in Latin America). An ignorance easily corrected by leafing through books like 'Killing Hope' by William Blum (on the ongoing American holocaust). A book Chomsky says is 'far and away the best book on the subject'. But the book has leftist leanings, and is therefore intellectually irrelevant to a religiously loyal status quoer.  Democracy is hailed as a reducer of violence, and justifiably so. However he also has an extremely limited idea of democracy. There is a crisis of democracy right now because of a lack of participation (the Manufacturing of Consent and Public Opinion) and fast-growing awareness of it. What about acknowledging the advent of a type of coercion that creates ignorance, apathy and depression? This is not considered as an element of violence of course. It would even appear to be a positive thing, if it can reduce those violence stats and keep us wanking. Even if certain types of coercion cannot be defined as violence, why not acknowledge it for what it is?  As said, Pinker targets ideology as a main cause of violence. When ideologies clash it often creates even more violence. Obviously. But it would seem Pinker is unaware of the current ideology’s potential for violence (and many have argued quite well that it is the main present cause of violence today). Currently the ideology of capitalism is being questioned by a large variety of people (because of its weaknesses). If and when that increases there may just be an increase in violence again, and not only from the Leviathan state that Pinker raves so much about.  Of course Pinker would blame the new ideology if that happened, instead of the old one and all its weaknesses that brought it to the conflict. This is ironic because he does spend some time criticizing conservative ideology for its inability to adapt to progressive change. I argue that Pinker betrays exactly that attribute despite his humanist claims. Liberals and conservatives are the only two electable parties (because neither is so different from the other and neither is at all threatening to the current status quo). But for Pinker to have his moral authority he should also be arguing that if capitalism doesn't work well enough or starts to create bigger problems than it solves (ie. environmental destruction and huge gaps in wealth and debt), it is the one that may actually PROPAGATE violence. But then again we might just sit around watching game shows and stroking our penises. If Pinker is right, that would be ideal. Perhaps this can be avoided if the old ideology adapts peaceably. But neither should anyone who analyzes history or anthropology honestly assume that the current ideology is forever. Of course capitalism hasn’t always been there, has only been there for a tiny amount of history, but Pinker sidesteps that. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. The thing is that a large amount of us aren’t convinced it ain’t broke. But perhaps Pinker’s main point is that we are less likely to adapt violently no matter what the change. Perhaps so, but denying or misunderstanding certain causes of violence (gross inequality and oppression which lead to new ideologies) will not help the matter. The so-called mystical class struggle and violence around the time of Karl Marx and the following century were actually consequences of the inability of capitalism to adapt to its structural weaknesses. If there were enough reforms the violence caused may not have been necessary, or rather it could have convinced the masses it wasn't necessary to challenge the system.  However, the inflexibility and fundamentalism of classical liberalism would seem to have actually CAUSED the majority of violent conflicts. One doesn't have to be a Marxist to see that the capitalist system did not adapt appropriately (or peacefully) to the class awareness (or if you prefer inequality awareness) that was developing. Pinker calls 'class awareness' ideology though. A more peaceful adaptation did not come until after World War 2 (with Keynesianism) IN REACTION to THE CLASS AWARENESS. But this has been progressively taken apart since around 1980. The fear of class war retribution has diminished. With the recent austerity measures only being the latest in a series of measures to increase the wealth of the rich at the expense of the middle class and poor.  But that doesn't mean that a self-defense type of violence will not develop in the near future if the current system doesn't adapt appropriately (rising homelesseness or unemployment could escalate things). The fact that violence actually went down during the 30s Great Depresssion is almost gleefully mentioned by Pinker though. So there really isn't a guarantee that violence will increase. In fact, it would seem that the elite powers are getting impetus from implementing their austerity measures because of Pinkeresuqe ideas of how non-violent we have become. Anyhow, if Pinker is right and the world is better off being wankers than trouble-makers, then our intellectuals should be the best wankers. And so for that reason a wanker cannot read trouble-making literature, or leftist perspectives, one cannot at least acknowledge their intellectual validity and consider them. Pinker doesn't acknowledge these debates because he is pushing his own ideology, or rather absurdly and falsely pushing the idea of the 'end of ideology' (which is actually a thinly-veiled support for the current neoliberal utopian ideal). One that is as unsustainable and unrealistic as any utopia or ideology. Keep wanking. The book was long and tiresome in many parts, but also very rewarding in the sense that it is an incredibly revealing look at how corrupt and anti-intellectual academics can be. Pinker is arrogant, puffed-up, self-promoting and irresponsible in his ideologizing (ironic isn’t it?) here. In Pinker's mind, it would seem he has earned the right to step right out of his specialty of psychology and linguistics and make sweeping generalizations in anthropology, history, sociology and economics.      anthropology civilization gs-exemplar               809 reviews14.4k followers     April 26, 2013   VIOLENCE HAS DECLINED, AND I WILL KICK THE LIVING SHIT OUT OF ANYONE WHO SAYS IT HASN'T Disappointingly, Pinker strikes a slightly less confrontational tone than that, but the basic idea is the same. His thesis is that violence of every kind, from international warfare down to murder and corporal punishment, has been on a steady decline throughout human history, up to and including the present day – and not only does he make this case in considerable detail, but he goes on to give a very wide-ranging discussion of possible political and psychological causes for what's happened. This book is big, and it needs to be: it's built around a vast accumulation of raw evidence. Historical, statistical, sociological, neurobiological, and anecdotal – and I'm slightly confused by some of the negative reviews here, because although you might not like all of his conclusions, it's not easy to argue with the facts when they're laid out in this much detail.  Not convinced? Wondering if village life in the 30s can really have been as bad as dodging rapists in today's inner cities? Well, prepare for approximately 8,266 graphs and charts proving you wrong in every direction. Leafing through them is at first daunting, then fascinating, then astonishing, and eventually wearying. But they keep coming!    The decline in some forms of violence is so dramatic that the figures have had to be plotted on a logarithmic scale, so vertiginous is their descent. Hitting kids – gone from normal to unacceptable in barely a generation. Murder rates? Dropping like a knackered lift. Paedophiles and child abduction? Statistically speaking, if you wanted your child to have a better-than-average chance of being abducted and held overnight by a stranger, ‘you'd have to leave it outside unattended for 750,000 years’. Terrorism, surely? Nope; in fact ‘the number of deaths from terrorist attacks is so small that even minor measures to avoid them can increase the risk of dying’ – one study suggests that 1,500 more Americans died in the year after 9/11 because they started driving rather than flying.  Okay then, what about WAR. ‘As of May 15, 1984, the major powers of the world had remained at peace with one another for the longest stretch of time since the Roman Empire.’ This is important, because inter-state warfare is much, much more deadly than the small-'n'-nasty invasions and civil wars that are more common today. And even they are becoming less frequent and less individually deadly.  Don't get me wrong, this is not a happy-clappy book about mindless optimism, and he is assiduous in stressing that the situation could easily change. The point is not that we have entered an Age of Aquarius in which every last earthling has been pacified forever. It is that substantial reductions in violence have taken place, and it is important to understand them. Pinker takes a good, long look at several possibilities, and (to my mind at least) identifies three major factors behind the decline. The first is the growth of democracy, which strongly correlates with lower rates of violence across the board, and we get the figures to prove it. The second is the revolution in communications, firstly during the Enlightenment, and then more recently with the birth of the mass media age. Again, huge numbers of studies are adduced to make the point.  The third factor is what he calls ‘feminization’: women are just less violent than men, and the more involved they are in a society the more peaceful it is. ‘We are all feminists now,’ he concludes, after a typically detailed examination of changing attitudes to, and rights of, women through history. (He is talking about the West here, but even elsewhere the trend is unmistakeable.) Studies suggest that this is not just a consequence of changing attitudes, but a cause of them, particularly given that ‘the one great universal in the study of violence is that most of it is committed by fifteen-to-thirty-year-old men.’ Pinker hones in on the obvious implications: Would the world be more peaceful if women were in charge? The question is just as interesting if the tense and mood are changed. Has the world become more peaceful because more women are in charge? And will the world become more peaceful when women are even more in charge? The answer to all three, I think, is a qualified yes.  When he's finished considering social movements and political changes, he pokes inside your brain. We have pages and pages of various neuro-sociological experiments where people were strapped to an MRI machine and told to slap a puffin in the face, or something, so that various lobes and cortexes could be identified and examined. The question is whether there are anatomical, or evolutionary-psychological, causes for violence, and if so how easily they can be overcome. We get a lot of impressive-looking diagrams like this (I may have remembered some of the details wrong):    Pinker is very interesting on the Flynn Effect, which, if you're not aware of it, is the upward trend in general intelligence observed around the world in standardised testing since such things began. Many people that have written on this subject are skeptical that folk nowadays can really be smarter than anatomically-identical humans of a few generations ago, despite what the tests say – but Pinker, after a careful examination of how thought processes are influenced by changing social norms, is not afraid to draw his conclusions, at least in the ethical sphere: The other half of the sanity check is to ask whether our recent ancestors can really be considered morally retarded. The answer, I am prepared to argue, is yes. Though they were surely decent people with perfectly functioning brains, the collective moral sophistication of the culture in which they lived was as primitive by modern standards as their mineral spas and patent medicines are by the medical standards of today. Many of their beliefs can be considered not just monstrous but, in a very real sense, stupid. Obviously we are into speculative territory here, but I actually found it very heartening and thought-provoking to see someone prepared to follow the evidence that far.  How's it written? His style is exact without being dense, although he is not averse to the odd cliché (‘capital punishment itself was on death row’), and from time to time his desire to cloak the science in colourful imagery leads him into some awkward prose: The age distribution of a population changes slowly, as each demographic pig makes its way through the population python. Yikes. Also…and this may sound like a weird thing to pick up on, but once I noticed it I couldn't take my eyes off it…he is absolutely obsessed with telling the reader to ‘recall’ things he's already said. Recall the mathematical law that a variable will fall into a power-law distribution…Recall from chapter 3 that the number of political units in Europe shrank…Recall that there were two counter-Enlightenments…Recall that the statistics of deadly quarrels show no signature of war-weariness.…and recall that duelling was eventually laughed into extinction.Recall that the chance that two people in a room of fifty-seven will share a birthday is ninety-nine out of a hundred.England and the United States, recall, had prepared the ground for their democracies…Recall that for half a millennium the wealthy countries of Europe were constantly at each other's throats.Cronin, recall, showed that terrorist organizations drop like flies over time…And recall the global Gallup survey that showed…Recall that narcissism can trigger violence…Recall that the insula lights up when people feel they have been shortchanged…Patients with orbital damage, recall, are impulsive…Recall from chapter 3 the theory of crime… Just how much stuff are you expecting me to remember, Pinker?! And surely someone who wrote three books on language has a fucking thesaurus handy?  There are a couple of minor errors, too, that an editor should have caught. The Polish city of Wrocław is printed in my edition as ‘Wroctaw’; and he also refers to some statistics gathered in the ‘town of Kent’ (there are dozens of towns in Kent, which in the dataset concerned is a county). However, and despite my sometimes flippant tone in this review, the truth is that I thought this was a magnificent book – convincingly argued and truly multidisciplinary, so that I felt like I was getting a synthesis of the important studies carried out in half a dozen different fields. It's a big, serious argument that deserves proper consideration, and one that'll give you some ammo to argue back next time you're feeling cynical about the relentless news headlines. I think it's a clear 4.5 – and since Goodreads won't let me do that, I'm inclined to bump it up rather than down.     history psychology social-history               653 reviews6,927 followers     December 8, 2014     The Skeptic’s Peace Pinker warns the reader upfront that the book is huge, and with more than 800 dense pages there is no question about it. It is so wide-ranging that it is fortunate it has such a memorable title - the reader might have easily lost track of where it is all supposed to be heading. Individually, any single section of the book is a throughly entertaining masterpiece, but as a whole, in terms of coherence, and on how the thesis and the direction of the arguments hold together, the book is not as much of a delight.  But it is an ambitious book and is in some respects a new sort of history - almost a moral history of the world and Pinker deserves praise for the attempt. The next such historian to come along has been given much to work with. Pinker is very convincing about the fact that violence has indeed declined; he is even persuasive on why it was but bound to happen. But when it comes to explaining the phenomenon (which he spends most of the book convincing us is real) based on his strength (psychology and evolutionary biology), he comes up slightly short. Pinker says all the right things and spares no punches and doesn’t flinch from taking on the worst arguments the critics might throw at him but his arguments still seem to lack that knockout blow. This is not to say that the arguments are weak. Pinker does a remarkable job in his survey of history, of stats and of a multitude of ideas. The scholarship is immaculate, the intentions are noble and the conclusions are plausible but I would still wager that Pinker would fail to convince the majority of his readers.  Why? Because he ignores the contingent nature of history and he forgets that the 'better angels' has not only made us a more moral society but has also made us a more skeptical society. I was disappointed that Pinker does not explore the preventive powers of sheer skepticism.  My own thesis, which was evolving as I read Pinker’s, is ultimately that the skeptical mentality is what the ‘civilizing process’ (and the years of bloody wars) has ultimately given us - a conviction that there are no easy answers, no ‘final solutions’. And that is a powerful deterrent to most forms of drastic action, since now it is harder to justify them. This to me is the real cause for optimism (of the measured and skeptical sort, as is our wont now).      history-civilizations media-hyped pop-history               865 reviews1,271 followers     February 15, 2012   This seems like a stunning misstep by the normally brilliant Steven Pinker. His ability to write with extraordinary force and clarity has been demonstrated repeatedly in two separate areas of expertise -- linguistics and cognitive science. Unfortunately, the brilliance of his earlier books in those areas is nowhere in evidence in this regrettable dog's breakfast of a book. I found it almost unreadable - poorly argued, undisciplined, self-indulgent, and - despite its grotesquely bloated length (800 pages) - support for its main thesis is woefully inadequate, dependent on a highly selective interpretation of existing data and completely unconvincing. Pinker can sling the statistical jargon (Poisson processes, power laws, the gambler's fallacy, the Gini coefficient) like a pro, but all the jargon in the world cannot make up for his recurrent habit of over- or mis-interpreting data whose limitations he consistently glosses over.  The jacket cover breathlessly promises "more than a hundred graphs and maps". Any graph is open to misinterpretation. Three of the most common ways of doing so are (i) selective interpretation (ignoring or explaining away the data that don't fit one's preconceived ideas) (ii) inappropriate extrapolation beyond the range of available data and (iii) failure to acknowledge the data's limitations, such as likely sources of bias, or extreme sparsity of information.  Pinker commits each of these errors, with such numbing frequency that one loses all respect. We are seriously asked to draw conclusions from a graph of the "rate of battle deaths in state-based armed conflicts between 1900 and 2005" (Figure 6-1) while being instructed to ignore the figures for the first and second world wars. After all, "the world has seen nothing close to that level since". This kind of rubbish insults the intelligence. Or you could look at Figure 7-28. Lest you be distracted by the actual data, Pinker has helpfully superimposed some very impressive looking solid lines documenting his cheerful belief in the rise of vegetarianism. These are much darker than the actual data points, presumably in the hope that the reader might be distracted from noting their complete lack of fit to the data. Worried about racially motivated killing of black people? Here are the yearly data (number of such killings) from 1996 to 2008: 5,3,3,4,3,3,3,4,1,2,1,1,1 Pinker's gleeful trumpeting of a five-fold reduction seems to rest on a pretty flimsy foundation to me. Not to mention being a little premature.  But nothing as inconvenient as facts, or their absence, can stand in the way of a man who has already decided he knows the answer. The threat of nuclear holocaust? Exaggerated, because - as any fool can see - nuclear weapons have never been used in wartime since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One imagines this argument must be of great comfort to those who survived those particular "anomalies". Just as Pinker's breezy insistence that the only meaningful way to interpret the number of people killed in a given conflict is relative to the world's population at the time is surely meaningless to anyone who has lost a family member in battle. It's at best breathtakingly insensitive; some would find it deeply offensive.  To anyone who respects the scientific method, this is a horrifyingly bad book, one which completely obliterates Pinker's credibility. Don't waste your time.     disappointing intellectual-con-artist-at-work never-gonna-finish               39 reviews361 followers     March 18, 2012   When an academic steps outside his or her field of expertise, it's best to brace yourself for a torrent of nonsense. Steven Pinker, whose work in linguistics and psychology I greatly enjoy, has made a habit of using that work as a springboard to foist his pet political theories on the public. Whereas his previous attempt in The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature was a vehicle for his ideological ramblings, it was at least not based on a gaping statistical flaw and had some value in refuting common misconceptions, even if it did so in a fundamentally dishonest way.Whatever redeeming qualities to be found in Better Angels are far outweighed by the failure of Pinker's thesis. Has violence actually declined? If not, the rest is window dressing. Pinker quickly notes that the reader will be skeptical of his thesis off the bat -- we are inclined to believe the world is getting more violent due to our constant exposure to it in the media, which is biased toward reporting bad news, criminality, etc. No doubt he is correct in this. It is well known that crime rates in the United States have been in decline for the past 20-30 years yet many continue to believe that crime is on the rise. This likely comes from a bit of selective reporting mixed with confirmation bias; the proverbial man searching for his keys under the streetlight. The main reason I was immediately skeptical about this thesis was that I had seen it before! The general thrust of Pinker's argument appears in a brief section in The Blank Slate and a TED talk he adapted that into a few years back. (http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinke...) Here he totally mangles basic anthropology and archaeology. The chart he presents is a misinterpretation of data from Lawrence Keeley's War Before Civilization -- anyone familiar with the societies he presents knows that most of them are not nomadic hunter-gatherer bands but partly or fully sedentary and horticulturalist, e.g., the Gebusi and Yanomamo. (As an aside, I find the use of Keeley ironic as he argues against a biological view of warfare in the book while Pinker is an ardent supporter of this view.) Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha devote an entire section to deconstructing this Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality (a book not without its own problems, as Ryan and Jetha play Rousseau to Pinker's Hobbes). (An adapted excerpt can be found here: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/s...)  Using modern hunter-gatherer societies (or at least what Pinker thinks are hunter-gatherer societies) as stand-ins for pre-historic societies is a rookie mistake. The degree to which modern hunter-gatherers have been displaced and influenced by industrial societies and nation-states has been one of the big debates over the last half-century in anthropology. Thus, whether they are representative of some "state of nature" at all is highly questionable. (See this brief summary of the "hunter-gatherer revisionist debate" by Thomas N. Headland for an overview and references: http://www.sil.org/~headlandt/huntgat...) Pinker notes this at one point but then completely forgets about it in taking his own cooked numbers at face value. Even if we accept Pinker's definition of violence, the whole undertaking itself is an exercise in guesswork and absurdity. There were no census programs or bureaus of statistics throughout much of history. Written records of war often inflate or deflate the body count depending on whose side you're reading from (and as we know, winners write the history books) and the archaeological record is spotty in a large number of places. Perhaps we can get fairly accurate body counts here and there, but there are large swaths of history that we essentially have to just guess at. Fortunately, the good folks at Quodlibeta, actual historians, have broken down a good deal of the historical and statistical flaws in the book (starting here): http://bedejournal.blogspot.com/2011/...  Considering he has been "refining" this argument since The Blank Slate (read: futilely polishing a turd), Pinker seems unlikely to back down. His FAQ released to "respond" to criticism completely dodges the fact that he's pulled a good deal of his numbers straight from his nether region. (See Quodlibeta again for an appropriately snarky take-down: http://bedejournal.blogspot.com/2011/...) At some point, it begins to stretch credulity that he doesn't realize there's a hole big enough to drive an eighteen-wheeler through in this argument. (This does, however, make the book a useful litmus test to see which critics will gush how "thoroughly researched, amply documented, and strongly argued" something is as long as you flash a few fancy charts 'n graphs and pseudo-intellectual smoke and mirrors their way. Unfortunately, it seems that the answer is "A whole lot of them.") Once you realize the entire book is a house of cards that's more or less already collapsed, the rest of it becomes an incredible grind. As above, the rest is just window dressing, a game of make believe. Sure, there's some interesting parts about, say, the psychology of aggression and a few delicious nuggets and tidbits of trivia along the way. Digging through the rough for them seems a rather pointless exercise, though, especially where it's already been done better. Large chunks of his argument are recycled from other authors such as Peter Singer and Lynn Hunt. The end result is a whiggish history where sense and nonsense blend together seamlessly, thus negating any use the layperson might find in it. The presentation of history too often crosses into the cartoonish, being loaded down with ad hoc theorizing deployed to save the book's overarching narrative. Pinker's goal is, at base, to push his ideology, his own brand of secular humanism he claims to be based in "Enlightenment values." It is an ideology whose values I happen to largely share, but history demonstrates that anything can be taken too far. This is why Pinker is forced to downplay or omit the excesses of the Enlightenment such as the French Revolution with its Jacobins and Cult of Reason. The irony here is that Pinker reveals himself to be as much of a romantic as his ideological opponents. The doomsayers appeal to a mythical past to buttress their claims (Arthur Herman has written an amusing account of this phenomenon in The Idea of Decline in Western History), but the optimists of modernity similarly appeal to a mythical future. While the notion that the kids these days are just rotten and the world is going to hell in a hand-basket has been with us for millennia, one of the central narratives of modernity has been a belief in a steady incline. With an increasingly global economy and the inevitable advance of science and technology, the high priests of modernity preach time and again, we are surely on our way to the best of all worlds. Predicting the future direction of humanity, though, has proven to be a fool's game, a bit of off-track betting for the intellectual class. While Pinker never commits to this teleological narrative wholesale, he does bang the drum for the steady march of progress quite a bit throughout the book. Obviously, while I don't pine for the days of King Cotton or colonial Africa, I don't find much comfort in the fact that while the number of debt and sex slaves has exploded in absolute numbers, their proportion of the total population has decreased. Oh, how marvelous! What Bjorn Lomborg did for environmental issues, Pinker has done for the history of violence.     hack-jobs-and-bullshit history politics-and-political-philosophy               643 reviews111 followers     January 22, 2014   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.”                   585 reviews217 followers     November 23, 2022   I love optimistic books, and there is a lot of optimism in the almost 800 pages of "The better angels of our nature". At the same time, I find it impossible to give a single opinion about this behemoth of a book, because I found some of its elements truly excellent, some ok, and some absolutely scream-out-loud dreadful, so I'll try to explain.In brief:  - the great: the quality of the writing is superb. This is one of the best books I've ever read in terms of clarity of exposition and effectiveness of the writing. Also, at the very beginning the author outlines the structure of the book, which gives you a clear mental map of what you're getting into. As a plus, Pinker peppers his prose with anecdotes, jokes and references to pop culture (a bit like Malcolm Gladwell) that enliven the experience. I know some may not enjoy that. I do. - the good: the analysis of the decrease in violent behavior throughout history is deep and overall fairly convincing. Pinker acknowledges the fact that we are missing a lot of crucial data (about deaths and violence in the past), and he's received a lot of criticism for presenting a thesis that's partially based on guesswork, but I think there is a lot of value in making the layman (like me) think about these topics, and at least in trying to find some general patterns. Some reviewers hated his methodology, or the way he handles some piece of data - all fair. I think it all makes for a healthy discussion. - the not so good: is that Pinker didn't make much of an attempt to present a truly global perspective on the subject: in this book, Western world = The World. China, India, Africa, South America... marginal "who knows?" footnotes. "Religion" = Christianity. He explains that European history has the most available data, but I'm not the only one to think that he could have made a much better effort in this regard.  - the dreadful is where Pinker lets his underlying personal New Atheist agenda seep through without any restraint. Sadly, this lowers the level of the book in many parts to pure tripe, in particular when it comes to the very subjective reasons behind the apparent decrease in violence throughout history.  On page 642 Pinker spells out exactly what the main problem with his own book is: "Even the scientists are piling on. Human beings are led by their passions, say many psychologists, and deploy their puny powers of reason only to rationalize their gut feelings after the fact". Ironically, that is precisely what he ended up doing with this book.  To be clear, this has nothing to do with Pinker's titular argument in favor the decline of violence, which as I said I found fairly convincing and rational. No, Pinker's emotional, irrational underlying argument is the following:  1) Enlightenment humanism, secularism and atheism are the only cultural forces for good in the world. 2) Religions have been purely a destructive, negative force throughout history, therefore our planet will be a much better place when religions have completely disappeared.  THAT is where the author's heart is.  "As if biology didn't make things bad enough, the Abrahamic religions ratified some of our worst instincts with laws and beliefs that have encouraged violence for millennia". Incidentally, I just found out that Pinker and Richard Dawkins are buddies and share the same New Atheist credo. That gave me a sudden bout of nausea... Dawkins, the Grand Master of Missing The Point himself!  Watching Pinker zig-zag his way through his own version of world history where religion has caused only mayhem and suffering is like watching a professional skier slalom down through the obstacles. You have to admire his incredible ability to make it through without tripping over every few seconds.    For example: in Pinker's world, the "Rights Revolutions show that a moral way of life requires a decisive rejection of instinct, culture, religion, and standard practice. In their place is an ethics that is inspired by empathy and reason and stated in the language of rights. [ ] This conclusion, of course  [but OF COURSE!],  is the moral vision of the Enlightenment and the strands of humanism and liberalism that have grown out of it. The Rights Revolutions are liberal revolutions".  Under this light, it becomes hard to reconcile and explain how Martin Luther King, perhaps the greatest protagonist in the "Rights Revolutions", was a Baptist preacher who dedicated his life to worship, prayer and to following Jesus Christ as a role model. But no worries! Slalomist Pinker turns his skis swiftly and manages to dismiss MLK's adherence to Christianity almost completely!  What a feat, ladies and gentlemen!! Here he goes: "MLK, as a graduate student in theology, was, of course, conversant with the Bible and orthodox theology. But he also read renegade theologians such as Walter Rauschenbusch, who criticized the historical accuracy of the Bible and the dogma that Jesus died for people's sins. King then embarked on a serious study of the social and ethical theories of the great philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle down to ... [etc. etc.].". "King was profoundly inspired by Gandhi's theory of nonviolent resistance not as a moralistic affirmation of love, as nonviolence had been in the teaching of Jesus".  And now - pay very close attention. After this microscopic cherry-picking, later on, on page 677 comes the master stroke. Here’s how Pinker references his ridiculously insufficient excursus through MLK's cultural influences: "As we saw, Martin Luther King rejected mainstream Christian theology and drew his inspiration from Gandhi, secular Western philosophy, and renegade humanistic theologians". Wait wait wait ..... we "saw" what??? The only thing you said was that he read some books, that is all we "saw". We never "saw" that MLK "rejected mainstream Christian theology"! Oh, what a number he just pulled there. Of course, an anti-christian MLK would fit perfectly in Pinker's nice little box. If only it wasn't a complete fabrication! Maybe, if we stretch it a bit, King was a "liberal Christian", but still very deeply and fully embracing Christian theology. www.sfgate.com/news/article/Writings-...  For King, his Christian faith was far more than a source of soaring rethoric. It was the boundless reservoir of the colossal courage he would need to risk his life day after day. Frankly, I find Pinker's statements about MLK's faith quite offensive.  So it is with unbelievably misguided violence (pun intended) that Pinker strips our history of any trace whatsoever of the positive influence of religion and religious people on the world, while focusing only on the stereotypical negative stories (of course, confusing "religion" with "corrupted clergy"). As I said above, what Pinker really means with Religion is Christianity, because it's the only one he keeps referring to, and he doesn't seem to know much at all about Hinduism or Buddhism.  "Very little good has come from these ancient tribal dogmas. [List of stereotypical pub-banter-level bad things that the Church did] Defenders of religion claim that the two genocidal ideologies of the 20th century, fascism and communism, were atheistic. But the first claim is mistaken and the second irrelevant".  Pinker is often leaving rationality aside to go FANTASTICALLY off the rails like this. Aside from the fact that he is wrong, what is even the point of this argument? What value does a defense of atheism bring to this book?  Pinker then constructs a couple of sentences aimed at resolving and clarifying why he has chosen to completely ignore religion in the 800 pages of "The better angels of our nature": "Religion plays no single role in the history of violence because religion has not been a single force in the history of anything. [Says the erudite expert on religion, as we have just seen] The vast set of movements that we call religions have little in common but their distinctness from the secular institutions that are recent appearances on the human stage".  Ok. So, let me get it straight: you find it reasonable to metaphorically pee on 100% of what goes under "religion" because you say it's always been so diverse and multifaceted that its overall impact on history is, in the end, completely irrelevant? There is no fundamental golden rule, no consolidated drive for empathy and compassion, no focus on respect for human life across the main religions? The declaration of Human Rights has been inspired exclusively by Enlightenment humanism, and not at all by Christian values? You are actually using the horrors committed by a small part of the clergy to invalidate all the positive messages of religion and, more importantly, the useful and positive initiatives that most religious institutions pursue throughout the world (and very rarely make it to the news - like these www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/17/100...) ? After these statements, it's not surprising that the author forgets to articulate how "secular ideas" possess this ideal quality of being "a single force in the history of something" that religions do not have. As if everyone who was ever inspired by secular ideas behaved in the same way and went exactly in the same direction - the BEST direction, of course.  Here Pinker goes on to perform some more professional skiing to get around other obstacles, like the excesses of the French Revolution, Cult of Reason etc., at the risk of losing his pants:    I thought people who kill, or in general use violence, do it in the name of anything at all: good, bad, old, new, religious beliefs, political beliefs, and science- or reason-based beliefs (a small example: the interpretation of Darwinism by the Columbine killers). More in general, I wonder: was it really that difficult for Pinker to admit that all types of cultural movements, religious and non-religious, have been influencing each other and impacting the history of violence in many different ways? Why did he need to defend secular ideologies as if they'd never been the inspiration for violence or violent acts? And why did he pinpoint all these cultural movements as a cause "in themselves" for violence and war? How would communism IN ITSELF or atheism IN ITSELF or Christianity IN ITSELF cause atrocities and wars? They are ideas: words on paper. None of these ideas was ever a specific order to commit atrocities. I've always thought that, in reality, bad or deranged people are the ones who read those words and bend them to their basic, animal desires.  But again, Pinker is a human being himself, and each human being needs to worship something - we are powered by emotions, not by reason. As much as he tries to tackle this immense subject with pure rationality, his personal opinions come through loud and clear and crash to a pulp any of his efforts to sound objective and fully rational.  So, in the end, to go back to the main official thesis of this book: violence has probably decreased, overall. We can talk forever about the type of statistics used by Pinker in this book, but it seems he could be right, and I hope he is.  As for the reasons behind the decrease, as discussed, Pinker gets irrational about it, for understandable reasons (his wife). Here is his own explanation from his website: " It was only through the intellectual influence of my wife, the philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, that I understood the logic connecting them. She explained to me how morality can be grounded in rationality, and how secular humanism is just a modern term for the world view that grew out of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment (in particular, she argues, from the ideas of Spinoza). To the extent that the decline of violence has been driven by ideas, it’s this set of ideas, which I call Enlightenment humanism, which has driven it, and it offers the closest thing we have to a unified theory of the decline of violence".  A crucial passage here is "To the extent that the decline of violence has been driven by ideas". No one knows how much this is! It could be 0.2%! But Pinker certainly thinks the history of ideas has been much more impactful on reality than what it actually has been.  This is a common misjudgement of academics: many of them tend to give far too much practical importance to ideas, books and cultural movements, and too little to money and power.  If violence has decreased, I see no evidence that the decrease has been directly and mainly caused by the advent of the Enlightenment ideas, as Pinker is trying to convince us with this book. Those ideas were certainly a big piece of the puzzle, a great inspiration, just like many other ideas have been a positive inspiration. But fundamentally, I think what needs to be credited most of all is: military technology, increased wealth and global commerce, a change in the cost / profit scenarios of violence, the increased spread of information, and therefore better risk assessment tools. Maybe, but only maybe, we could also add to this list some steps forward on the path of evolution of our collective consciousness.  -------------------------- Here is a good book that quietly destroys the myth of Enlightenment perfection: "In defense of Faith", by David Brog  Here are some interesting articles that talk about Pinker's world view: On his view of scientism: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013...  On his New Atheist credo: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/scienceo...  On his (mis)understanding of religion: http://bedejournal.blogspot.com/2008/...                    801 reviews2,502 followers     January 9, 2014   In this book, Steven Pinker explores a very controversial thesis, that is, violence is declining. Different types of violence are declining on multiple time scales. It would seem like the twentieth century had some major wars and plenty of genocide to make his thesis sound rather foolish. But in the first seven chapters he shows lots and lots of statistics to back up his thesis. In the eighth and ninth chapters he also explores the scientific reasons for violence and the reasons for increasingly non-violent behavior. The book is very comprehensive--it is quite long and detailed. The first chapters are not particularly "heavy" reading, but towards the end of the book, it can be tough-going--but fascinating throughout. Pinker tackles the main objection to his thesis--the three worst dictators of the twentieth century (Hitler, Stalin, Mao) were responsible for an immense amount of violence, deaths and misery. Some of the reviewers here at Goodreads have remarked that Pinker underestimates the number of deaths that are attributable to Mao. Perhaps he did grossly underestimate the numbers--I really don't know. Pinker makes an interesting point about the recent theory, raised in the book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, that crime in the United States declined in the past few decades, because of the legalization of abortion in 1973. The idea is that the reduction in unwanted children led to fewer violence-inclined youths. Pinker argues that after 1973, the proportion of children born to vulnerable women actually increased, rather than decreased. One of the reasons for the decline in violence is the increase in literacy and reading. Pinker argues that the transmission of new ideas in books has acted as a liberal force in society. He shows that during the Middle Ages, most people were religious and believed in the literal truth of the bible. Heretics were everywhere, and were persecuted in wars, massacres, pogroms, executions and torture. Nowadays, while religious people "believe" in the bible, most do not take such a literal interpretation. They don't think that it is moral to invade a city and kill--or take as slaves--every single person. A higher value is placed on human life, because of the "shift from valuing souls to valuing lives." Pinker writes,  The theory that religion is a force for peace, often heard among the religious right and its allies today, does not fit the facts of history. Later, he writes, The world has far too much morality. Very true indeed.Pinker shows how game theory plays a big role in the evolution of morality. In fact, he defines morality as the opportunity for positive-sum games. In so much of history, people played in zero-sum or even in negative-sum games. For example, war is usually a negative-sum game, in the sense that so many people die and suffer, that the gains to the victor are completely overwhelmed by the losses to both sides.  Nowadays, the language of violence is often cloaked in "bureaucratese", in words like purges, deportations, bombardments, pacification, rectification, ethnic cleansing, collateral damage, and rendition. These euphemisms help to self-exculpate the perpetrators of violence, and make violence seem to be justified or involuntary.  Pinker discusses in some detail the factors that he believes have led to decreased violence in recent times. He talks a lot about the concept of Leviathan from the book by this name by Thomas Hobbes. According to Pinker, the presence of a legitimate, strong central government helps to reduce violence, at least on a personal basis. People are less inclined to violence when they think that punishment is likely. (Not always true, but usually.)  He describes how "gentle commerce" helps to "turn zero-sum warfare into positive-sum mutual profit ... sweetening the outcome of mutual pacifism with the mutual gains of exchange." Pinker also shows how "feminization" has helped to move society "... away from a culture of manly honor, with its approval of violent retaliation for insults, toughening of boys through physical punishment, and veneration of martial glory." One of the most interesting--and potentially useful--parts of the book is his analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The root of the problem is that there are so many sacred concepts on both sides. A sacred concept is one that is not subject to negotiation--it is completely off the table. People will not compromise on their sacred values, but they might compromise on so-called "pseudo-sacred" values. Pinker describes evidence that both sides might be willing to declare compromises through symbolic concessions, even though they are not actually willing to perform on their compromises. Pinker writes,  To find anything that softens the opposition of Israeli and Palestinian fanatics to what the rest of the world recognizes as the only viable solution to their conflict is something close to a miracle. It all has to do with the symbolic framing of a peace agreement.There are certain parts of the book that might make a squeamish reader cringe--there are some short descriptions of barbaric tortures. If you can get through (or skip) those parts, then you will find a fascinating theory developed from the point of view of scientific scholarship--sociology, psychology, and evolutionary biology. As with all of Steven Pinker's writings, this book is fascinating, comprehensive, and sure to be controversial. He has (most of) the facts behind him, and it is difficult to argue against his major points.      biology ethics history               269 reviews564 followers     November 17, 2022   This book asserts that violence has decreased. I can set this aside as a worthy discussion. However, that is just the hook to catch readers. The purpose here is spreading ideologies to explain why violence has decreased. The Bad:Well, it turns out Pinker puts much of his faith in the status quo (i.e. power) as directly responsible, i.e. the State ("Leviathan") and Capitalism ("Gentle Commerce").  Let us consider status quo bias:1) One can argue that it is resistance to power that has brought much of the decrease in violence we see today! After all, slavery and colonialism were the most profitable Capitalist ventures, backed and enabled by the growth of States. Elites sure are innovative at co-opting grassroots demands (and then smugly taking credit for it!), like the liberal elite property-holders who did all they could to thwart democracy ("mob rule") until it became advantageous to run as "democrats" (while power migrated from the political sphere to the private economic sphere of one-dollar-one-vote).  2) Even if such violent power structures were capable of forcing an increase in material production, must we assume they are the only options? Have we really reached "The End of History" in finding the optimal social system, as another status quo shill put it? (Indeed, we might soon reach the end of history given climate change and other destruction of crucial Earth systems, but never mind that; Pinker just picks out the "science" that conforms to status quo triumphalism)...Euro/Americentric Liberal elitists and their useful idiots (Pinker?) place their faith in "the Enlightenment" (similarly, the "Founding Fathers") as the foundational social movement in human history, but we should look beyond Orwellian history, towards accounts that do not just assume whatever is written by the victors is the totality of reality. The autonomous communities not requiring and openly resisting the violent shepherding by authority are indeed written out of history...  I tried to re-read these 800+ pages to give a thorough unpacking, but frankly there are better uses of one's time. I am thankful for 
 The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions
 which brings an accessible dose of decolonization ideologies to expose just how atrocious Pinker's ideologies are.  ...and these beautiful (negative) reviews, enjoy! Brilliant review #1  Brilliant review #2  Inception of spicy reviews  ...and one more ...in fact, there's an entire book (Reality Denial: Steven Pinker’s Apologetics for Western-Imperial Violence), co-written by Edward S. Herman (who also lead the co-writing of that famous Chomsky book on foreign policy media: Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media)  The Missing:I used to first recommend the following critiques on power and appraisal of popular resistance and decision-making for Western audiences given their accessibility. They are still useful:-Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky -The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement  However, to appreciate why socialism in 20th century revolutions took place in the Global South/periphery is to build the historical context of the violence of global capitalism. This is crucial to avoid becoming the smug Western armchair critic that sees everyone else as primitive/violent/"totalitarian"/"anti-democratic"/"not real socialism", while at the same time failing to prevent the exportation of bombs and embargoes, or achieving economic democracy at home. Where to start? 1) I'm accumulating a playlist on Global South Socialism, featuring Vijay Prashad, Michael Parenti, Utsa Patnaik, Max Blumenthal, etc.:  https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...  --Highlights include:i) Michael Parenti:-on Cuban Revolution:  https://youtu.be/npkeecCErQc  -full: https://youtu.be/O8k0yO-deoA?t=27 ii) Vijay Prashad -on ideological censorship: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jKcs... -"The Many Lives of Communism in the Third World": https://youtu.be/NZXh2Guebhg?t=104 -Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations -The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World -The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South  2) Books on the history of global capitalism not glossing over its violence and contradictions: -accessible intros: -Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (has reformist blind-spots towards empire, but very accessible intro to the history of economic development where long-term productivity gains require nurturing/protection from ruthless short-term market competition)-The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry -Capitalism: A Ghost Story -A People's History of the United States (history from below instead of by the winners)-A People's History of the World ...deeper dives:-Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present -Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World --Debt: The First 5,000 Years -Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital  3) Capitalism as the end of history?-Intro on capitalism's dynamism being at the same time its volatility: Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails -Structural alternatives? Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present -Capitalist growth on a finite planet: -Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World -Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System -Capitalist State as a tool to manage class conflict: -A Brief History of Neoliberalism -The State and Revolution      critique-violence theory-psych theory-violence               509 reviews427 followers     September 29, 2016   Steven Pinker has written a monster of a book. He has used his intelligence to crunch a huge volume of material. He has made a number of great points to which I'm sure to be referring often.Yet despite all the insights and accompanying drum rolls, I am suspicious of the dramatic hypothesis, the grand prediction that humankind has learned in any permanent sense to be kinder and gentler. That hypothesis is a welcome change from all the dystopian predictions, and I do think I, and western civilization in general, has it pretty good right here and now in terms of space to survive and thrive. I just don't think it's necessarily a permanent pinnacle. And when people are thumping their chests and seeing themselves as representing that pinnacle, well, that's concerning--even though he insists his views are scientific and not in the least messianic. So, if Steven Pinker had been a little more humble and had spoken of current times as pretty nice for some without necessarily approaching the best of all possible worlds, I could better countenance him. But Steven Pinker can be hard to take and he doesn't do humble. Here's a cartoon making fun of Obama from the right--and of the notion that violence has declined. But, as when we see ten feet of snow and sneer at "global warming," everything is not always as it appears!  --Ramirez, 06-17-2014 On the other hand, given all the predictions of doom for the world that are in circulation, it's good to hear thinking from the other angle for a change. We need it. Having leaned too far one way, maybe the only way to get back in form is to lean the other way. And that's why, when I finish complaining, I'll be touching on some of Pinker's many surprising assertions, despite not being a Pinkerite. But, first, here are some more of my objections. Steven Pinker has thrown so many ideas and hypotheses into this book, and he's such a fast talking, smooth intellect that it's hard to evaluate all of it--as though he were some rogue trader wheeling and dealing beyond the capacity of his would-be supervisors. You can't help but be impressed by his moves even when they're too fast to follow and you know he's sometimes pulling a fast one. Steven Pinker doesn't do justice by his opponents. I remember the Platonic principle I learned in Plato at the Googleplex--that you haven't refuted an argument unless you have it in its best articulation. Straw men won't do. We hear references to opposing ideas and their proponents but in this book it's assumed that Pinker's views represent the "normal" and "best" views. I mean his views that the current commercial economy and individualism do represent the best of all possible worlds. I may even agree with him, but my point is that not everyone does.  One of Pinker's main arguments for the decline of violence is that a lower percentage of humans suffer violence now than in the early modern period, medieval times, the Renaissance, or in antiquity or prehistory. Yes, a lot of people suffered violence in the 20th century, but, according to him, a lower percentage. But, if more people suffer now but are a lower percent of the total population, is that really less violence? Did anybody ask the particular sufferers? If each human is an end in him- or herself, and a greater number are suffering, can that really be considered evidence for the decline of violence? Actually, I took that line of argument--asking what the individuals themselves would have had to say--straight from Pinker's mouth: Ho Chi Minh was correct when he prophesied, "Kill ten of our men and we will kill one of yours. In the end, it is you who will tire." 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 proverbial ten men how they felt about this), and the United States eventually conceded the war of attrition despite having every other advantage. (p. 309)(my italics) Something similar happens--the author's doing what he himself reprimands others for--in the area of religion. Over and over, Pinker comes down hard on religion, blaming it for the violence and excesses of earlier eras. Yet he has to employ the most fundamentalist interpretations and he has to ignore aspects that run counter to that thesis, and all in a field that is outside his area of expertise. He has to take things literally and his interpretations as the one-and-only interpretations, laid down once and for all, for example, to take a common and conventionally-made criticism:  The overriding principle was that animals exist for the benefit of humans. In the Hebrew Bible, God's first words to Adam and Eve in Genesis 1:28 are "Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." (p. 458) And he has to pick out only the aspects of scripture that he finds distasteful. And use whatever "God said" in some Bible verse as if an actual historical event to compare to "other" historical events. Apparently he must even keep the King James flavor (moveth). Expounding on the meaning of seemingly arbitrary and bizarre but nevertheless rigidly required manners and rules of etiquette, Pinker studies their history. But studying the history of religion that way wouldn't advance Pinker's argument, while blindness to any such thing does, so he leaves it in the dark. "What you see is all there is," as Daniel Kahneman, another cognitive psychologist, says. My early impression from the quotes that were up when I started out was that most casual readers were reading The Better Angels of Our Nature primarily to hear Steven Pinker diss religion and reinforce their own views. In an apparent spirit of fairness, Pinker disses the New Testament, too, but he reserves most of his ire for the Hebrew Bible. Let that be a lesson for you, Christians who disrespect your Old Testament. You are doing the work of atheists for them.  Speaking of cognitive psychology, Pinker pretty much worships at the alter of reason. Doing otherwise wasn't something that was going to advance his thesis; the reader will have to look elsewhere for the limits of reason and for the understanding of consciousness as a system of attention rather than as some pristine space for free choice. One more criticism: I was surprised by a clear inconsistency on Pinker's part. This author loves local authority, and, on the national level, Leviathan--a central government large and powerful enough to reserve violence to itself and wield it in an increasingly disinterested and just manner--as an alternative to a wild, wild west scenario of every man for himself. Yet when it came to the international level he argues correlationally for a "Democratic Peace" theory, calling the "empire" theory of peace "cynical." (p. 281) Huh? And going back to religion for a minute, what about God and religion as a means to call up a symbolic "Leviathan," long before there could be an actual central government in that role. He hints as much on p. 539, quoting from Martin Daly and Margo Wilson's 1988 book Homicide on the subject of our retention of a "just deserts" approach to justice as opposed to adopting a purely utilitarian "deterrence" approach: From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, this almost mystical and seemingly irreducible moral imperative is the output of a mental mechanism with a straightforward adaptive function: to reckon justice and administer punishment by a calculus which ensures that violators reap no advantage from their misdeeds. The enormous volume of mystico-religious bafflegab about atonement and penance and divine justice and the like is the attribution to higher detached authority of what is actually a mundane, pragmatic matter: discouraging self-interested competitive acts by reducing their profitability to nil. Pinker himself goes on to argue that just deserts itself may serve a deterrent function, and that if we were to get rid entirely of the just deserts, "retributive" aspect, making the justice system "too narrowly utilitarian," then "malefactors would learn to game it. Just deserts can close off that option." I think it is here, in those words, and in waffling sprinkled throughout the book on the subject of religion, that Pinker concedes the value of of the very phenomenon against which he becomes so exercised. But he doesn't get that he has done so. I got the impression that Steven Pinker really, really wants his theory that our better angels have won to be true. More on that at the end... Now to some of his thought-provoking assertions and conclusions: Prehistorical hunter-gatherer times were not some idyllic period during which the world was populated by noble savages free from the corrupting influence of civilization. On the contrary, life was nasty, brutish and short; those times were dominated by sneaky, murderous, rapacious raiding parties. Things had to settle down considerably before anybody could write or read any books, people! Yes, it was two steps forward, one step backward for eons; people lost health and strength when they traded in hunting and gathering for agriculture--but still! Nor were medieval times some idyllic period over which to nostalgically yearn. That would be "cutting off your nose to spite your face," nose-snipping being one common response to a slight. Honor was priceless but life was cheap. The way we feel now--that our bodies belong to us and are ours to care for--a perception that seems to reflect "reality" but is of recent, modern derivation. It is an attitude we anachronistically think always existed. Instead, individualism developed gradually. With modern times we no longer belonged to some warlord or king; and with the spread of trade we had to get inside the head of the prospective trading partner and see others as we see ourselves..as we see others....  The biggest problems for a society come with an overload of young males. And, yet, the confounding preference for male babies that drives female infanticide in many cultures! Infanticide itself is far from being some aberration attributable to the impact of modern stress and alienation. Infanticide was the norm from time immemorial--if it helped the survival of current young whose viability was already established, circumstances being such that a mother could care for only so many. This kind of thinking--some people don't want to hear it! It's enough to garner threatening letters for poor scientists. Genocide is not a disease of modernity either. We've just learned to recognize it, that's all. Life used to be a permanent holocaust for nameless multitudes, in slavery and through the impact of war and violence. No one thought anything was wrong with it unless it happened to you, says Pinker. Murderous death was supposed to represent the verdict of history, of God, in accordance with a way of thinking only lately subject to question.  In this day of competition for victimhood (at best a two-edged sword!), silence in the aftermath of genocide seems inconceivable, but if genocide was a just verdict, no wonder that, at first, Holocaust survivors couldn't talk about it. I am told that changed for American Jews in consequence of the 1967 Six Day War. Did that raise the possibility of an alternative verdict? I want to digress here on how views on the suffering of violence are shifted around in religious narratives. Some ideas have begun to consolidate themselves while I've been working on this review but since they are off the beaten path of the review I'll hide them.  In particular I came back to Galatians 3:13 in which Paul turns around the crucifixion of Christ from the "curse of the law" to a blessing. That has always bothered me because Deuteronomy 21:22-23 doesn't say being hanged (or crucified) is a curse. (The Jewish Study Bible and the NRSV share an editor; the translations and footnotes are very similar.) It says that leaving the body out and unburied is the curse (affront to God)--basically the same as for Sophocles' Antigone and her brother whom Cleon considered a traitor and wouldn't let her bury, to the misfortune of all. In biblical times--meaning Hebrew biblical times--stoning was the method. The final redaction was around the time of the Exile, when crucifixion didn't yet loom large. The Hebrew bible--"the law" in Paul's terms--recognized that, atypically, some traitor-types might be hanged or impaled; in that case, leaving the body exposed might well be part of the punishment. So the bible, to circumscribe such practices, said the body must not be exposed and left overnight to become carrion. The bible, in other words, sided with the morals of Sophocles' Antigone. That is what Deuteronomy is saying. But, by post-testamental--make that intertestamental times, if you're from a Christian tradition--that had changed. The sadistic execution method of crucifixion had become unfortunately well-known, and, by then, that's what people thought of when they read those Deuteronomy verses. Here's an article I came across--the first few pages, anyway: http://www.tsm.edu/sites/default/file... So, I think Paul thought what he thought and wrote what he wrote--and isn't the part about suffering a bad end as a curse typical? Isn't turning that upside down what religions do? But, "the Law" didn't say that being crucified is a curse. No gas chambers? We may think genocide requires modern technology, but it doesn't. Just lock a town's population in a building and come back in two weeks. Think of the sieges of the ancient world, or of chariots, the advanced weapons of a long-ago day. And, now--political correctness. For Pinker, PC is the residue of changes that have occurred and that we've therefore forgotten about.  During the transition to modernity, people did not fully appreciate that they were undergoing changes aimed at reducing violence, and once the changes were entrenched, the process was forgotten. When Europeans were mastering norms of self-control, they felt like they were becoming more civilized and courteous, not that they were part of a campaign to drive the homicide statistics downward. Today we give little thought to the rationale behind the customs left behind by that change.... ...(A) civilizing offensive can leave a culture with a legacy of puzzling customs, peccadilloes, and taboos. ... The code of etiquette bequeathed by this and other Rights Revolutions is pervasive enough to have acquired a name. We call it political correctness. He also thinks we become amnesiac about the degree of change. We forget what the past was really like. We say little has changed. That is related to PC, enabling us to keep our guard up against the return of "the bad old days," and it also enables activists to exhort us to do more. In other words, exaggeration. If we had to acknowledge how much better things are, could we get away with it? People say racism is just as bad as it always was, but it isn't. Same for antisemitism. Not so far.  My husband was taking a Greek course last fall. In Georgia, people over 65 can take college courses for free within the state university system if there is space--isn't that nice? In connection with his course we could attend some lectures on antiquity, and at one the doctoral candidate made reference to the Greek "dark ages" (from about 1200-800 BCE). There was an African-American woman of uncertain age--meaning not young (but younger than I, as nearly everyone is getting to be) in the audience. I mention her ethnicity for any light that may shed on her reply, and what she did, during the question-and-answer period, is take issue with the "dark ages" designation, for, she said, we shouldn't make such a designation given that this is such a dark age.  That exemplifies the point Pinker was making re forgetting what the past was really like and exaggerating the problems of the present, even as we all sat safe, secure, comfortable and diverse, discussing our esoteric subject. That segues to the Moralization Gap.  Say I've done something to you. From your point of view, you were my victim. Our perspectives are going to be very different. Mine will be that whatever I did wasn't all that serious. At any rate it was a long time ago. Did I really have a choice? What can one expect, anyway? My stance is going to tend toward you should get over it already, and, while you're at it, stop being so over-sensitive. Meanwhile, you don't see it that way, not by a long shot. Whatever it is lives on in your memory and your heart. For you, not forgetting is more than common sense; it's a sacred trust.  In short, the Moralization Gap is about the impact of self-interest on our views and dealings with each other, a potentially fruitful method of analysis for understanding the dynamics of a situation and why it's so hard to get along. According to Pinker the scientist is usually going to side against the past as a living cause and with what's over being over. So, in other words, he's assuming whatever it is is over. One can envisage still more angry letters and protests against that poor scientist. Why does Pinker need to believe at all costs in his Enlightenment values? It occurs to me that for a philosophe who is not from the religious majority it's distinctly unpalatable to consider what it would be like if the hands of the majority tradition were to be untied. What would happen to his vaunted authority then? And yet when he goes on and on with his criticism of the Hebrew bible, it sounds like sucking up to that majority, as if to say "Listen to me: I'm putting them down; I'm not like them." And, in that way, he's reminiscent of Marx. Here's a 2008 article by Jerry Muller asserting the triumph of ethnonationalism. If Muller's assertions are correct, they undermine Pinker's general hypothesis. (Foreign Affairs allows non-subscribers one article a month and two if you register.) http://www.foreignaffairs.com/article... Here, critics try to refute Muller but don't succeed: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/article...  Finally, don't think that all that's here is all there is. This review isn't very systematic. Or comprehensive; for example, there's game theory and the Prisoner's Dilemma in the evolution of cooperation. Or the concept "self-determination of peoples" as instigator of blood baths....     audio history morality-justice               5 reviews32 followers     July 22, 2016   Loathing is the word. It infuriated me. You'd think that after all these years one would stop being surprised by this style of typical new-atheist/liberal argumentation but when I see this much cherrypicking, oversimplification, handwaving and western supremacism shoved into a single book, I still get all worked up. And of course, it doesn't help that they call themselves "The Brights" and "The Enlightened" etc. I mean, who does that? Even if I was intellectually convinced by their arguments, I still wouldn't wanna hang around these jerks.His main thesis is simple and for anyone brought up after the 19th century, overly familiar: We were savages, then we were saved by Science and Reason. Not all of us, of course, only Europeans and Americans at first, but thanks to Capitalism (or as he labels it, the gentle commerce), everywhere else is catching up slowly, too. One time this evil thing called Communism had suddenly sprung up out of nowhere and caused many deaths and suffering but it was ultimately defeated by the Allies of Light. Etc. "If you'd suggest occupying another country today, everyone would laugh at you and they'd think you were crazy; it is a thing of the past", he says (paraphrasing). So what about Iraq or Afghanistan? Panama, Bolivia, Vietnam, Libya and countless other bloody conflicts and interjections by the Western forces, mainly USA? Oh, they are not "wars", he says, but merely unfortunate but "defensive" actions taken by civilized nations to protect their democratic ways. Isn't it incredibly telling that in an EIGHT-HUNDRED-page book about the history of world politics and violence, the word "imperialism" is not uttered at all. Not even once. There are a myriad of graphs and numbers stuffed inside. But the way he handles them and the way he chooses the sources he gets them from is so blatantly manipulative that it's cringe-inducing. A source repudiates his claims about "The Long Peace" and "the waning of war", and draws a bleak picture of the condition the world is in outside TheCivilizedNations? Well they are extremist, communist, leftist fanatics, you can't trust their data. Here, we have a government-funded organization that prints out numbers that fit my theory beautifully; surely they're the trustworthy ones. In one of the most embarrasing moments of the book, «we are seriously asked to draw conclusions from a graph of the "rate of battle deaths in state-based armed conflicts between 1900 and 2005" (Figure 6-1) while being instructed to ignore the figures for the first and second world wars »**. Why should we ignore two world wars, while looking at the history of wars, you ask? Because "after all, the world has seen nothing close to that level since". It was a fluke. This is kinda like saying "please don't call it murder just because there's a body lying on the floor with a knife in the back, since it's not like we see something like that everyday". Forgive me for the vulgar language, but this reminds me of a lovely Turkish idiom: "If my aunt had balls, she would be my uncle". Well, I could go on and on (like this occasionally biased and contrived -leftists!- but very detailed and informative review does) but you get the gist. In the end, it's not that I find the claim that violence in general is getting comparatively subsided (and it's at least partially thanks to Western Civilization) completely worthless. It doesn't even have to be a glorious, total, irreversible change of paradigm to be worth praising. If we are living in a marginally better, more peaceful world, we should know about it, and understand the why and the how so we can push it further. If it really turns out that the Westerners are morally superior and more evolved or something, so be it; it's not the premise that bugs me at all, but if it takes this much deceptive and manipulative "scholarship" to prove a point, maybe we should at least raise an eyebrow in mild suspicion before patting our world of gentle commerce in the back, you know. **Quote from David's review, because I'm too lazy to look it up myself.     history non-fiction               443 reviews90 followers     December 14, 2018   What an interesting read! If the idea is to give the reader food for thought this book more than nourishes. My approach to this book was a bit different than is usual. I have tended to write a review and then read others. Not in this case. I read many good reviews and few that were critical so was very open to being a critic. I am of the opinion that a few did not take note of what Pinker wrote. He got some numbers wrong was a fairly common complaint. He may have and admits as much. A few times he made it clear that his numbers were estimates based on researchers who are respected in the field. “…. so there is no single correct estimate” he writes on page 60 of my copy. Page 168 “….. no one knows exactly how many were killed…..” when discussing holy slaughters. In fact Pinker supports scepticism as he suggested on page 217 when discussing the Enlightenment.  As a westerner living a very comfortable life in Australia I was intrigued to read a comment by US politician John Kerry on page 417. “We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorist are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance. As a former law-enforcement person, I know we’re never going to end prostitution. We’re never going to end illegal gambling. But we’re going to reduce it, organised crime, to a level where it isn’t on the rise. It isn’t threatening people’s lives every day, and fundamentally it’s something that you continue to fight, but it’s not threatening the fabric of your life” He was right of course but he became “unfit to lead” and had to back pedal as the reality is that the authorities may well have reduced and contained crime, by cripes don’t tell the people that because the media will not be happy unless they are able to make you feel bad about just about every part of your life. Less violence? How dare that be considered when there is news to sell. And take it in your stride as you are not going to get hit by the Mafia? Bah!  This book covered a variety of female issues and after conversation elsewhere I even read On Rape by Germaine Greer. Hardly an area I knew much about. Glad I did. Perhaps blokes my age, 60ish, need to get of their fat arses and not think they rule the world as Pinker has given a very good case that the rise of feminist thought has been good for our collective health. While reading this I came across this item on the repulsive practise of female circumcision. Yes the item says caution is required but it is good to read that progress is taking place.   https://www.theguardian.com/global-de...  This book has some fascinating sub chapters and one on page 572 called Whence The Rights Revolution? should thrill the hearts of all book readers. Among other things is a fivefold increase in books published from 1960 to 2000. The information we are getting seems to just make us collectively smarter when it comes to treating each other with a little bit of respect and not get on our high horse and want to smash the face in of our neighbours be they next door or in the nation next door.  So does Pinker say we are in for even less violence in the future? No! In fact he makes it abundantly clear that one bit of lunacy can change everything. I personally am very unsure we have rosy future. I am like the next father of children and worry about the environment, that a loony with a nuke will go mad but the book itself is in fact not really about that. It is about the data that shows violence has dropped and gives several reasons why. Disagree with the reasons by all means but also enjoy the fact you have more chance of dying in a car crash than by a terrorist attack no matter what the newspapers tells you.     history my-non-fiction           September 24, 2012   I have a peripheral awareness that Pinker awakens red penitus in a goodly proportion of his stalwart readers: but I don’t know why. I shan’t delve into this before I write up ‘better angels’: don’t want to be distracted by ‘noise’. 800 pages of socio-economic postulating: always an inexact science, is going to rub someone the wrong way hither or thither. We see what we want to see, and 800 pages of the ‘humanities’ is like waving a red flag to a bull: plenty of scope to flare up, statistically speaking, and isn’t that just what we love to do best: exploit the ‘Moralizing Gap’ to justify our own world view:we’re brushed up dammit: well, OK, we may not be able to prove a point statistically, mathematically, economically, biologically or physically, but give me the humanities, I say: and see if I know my oochie from my achie.  The subject centre stage here is violence, (mainly in the westen hemisphere, where data is more readily available)and the overarching conclusion is that it has decreased over time: in terms of war, rape, homicide and any other conceivable physical violation against the person.  No one, as far as I am aware, has disagreed with this overall premise, although certain definitions of violence are under debate : e.g. the high prevaleence of infanticide has been supplanted with high levels of abortion, so in this particular area Pinker’s hypothesis does not hold up: but this is and other instances are outliers in the more general scenario of violence reduction. Pinker’s starting premise is the biological impulse, the Darwinian hegemony for survival . This type of thinking will either resonate or repel. But it is an important point because if you’re going to go down the route of biological justification, then its inadmissible to switch and bait halfway through as Pinker does. And he does so by positing the issue of excessive violence in terms of biological necessity, but resolves its decrease through ambiguous channels such as self control, empathy, reverse morality and, incongruously, and ultimately, the Flynn effect. Hence the incompatibility? How can something which starts off as nature be dampened by nurture? Huh? Huh? On the surface, all of the theories Pinker posits withstands microscopic examination: the Civilizing Process (e.g. the contract between man and state) does indeed explain the decline in violence: prior to Henry II introducing the state vs Jane Doe as opposed to Joe Bloggs vs Jane Doe, violence was the only way out: you smacked your feudal neighbours about, or you lost out. The aristocracy were just as likely as the hoi polloi to ‘engage’ in a good brawl. After the change in law, it wasn’t so beneficial. The upper and middle classes modified their behaviour. The lower classes persisted (and persist), because they have never fully bought into the state-citizen contract (and to be fair, neither has the state, on their behalf). Other influencing factors intervene: commerce, the integration of minorities in spheres of influence which engender the ‘rights revolution’, the pacifying influence of women, the clear demarcation of national borders, the influx of democracy, the redefinition of moral values. And you know what: its all true. All of it. All of these trends decreased violence. And not one person can nary say it didn’t. But how exactly:well, Pinker’s final analysis is: mainly, Reason. Now, I’ve cut and pasted this next section from Peter Singer in the New York Times book review, because he rightly summarises Pinker’s position and I am too lazy to. I’m saving my fire for the constructive anlaysis after: ‘Pinker’s claim that reason is an important factor in the trends he has described relies in part on the “Flynn effect” — the remarkable finding by the philosopher James Flynn that ever since I.Q. tests were first administered, the scores achieved by those taking the test have been rising. The average I.Q. is, by definition, 100; but to achieve that result, raw test scores have to be standardized. If the average teenager today could go back in time and take an I.Q. test from 1910, he or she would have an I.Q. of 130, which would be better than 98 percent of those taking the test then. Nor is it easy to attribute this rise to improved education, because the aspects of the tests on which scores have risen most do not require a good vocabulary or even mathematical ability, but instead test powers of abstract reasoning. ...... Pinker argues that enhanced powers of reasoning give us the ability to detach ourselves from our immediate experience and from our personal or parochial perspective, and frame our ideas in more abstract, universal terms. This in turn leads to better moral commitments, including avoiding violence. It is just this kind of reasoning ability that has improved during the 20th century. He therefore suggests that the 20th century has seen a “moral Flynn effect, in which an accelerating escalator of reason carried us away from impulses that lead to violence” and that this lies behind the long peace, the new peace, and the rights revolution. Among the wide range of evidence he produces in support of that argument is the tidbit that since 1946, there has been a negative correlation between an American president’s I.Q. and the number of battle deaths in wars involving the United States. ‘ Here is where I wade in now: First of all, surely the Flynn effect is fallacious? There has been much debate about the accuracy of IQ tests in general, and how they are loaded with prescribed sense-data which automatically ‘disqualifies’ intelligent people who have not been immersed in the culture of this sense data. Second, the mode in which abstract reasoning is included in standardised tests is very easily a ‘learnable’ rather than an ‘applicable’ commodity, whose sequences have been incorporated in thousands of ephemeral ways in the educational system to begin with, and routinely tested over time. To use the Flynn effect as some overarching proof that we are ‘smarter’ than our predecessors is a travesty. But no more so than Pinker’s next theory, that ‘Reason’ has finally got the upper hand and carried us away ‘from impulse led violence’. This must be intuitively wrong, even to a philosophical novice. How can Reason deal with a biological impulse? In fact, when has Reason ever successfully ‘eliminated’ a biological impulse? Need I remind Pinker about the painful, unnecessary and degrading experiments in say trying to ‘reason with homosexuals’ that they have other choices? Conversely, I’m pretty certain no amount of reasoning will sway my biological sexual impulses either. Obviously countless other examples pertain. Pinker!!!And yet violence has gone down. How to explain this, then? Given I don’t buy Pinker’s theory, I’m going to have to have a go at this myself. Why not?  First, Pinker concedes the impulse to violence is biologically driven. Then, buried deep within the 800 page text is a study by Preston and de Waal in 2002 ‘aversiveness of conspecifics in pain’, which basically translates into primates (and humans) having a natural inbred revulsion to inflicting violence on other primates/humans (backed up by Stanley Milgram’s shock experiment and the Trolley Problem). On a separate note, there is also the well known concept of ‘crowd mechanics’: or how we all fall into rank when the mob rules. My personal theory here is that, based on the studies above, it is possibility that violence was ‘overexaggerated’ in early history to begin with, due to lack of behaviour limiting controls. Perhaps in the wild these might be say greater geographical distances between competing primate groups. In human history, perhaps it was the state contract which modified an unnaturally rampant exhibition of violence between competitors in close proximity.(picture two pitbulls in a ring: excessiveness, eh?) Effectively then, an ‘overly violent’ population was stabilised to its natural levels. But this is not the whole story. ‘Better Angels’ shows we have gone one further, and overt violence is now perhaps below what might be considered the natural equilibrium. How did this happen?  Well, it didn’t. The first thing that I must concede if I am to accept that violence is a biologically driven impulse, is that it simply can NOT have been dissipated, and certainly not by Reason. The question then is, where did the violence go? Its not easily seen as a subject-object agreement, so what happened? Its been redirected, I think. We’re not rid of it, we’re simply rechanneling in a ‘non statistical’ way. Its not with a little trepidation I’m going to mention the xBox and film now. I realise I might be relegated to cuckoo territory (my only consolation is I’ll be sharing it with Pinker though!).  In the first half of the last century we had two world wars to keep us busy (and I think anybody would agree a combined total of over 40 million casualties is enough to keep anyone’s bloodthirsty instinct at bay), in the 60s there was the Vietnam war and the most intense cold war stand off ever (Bay of Pigs), and from the eighties onwards, we have: well, video games. The xBox (and read here all its technical predecessors and contemporaries) cuts across class, race, age divide and unite men (yes, men) in an indiscriminate guts and glory campaign. Usage is phenomenal., and all inclusive. If you’re old enough to hold the controller: you’re in. Its the new passage of initiation: four year olds sat next to fourteen year olds next to forty year olds: killing, massacring, rampaging, destroying and eviscerating (apparently the only taboo is raping: there is no button for it. Says Pinker). If its not the xBox its organised sport in a way well, in a way sport hasn’t been organised ever before. Not for nothing do we have the football hooligans and the mandatory Saturday matches. And finally. Film. This is something I’ve been ‘doing’ for the last month and a half: I’ve traversed the chronological gamut of film, and I find that the level of violence in film ‘now’ is phenomenal compared to anything found before the 1960s, with ever escalating etudes since. Its gotten so bad, that at the moment we are in a new era of image making: and I call it gender segregation. The majority of current offerings seem to run across gender biased lines: mindless violent action for the men, where the directors don’t even pretend to be aiming for all round inclusivity, tempered with a backlash for women: just as silly a regression in stereotypical ‘romcom’ where no allowances are made for the non chicklit minded. Cinema is divided, in a way it never was prior to the 1960s onwards. Which serves no one well. But apropos of violence: this is where its all happening. Behind the scenes, where the victims are not ‘real’ people, and the statistics don’t register. Which means, of course, that the problem of violence hasn’t gone away.  It will resurface in all its glory. Just give it the right time and place.     2012               1,131 reviews1,007 followers     February 10, 2017   Steven Pinker certain ranges widely in intellectual circles. Although he is nominally a professor of psychology at Harvard, but even with specialties (per Wikipedia) in experimental psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, he somehow dove into history to present one of the best TED Talks, back in 2007: 
 Steven Pinker on the myth of violence
 (watch those nineteen minutes, if you haven't already).Wonderfully, he has now followed that presentation up with an entire volume. Peter Singer wrote the glowing review of this book for the New York Times, and that somewhat lengthy essay is itself well worth reading: 
 Is Violence History?
. Update — the Autumn 2011 issue of the excellent pop sociology quarterly The Wilson Quarterly also enthusiastically recommends the book (with minor caveats) in 
 Peace on Earth
. Update — Just got this from the library; must read within three weeks since the number of holds will prevent me from renewing. Curiously, the podcast I was listening to on the way to the library was on a related topic. The U.C. Berkeley School of Law professor (and socioologist) Franklin Zimring wrote an article back in August on the precipitous decline in crime in New York City, and was interviewed by the charming SciAm editor Steve Mirsky, 
  The City That Became Safe: What New York Teaches about Urban Crime and Its Control
. Check it out! Update — just stumbled on a brief Q&amp;A with the Economist here. Poked around and found a review, also covering A History of Violence: From the End of the Middle Ages to the Present, titled 
 Punchline
; and a summation by the Economist blogger Buttonwood at 
 A Cause for Celebration
. Yet another update — since I bought the book, I'm hoping to read it again after I finish a few others. Meanwhile, I've found a few other reviews and interviews. The philosopher Nigel Warburton interviews Steven Pinker on the Social Science Bites podcast. A transcript of the interview is here, along with a downloadable PDF or audio MP3. Pinker was interviewed on the Charlie Rose Show. A review of the book on the GuardianUK Observer column by John Naughton,  Steven Pinker: fighting talk from the prophet of peace.  An audio interview from the GuardianUK's Science Weekly podcast. A text interview with author Sam Harris (who is Pinker's friend and wrote the introduction to Pinker's book),  Twilight of Violence. A vigorously negative review (albeit simplistic and misguided, in my quick, and as-yet contingent appraisal) by the philosopher John Gray in Prospect Magazine, Delusions of peace. Finally, the book's Wikipedia page has additional citations in the praise and criticism sections.­     awaiting-big-review nonfiction own               288 reviews291 followers     September 10, 2017   Are you afraid of being of being attacked or murdered? Do you think our society is becoming more violent and less safe? If you watch the news, read the papers and listen to politicians it would be logical to be afraid of the seemingly rising tide of violence and criminality in the world. However, Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature will show you your feelings are misguided- crime and violence in society is lower than it has ever been, and our often idealized past (even the recent past) was a very violent and scary place.Before you read this book (and you should read it) be aware that it is Looooong. Weighing in at 832 pages  The Better Angels of our Nature is no reading Everest, no Tolstoy, but each of those pages is a heavy bit of paper, drowning in a kudzu of fascinating facts and info that has spread to near every sentence. It was a long march to the final page, but trust me, it was worth it. This is a fascinating and constantly surprising read. Pinker presents the perfect antidote for the doom, gloom and bolt-your-doors crime hysteria present in the media. I already knew that we live in a comparatively safe era of history- the lack of recent Viking raids on my apartment block is noticeable - but Pinker makes it clear that this is by far the safest period of human history that there has ever been. Present-day developed nations make even the 1970s and 80s look like a time when to step outside was to enter a gritty urban version of the hunger games, complete with roving packs of armed rapists (the sexual violence stats for those decades are genuinely horrifying). The United States, sadly, is still more violent than Europe or Australasia, but even with all the shootings and killings of recent years the cold hard statistics show that Americans are still safer than ever. This completely flips the established narrative in politics and the media, and the hard data shows that suicide is a greater threat than murder, or even from war and natural disasters combined. The average person in twenty-first century society is more likely to die by their own hand than they are by the hands of others.  The reality of contemporary crime and violence is completely contrary to the apocalyptic vision presented by fearmongering politicians and news outlets and The Better Angels of our Nature, or at least a summary of Pinker’s findings, should be compulsory reading for anyone standing for public office. Pinker's book stands as an engaging testament to how much progress we have made in making our broader human society far less violent.     history non-fic               Author  9 books455 followers     November 2, 2017   Steven Pinker’s "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined" is a big ambitious book. Perhaps too big, perhaps too ambitious. And perhaps, too sprawling for its own good. One could opt for a Peace Studies reader and get a more eclectic taste of what research is out there. Would it be as comprehensive as this book? Maybe, maybe not, but you would get the benefit of tasting the many kinds of literature through many different voices. Here, we get a great deal of peace science, behavioral science, religious literature and more, all sifted through one scientific (and often brilliant) voice. Much research is included in this volume, and the many references often drown out the voice, but the voice is also in control of how we receive the literature.  So, what is the book -- polemical argument, scientific memoir, or reference volume? I doubt it knows the answer.  The point of the book is simple: to outline how violence has decreased, and to answer why so that we may learn from our successes and continue to replicate them.  The book might strike some as counter-intuitive -- in the time of Rwanda, Darfur, Iraq, mass-casualty terrorism, runaway gun violence in the US, and much, much more, it would seem like our times are just "another bloody century". Surely, if we subtract the effects of nuclear weapons in deterring warfare between major powers, and on top of that, if we discount the way modern battlefield medicine has led to a decrease in fatalities from warfare (many are still wounded and crippled), then our century can't be that much more peaceful than others. And there is also the other issue, the possible historical contingency of our own "long peace" (much like the long relative peacefulness between the Napoleonic wars and the first World War). One really bloody hegemonic war between nuclear powers might be all that's needed to eliminate our current gains.  And yet there is a surprising body of evidence that suggests that violence has decreased that spans across multiple disciplines. Pinker makes the case that this trend is deep, enduring, and possibly sustainable. Ancient and medieval societies took genocide, rape, mutilation and other types of violence as given. All of these forms of violence were permissible as long as customs and traditions were adhered to.  For me, the most interesting aspects of the book are the tracking of the rights movements and the civilizing processes. These are truly fascinating aspects of the evolving peace that I was not fully aware of. I think for many of the scholars coming to this book with some background in peace studies or studies of violence, they will have a similar reaction to mine. I know that...and I know that...and I know that...but ah!, I didn't know that!  This speaks to the benefit of having such a comprehensive volume. Peace researchers who are aware of one of type of literature might be bored by some chapters of the book, and yet, find themselves enthralled by others.  Overall, a fantastic read and one that I would readily recommend to others.     books-of-2017 international-relations-classics               337 reviews288 followers     January 12, 2018   Pinker goes into voluminous detail to show us that violence has steadily declined in human society since prehistoric times. In this well-structured work rich with statistics, charts, and the ideas of influential scholars he identifies six prevailing trends: The Pacification Process, the Civilizing Process, the Humanitarian Revolution, the Long Peace, the New Peace, and the Rights Revolutions. Turning from history to psychology he identifies five inner demons that lead us to violence: Predation, dominance, revenge, sadism, and ideology. Then he identifies four better angels: Empathy, self-control, morality and reason. He gives us a brief review of violence in human history before explaining each trend and the underlying psychology. Below is my recap.The first trend, the Pacification Process, explains the decline of violent deaths as a percentage of the population from the time of prehistoric tribes to today’s modern nation states. Incessant feuding and raiding between tribes gave way to organized societies that enforced laws and weighed more carefully the consequences of war. The decline has been steady but not smooth with large conflicts and exterminations causing big blips in the trend line but not breaking it.  The second trend, the Civilizing Process, explains how people acquired manners and standards of behavior that were less prone to violence. Pinker attributes much of both processes to Hobbes Leviathan, the state. From 5000 fiefdoms in 15th century Europe came 30 nations in 20th century Europe. As these states grew in size, so did strong central authority. Laws, rules and norms on behavior were imposed to ensure loyalty and stability decreasing internal violence. Increased commerce created interdependence between states also engendering stability and reducing the benefits of interstate conflict. The degree of violence in a country or even a region in the US is best explained by acceptance of the rule of law. The rule of law is not accepted where governments are weak or by people in remote regions or by people who feel discriminated against. In these situations street law replaces government laws, honor systems prevail and personal disputes are much more likely to end in violence. The third trend, the Humanitarian Revolution, developed from the Enlightenment which began in the seventeenth century led by philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. The Humanitarian Revolution challenged sadism, despotism and cruel punishments for people and animals. The invention of the printing press had resulted in an explosion of books and rapid increase in literacy. Reading, particularly popular novels which induced vicarious emotion, led to shared ideas, values and perspective crossing traditional community lines. People from different backgrounds congregating in cities and increased international trade contributed to the Humanitarian Revolution as did the Civilizing Process. Prior to the Humanitarian Revolution the world was brutish and cruel. Pinker goes into great detail about many popular tortures that were widely enjoyed such as burning witches and dangling cats over fires for evening fun. Communities even purchased prisoners from other jurisdictions so they could hold executions for public entertainment. Reading this section is like reading about a completely different world. Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror provides good background. The fourth trend Pinker calls the Long Peace. He is referring to the relatively peaceful period since WWII. He also points to the long period of relative European peace between the Napoleonic Wars and WWI. Pinker goes back further amassing a plethora of statistical measures to posit that the trend of the world since at least the fifteenth century is towards fewer wars and fewer war deaths as a percentage of world population. This holds true even considering the huge casualties of WWI and WWII and other deadly calamities. Pinker believes nationalism and territorial conquest are on the decline as Enlightenment values such as human rights take hold. The humanitarian influence is strongly reinforced by the now readily available real-time graphic pictures of war. He sees hope in the number of countries that have stopped conscription and the slower than expected rate of nuclear proliferation. He goes back 200 years to Kant who pointed out three forces that promoted peace – democracy, international trade, and international organizations. All three have experienced recent dramatic growth supporting Pinker’s trends of pacification, civilizing, and humanitarianism to support peace.  The fifth trend is the New Peace. This encompasses the period following the end of the Cold War in 1989 up to the time Pinker wrote the book, published in 2011. Pinker analyses different types of wars (interstate, non-state, and civil), mass exterminations (racial and political) and terrorism to show the world has continued to become more peaceful. He points out how our perceptions have changed. Compare the 5,000 Americans and 100,000 Iraqis that have died during this period in Middle Eastern conflicts to the 58,000 Americans and 1,000,000 or more Vietnamese who died in that conflict. What shocks today would have seemed far less significant just decades prior. Once, even genocide didn’t raise the eyebrows of those not affected. Pinker discusses modern exterminations including the Armenian genocide, Soviet collectivization, the Holocaust, Chinese land reform, and Rwandan genocide. Political instability, ethnic divisions and ideology all play roles leading to authoritarianism and genocide. Terrorism has always afflicted the world. But reliable statistics are available only going back to the 1970’s. Western Europe has seen a steady decline of terrorism as has the US with major exceptions: 9-11 in 2001 and to a lesser extent the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Pinker points out with the exception of 2001 and 1995 “more Americans were killed each year from lightening, deer, peanut allergies, bee stings, and ‘ignition or melting nightwear’ than by terrorist attacks.” So the recent trend, despite all the histrionics, is toward less violence, but it only takes one megalomaniac with nuclear weapons to undo all the trend lines. The sixth trend Pinker calls the Rights Revolutions, which were primarily due to the increase in access to information exposing people to new ideas and different viewpoints. Contributing are democracies which promote access and prosperity which allows people to focus beyond necessity. Pinker describes five Rights Revolutions: Civil Rights: From the lynchings of the American South to the pogroms of Russia, racial and religious violence has persisted throughout history. In America only since Truman integrated the armed forces in 1948 and Johnson signed the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 did change begin to take hold. Today most Americans accept diversity and respect differences.  Woman’s Rights: Rape and wife beating have been endemic in every society. Women were regarded as property. Rape was considered a crime against the husband or father. Not until the late middle ages did Western views begin to change and so.me cultures still haven’t. It wasn’t until the 1970’s that states in the U.S. began to pass laws against husbands raping their wives. As late as the 1970’s women were denied credit unless their husbands signed. A 1974 law made that illegal. Change has been dramatic in the last fifty years with the “me too” movement the latest iteration of progress.  Children’s Rights: Until recently 10-15% of all children were killed shortly after birth. Infanticide has been regularly practiced by all types of societies. Mothers did it to ensure the survival of other children. Men did it because they did not believe the child was theirs. Both men and women did it because the child was a girl. For children that survived, beating or at least spanking them was considered good parenting until the last half of the twentieth century. Today the danger may be that parents are obsessively controlling their children’s lives and taking “safety” precautions that are counterproductive. Children should be allowed to learn how to play without adults around. Parental influence has its limits. Children take on the values and vernacular of their peers.  Gay Rights: As late as 1969 homosexuality was illegal in every U.S state except Illinois. That gay and lesbian marriage is now legal and widely accepted in the U.S. is to me the most unanticipated of all the gains in human rights in my lifetime.  Animal Rights: Abuse of animals like abuse of humans has a long history and only in the last decades has the issue come to the forefront. Rising concern over the humane treatment of pets, farm animals, and laboratory animals has spawned action groups and regulations to protect animals. Cock fighting and dog fighting are outlawed many places and even bullfighting is on the decline. This is a far cry from primitive, ancient and medieval societies where torturing animals for fun was widely practiced.Next Pinker describes the psychology that predisposes us to violence. He describes the Moralization Gap, self-serving biases used to justify our actions and feelings. This gap enables perpetrators and victims to create widely different narratives of the same event. He even digs into brain structure to explain how violent and anti-social impulses are generated and to further discredit the concept of pure evil. The ingredients for evil lurk inside all of us. One is reminded of Solzhenitsyn’s observations that, “…the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” and “To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good...” Pinker identifies what he terms the five demons that drive violent behavior:  Predation is exploitive, practical violence done for personal gain.  Dominance is characterized by actions that tell others - Don’t mess with me, I’m in charge. Narcissistic (grandiose, needs admiration, lacks empathy) political leaders are particularly violence prone. Thwarted narcissists feel humiliated leading to envy and rage. Virulent nationalism and tribalism can form in the presence of group narcissism.  Revenge is a common urge and major cause of violence. Empathy, dependence and close connections can modulate revenge.  Sadism, inflicting pain for pleasure, is hard for most of us to understand. It can grow out of predation and punishment. It is largely an acquired taste. People in control of others can slide into sadism.  Ideology justifies violence as a means to an end for the greater good. People in tightly knit groups feed off each other making violence seem reasonable. When the group is dominant others behave like sheep and pretend to believe. Euphemisms, gradualism, diffusing responsibility, distancing from and denigrating victims are common techniques that lead to moral disengagement.Lastly Pinker reviews four “Better Angels”, those traits that mitigate violence:  Empathy, often used in the sense of sympathy or compassion, has several meanings. One is perspective taking which refers to seeing things from someone else’s point of view. Another is theory of mind, trying to figure out someone else’s thoughts and emotions. Empathy is typically applied disproportionately to individuals in the same community, or who share our values, or are cute. Thus empathy does not embody fairness. Expanding our perception of interconnectedness with others can expand our circle of empathy and altruistic behavior.  Self-Control often means delaying gratification. It’s fair to discount future benefits but many of us discount them far too much. Individual self-control is rooted in brain structure and function including the workings of hormones and neurotransmitters. But it can be cultivated. The Civilizing Process by setting behavioral norms has helped us make substantial improvements over the centuries.  Recent Biological Evolution (not a better angel) has been proposed based on varying demographics in birth and death rates, but there is not adequate proof for this. The Humanitarian Revolution, The Rights Revolution and significant recent declines in crime have happened too rapidly for biological evolution to be a factor.  Morality and Taboo have shifted. Pinker reviews several models. The shift has been from morals based on purity, community and authority which appeal to social conservatives to those based on fairness, individual autonomy and rationality which are values embraced by social liberals. The shift is reflected in recent changes in minority, women’s and gay rights.  Reason despite newsworthy examples to the contrary is on the rise. It reduces violence by identifying the absurd, promoting self-control and even morality. It introduces the concept of proportionality which is essential to fairness. For whatever purpose reason originally developed, its continued expansion to other areas is only natural. IQ test do show people are getting smarter, at least in the area of abstract reasoning, a skill that is developed as educational levels, science, technology and a symbol rich environment have increased. This does not mean underlying general intelligence has increased only the way it is applied has changed. The development of abstract reasoning promotes cooperation, liberalism, economic literacy and democracy; all of which help reduce violence. To put this all together Pinker looks, “for common threads in the Pacification Process, the Civilizing Process, the Humanitarian Revolution, The Long Peace, the New Peace and the Rights Revolutions. Each should represent a way in which predation, dominance, revenge, sadism, or ideology has been overpowered by self-control, empathy, morality, or reason.” He identifies forces that turned out not to be important to the six trends: Weaponry and disarmament, resources and power, affluence, and religion and ones that did matter: The Leviathan, gentle commerce, feminization, the expanding circle of sympathy and the escalator of reason. It is popular to opine nostalgically on the good old days and extol the simpler more natural life of past centuries and eons, but as Pinker points out those past times for most people were harsh, bitter and much more violent. Pinker makes a convincing and well documented case that we have gone from a society where violence is the accepted and expected norm to one where violence has diminished to the point that we look on it as an aberration. He takes pains to not predict the future even though the many statistical trend lines Pinker presents imply that we might expect more of the same in the future. I’m not swayed by statistical implications for the future but his analysis of the forces at play give me hope. Pinker’s thesis is not uncontroversial. However, despite its detractors, it has won many awards and significant endorsements. But even if you don’t buy in to Pinker’s conclusions, there is much food for thought. This book is for readers with a serious interest. It is well written and clear but there is a lot to digest and I think most readers will be best served by patience and allotting the time necessary to take it all in. It is, as widely claimed, a very important book that can change the way you look at the world and the human animal that is dictating its future.     science               Author  154 books37.5k followers     June 27, 2013   After a steady recent diet of short-attention-span theater internet surfing, it was very interesting to dive into a dense read that took me a week to chew through. (I am not a very fast reader, but I'm usually faster than that.) The exercise of following a really long, complex, sustained argument was probably good for me.Seven chapters of convincing examination of historical evidence to the best approximation that could be managed, all of which jibes well with what I know or have experienced of history, followed by three chapters of attempts to figure out the why of the what. Pinker was pretty good about fencing off his facts from his hypotheses with suitable disclaimers. Several times he more-or-less interrupts his narrative to give the reader tutorials on basic statistics, in a desperate bid to bring his audience up to speed so that they can understand his data and how he massages it to get it to yield up more understanding. I was very interested in the brief survey of recent formulations in neurology and cognitive psychology that he used to underpin his arguments.  I was also reminded of a classic little book from the 50s, How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff, which should really be required reading for every voter and consumer. (It has been reprinted in paperback and is now available on Kindle, I'm pleased to note.) Pinker, I think, is trying very hard to tell the truth with statistics; that little book would help ground one's evaluation either way. I was charmed by how many of my own humanist beliefs about history and human nature were supported variously, not to mention how many of the jokes and cultural references I got, but naturally, I would be; Pinker and I are of the same generation and share a certain amount of world-view, after all. I am pretty fond of the modernity that cocoons me and has repeatedly saved my life, and he does not underrate it, either. Not everything worked for me in his arguments, but enough did for going on with. He footnotes the hell out of everything, which I appreciate. Along the way he dropped recs for what sounds like a lot of potentially interesting further reading, should I find energy for it. (31 pages in very small print of sources one could go check up, ditto.) Highly recommended.                    137 reviews84 followers     July 8, 2016   This book is sure to anger or confuse just about everyone who cares about the world today, but particularly those who love to hate the idea of cultural progress: "What? You gotta be kidding - violence has declined over time? No frikin' way - just look at the news." But be assured - after you read only a few pages of this book, you'll be reminded of what life used be like in the foreign country called The Past and you just might change your tune and recognize how, for large sectors of the world's population, life today is less violent, less brutal, and less cruel. Pinker's basic thesis is that, no matter how you look at the data, no matter what time frame, no matter what part of the world or what era, and no matter what form it takes, violence, cruelty, and brutality in human society has declined over time. With over 700 pages of detailed charts, data, and references to other such studies (such as the books "Homicide" by Daly/Wilson and Keeley's "War Before Civilization"), Pinker demonstrates the astonishing fact that, despite the continued violence everywhere in the world today, much of today's world lives in a time of relative peace and safety unknown to past generations. It's not an argument that violence has been eliminated but that there is a pacification and civilizing process at work in history in which violence in its many forms has been decreasing over time. It is especially an argument for the success of secularism, modernity, liberalism, the democratic state, and societies based in law and order, an argument many just don't want to hear. Many of my friends simply refuse to read it because they're unwilling to challenge their adherence to some version of the narrative that "the world is going down the toilet" and that some version of modern western culture is the reason why. They may be right in some sense but they're not in terms of what Pinker is talking about.  When you are able (willing?) to separate out just how Pinker is framing "violence" from your overall view of violence in today's world, his argument becomes crystal clear. He is quite aware that there still exists cruelty, slavery, and horrific brutality in today's world but, like the difference between the institutionalized, culturally-sanctioned slavery of the past and the clandestine forms of human trafficking of today (not to mention the sheer numbers difference), there really has been progress here as there has in so many other areas.  Pinker's book deals mostly with human-on-human violence and to a lesser extent, human-on-animal violence. While the evidence he presents points to an ongoing decline in the former, it could be argued that human&gt;animal and human&gt;natural world violence has actually increased as human populations increased. The question for Pinker is: have certain privileged parts of the world's population gained a relatively violence-free society at the expense of the continued violation-destruction of nature, of plant and animal species?  Edited: Jan2016     all-time-favorites history-cultural social-science-theory               497 reviews225 followers     May 13, 2021   I was recently listening to a BBC interview with two historians on the An Lushan rebellion, and the interviewer read a passage from Pinker's book in which he argued that this Chinese civil war was important evidence for his thesis that human violence used to exist on a scale we would now find hard to believe. When the interviewer read some of Pinker's death statistics about the rebellion, both of them spontaneously burst into laughter and one of them asked "What on earth is his evidence for that?" What, indeed? Pinker relies throughout this book overwhelmingly on the death statistics for major historical events compiled by a librarian and published to his personal website in his spare time. Pinker explains that he finds the hobby website impressive, and argues that as a librarian, he can utilize source material better than most academics, i.e., than trained historians. If you think I'm joking, look for yourself. No, I'm afraid this book is the joke, and it makes a joke of its credulous audience, making specious, anti-empirical, and fatuous arguments fueled by intellectual narcissism.  What if the situation were reversed? That is, what if a history professor wrote an eclectic book on cognitive linguistics that was fundamentally at odds with the consensus of trained experts in the discipline, and that relied largely for support on a single source, which was itself entirely the work of an amateur?  I think such a book would quite likely be universally regarded as a laughingstock. However, we live in a generation in which the increasing consensus among intelligentsia holds that scientists hold the answers to questions that used to be addressed by the humanities, and so Pinker's book is not only accepted as plausible, but widely lauded and championed, including by people who should know better, like Bill Gates. Indeed, many of its chief boosters seem to be techno-utopians already deeply committed to the notion that gains in technology are a rising tide that lifts all boats. This is a work that flatters its secular humanist audience by suggesting we have learned our lesson and, by and large, moved past our brutish origins, carried on the wings of science, progress, and bourgeois values.  Apparently scientific progress doesn't include historiography, which anyone is qualified to do.      hated history               1,634 reviews257 followers     May 25, 2022    "War is peace" in: NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR, by George Orwell 
 
 Magic Mirror, do tell me, which one is  RosierPinker??I still don’t figure it out, in what planet psychologist Pinker lives on. I have watched him many times insisting on “things are getting better”. Due to his studies on violence, he sees there is less violence amongst humans. He adds to this optimistic picture: “we’re getting more humane”.   
 
  
 
  
 
  
 
  One thing is reported, numerical cases of violence, in wars, in crime etc. Another different thing, is the human nature. Despite his studies going back in thousands of years, he just doesn’t report on the POTENTIAL for violence; I mean, atomic weapons still exist today (in big numbers, and in several nations), as well as chemical and biological ones. Should an atomic war conflagrate (say, in the Korean peninsula) (God forbid!),  The Day Afterthe next day the book of Pinker would be just obsolete. Yes, you cannot cope with (the idea of) the numbers killed. Pinker, the one who had affirmed “nuclear weapons are useless”, would be instantly refuted. For good.  
 
  Deep down in the human nature, violence does exist. Let’s not put some sort of  pinkrosy camouflage, in the human nature. I've been thinking about Africa in this and the past century; Mao's China and Russia under Stalin, and other examples, which should make Pinker think thrice, at least,... about demons.I would like Pinker to comment on the Mandalay Bay hotel shooting, in Las Vegas, the past October. And on similar cases.  
 
  
 
 (decline? what decline??) UPDATE  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCm9N... Here Pinker is good with numbers; yet, he didn't include mass shootings in the US. How many since the Mandalay Hotel have occurred up to the present moment?? UPDATE (for 2018 and 2019, for Pinker to check it out)  https://www.motherjones.com/politics/...  UPDATE "It's Insane We're Having A 'Debate' Over Whether It's Acceptable To Assault A Journalist" (1st of July 2019) Pinker wrote on Twitter, regarding what happened in Portland. Yes, by Antifa people. Pinker is slowly waking up apropos VIOLENCE.  UPDATE This is an important interview because Pinker goes nuclear. 😛  https://www.forbes.com/sites/rainerzi...  UPDATE How much of a "humanist"?  https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/aut...   https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nyti...  UPDATE ( This is for Pinkerites)  https://www.theguardian.com/science/2...  UPDATE Besides the war in Ukraine (it's been 3 months!), much sadly, I would like to add the Texas shooting.  https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05...  ---"For when they might say, "Peace and security," then suddenly destruction comes upon them, as the labor pains to her having in womb; and they shall not escape."in: 1 Thessalonians 5:3     6-major-declines deep-down forensic-archeology               198 reviews123 followers     May 15, 2017   Mind-blowing book! I have never read a book about history and statistics that was this interesting. I love how Steven Pinker argues with countless studies and a great logical validity. This book is a must-read book for anyone interested in sociology, history, politics and environment. This book breaks the long romanticized picture of the past which has been filled with nostalgia and confirmation biases.      cognitive-science next philosophy               2,234 reviews3,663 followers     January 15, 2023   there are some missing connections and it's an ethnocentric view of violence. Like did enlightenment ideas also diminish violence in the East?                  319 reviews344 followers     January 2, 2016   Did this really take two and a half years to read? I see that it did. I picked it up after a new-ish boyfriend press-ganged me into seeing Pinker talking about his new book - this one - in Edinburgh, and thinking that it sounded fascinating and potentially relevant to a PhD I was considering doing. Well, the PhD idea is discarded, and as for the boyfriend, I swapped Pinker for Susanna Clarke and moved in with him. He finished my book first.The premise of The Better Angels of Our Nature is that the world is getting less violent. I read about the first half fairly slowly, as it marched through prehistory and the Middle Ages, with graph upon graph and source upon source - I mean, that's pretty uncontentious, isn't it? That there are far fewer beheadings and settlement-on-settlement raids and Hundred Year Wars as we get through history past the Enlightenment. Knowing next to nothing of east Asian history, I was interested to read about things like the An Lushan Rebellion and a brief history of belligerent Mongols. There are parts on international armed conflict, on genocide, on civil war. I spent a year studying humanitarian law. It felt like a lot of the coursework from that year, albeit a bit rearranged. So far so good, Mr. Pinker; I accept where you're going with this. I put the book down, for a very long time. Then in November 2015 two things happened in quick succession: the Paris bombings, followed quickly by the vote in the UK Parliament to bomb Syria. I'm in Scotland, and a more dyed-in-the-wool pacifist you'll not find. So I picked this back up, to keep reading the sections about armed conflict in the twentieth century, because I wanted to be reminded (convinced?) that the world is broadly heading in the right direction. I mean, it is. It is; but we're not anywhere near out of the woods yet. And we probably won't be in my lifetime. But maybe we will. Pinker's point is not that violence has gone away. He makes few predictions. (Five years down the line, his predictions on conflict in the Middle East have proved too optimistic. But hold that thought a moment longer.) He plots a direction, and the direction is more peaceful. It seems to involve more things being classed as atrocities and abuses - but that's because we're rightly outraged these days by things that nobody would have cared about fifty or a hundred or three hundred years ago. Finally he talks neuroscience and psychology. Do your thing, Steven; that's more your area than mine, so I'll take your word for it. Let's come back to the optimism of Mr. Pinker. Because he is very optimistic! Let's get the biggie out of the way first, shall we?:  In early 2011, as this book was going to press, a swelling protest movement deposed the leaders of Tunisia and Egypt and was threatening the regimes in Jordan, Bahrain, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. The outcome is unpredictable, but the protesters have been almost entirely non-violent and non-Islamist, and are animated by a desire for democracy, good governance, and economic vitality rather than global jihad, the restoration of the caliphate, or death to infidels. Even with all these winds of change, it is conceivable that an Islamist tyrant or radical revolutionary group could drag an unwilling populace into a cataclysmic war. But it seems more probable that "the coming war with Islam" will never come. Islamic nations are unlikely to unite and challenge the West: they are too diverse, and they have no civilization-wide animus against us. (p443) ...Oops. Well, he did hedge his bets, I suppose.Where he didn't hedge his bets, and where he consequently rather lost me a bit, was when he focused on the US a bit more specifically. When I mentioned to a friend a few weeks ago that I was reading Pinker, she clucked her tongue at me and said, "Oh dear - does he think sexism is over yet?" That's overstating it a bit, but the impression I got was, well, yes - it really is as if he thinks sexism is pretty much winding up, and the civil rights movement put paid to racism and racist violence decades ago. After 500+ pages of meticulous research, it seemed like a glaring oversight to just assume that the various -isms had just upped and finished since 1980. No, it didn't seem like a glaring oversight: the quickly glossed-over suggestion that racism in the US is a relic of days gone by made me think there were things Pinker wasn't telling me. This is a 1100-page book, of which the last 300 pages are entirely citations, and here I am accusing the author of leaving things out. Well, I'm gonna, 'cause I feel like he has. No fifth star for you, Steven. And yet I'm still mostly on his side. I'm no John Gray, whose arguments seem to be of the "when you say 'it's got better', I hear 'everything's fine', which it's not" and "I know tribal people and they don't fight each other, therefore science" varieties (and, I might add, get neatly steamrollered by Pinker himself here - I do so love a good academic spat in the Guardian...). Earlier this year, I proofread an essay criticising Pinker (don't ask how I arrived there; terribly unlikely circumstance is how), apparently on the twin bases that how could you possibly know that 15th century middle England executed more people than were executed in 21st century Oxford; and the ever-classic "but NUCLEAR!" It plays with an idea that I don't think I'll ever fail to be interested by: it's why I loved The Wake so much last year, and the idea is of a magical past where everyone was nice to each other and had conversations at the dinner table, and none of these horrible new-fangled innovations existed yet to ruin everything. I love this idea! I love what it makes us do, how it makes people react, how intoxicating they (we) find it, how they'll fight so hard to show that it's real - and yet it never was. It's the ultimate bittersweet hope, the most incredible Escher-like illusion, and I just find that the most fascinating thing. There never was an Eden! There never was a perfect 1950s family, or a perfect 1880s family, or however far back you'd like to go! The government never was more competent, and people never had more common sense! The world of your childhood was nowhere near as good as this one, you just weren't looking at the crap bits! The best thing about The Better Angels of Our Nature, or I think, is the same thing that means it's going to wind up people who want to be wound up by it: it's a testament to things getting better, faster. Which if you ask me they absolutely, irrefutably are. Ask yourself this: whenabouts in history would you rather live? I mean, I still think he's a bit overoptimistic in places. But at least I'll agree that his views, my views, and the best the world can be are tending to converge. Plus he's a great writer, you know. Stay for the prose, frankly.     books-i-have-taken-to-dinner i-also-read-nonfiction-occasionally recommended-to-me               3,023 reviews1,011 followers     May 22, 2018   Anyone who follows me on this site knows that I rarely give high scores to books; I like to make very clear distinctions and to indicate what is just good and what is outstanding. And this book is one of those that belongs to the top category: not because it is a perfect one (see below), but because of the breadth, the depth, the insightful, well-founded, nuanced and yet daring way in which Steven Pinker has tackled the very delicate subject of violence throughout human history.It is not feasible to give a thorough presentation of this book. Because it actually is several books together: 1. a global, especially quantitative approach to physical violence in human history in which Pinker establishes that there’s a steady but very clear decline; 2. a tentative explanation of that decline on the macro-level, in which he focuses on the processes of humanization and civilization; and finally 3. a thorough analysis on the microlevel of good and evil in man in general, with particular attention to biological and psychological aspects that promote or reduce violence (our demons and our angels). For me, Pinker's presentation is absolutely convincing, both in his observations and in his analysis. It is in line with my inner conviction (which of course is based on personal perception, rational analysis, as well as emotional orientation), but it also fits in with much of what I have read over the past years, especially on history. Pinker is 100% right that we have to get rid of romantic nostalgia and cultural pessimism (“the past was better, now we go from bad to worse”), which is no more than a reactionary reflex, motivated by emotional (especially fear), ideological and religious blindness. For him it is no coincidence that modernity (with its emphasis on rationality) has gone hand in hand with a humanitarian and civilization-revolution that has led, among other things, to a marked reduction in violence worldwide. And that is true, despite the daily flow of negative news coverage on conflicts and injustices that still plague our world. Yet, as already indicated, this is not a perfect book. For example, I have some reservations about Pinker's tendency to give great emphasis on evolutionary-biological aspects in his search for explanations; I understand that, because that focus has become a trendsetter in his field of study (social psychology in the broadest sense of the word) and has certainly clarified many things. But the sometimes implicit suggestion of Pinker that these are ultimate clarifications (necessary ànd sufficient) seems rather exaggerated to me. Fortunately, he nuances in other places. Second caveat: Pinker regularly warns against statements about future developments, and cites the well-known saying that social scientists better not make any predictions, because they already have so much trouble dealing with the past. Yet Pinker in this book regularly formulates optimistic expectations for the future and that is strange. At the moment, 2018, for example, the world looks slightly different than when he wrote this book (2009-2011) and his unbridled belief in the further advance of liberal humanism and rationalism isn’t that probable any more. Third reservation: Pinker continually illustrates his observations with both general statistical material and specific experiments. What is striking is that these studies are mainly Western (in particular American) oriented. Pinker does make attempts to break out geographically and culturally, but still, his evidence is almost entirely Western (American-European). And that involves a great risk of bias. Also his focus on our recent history (after the second world war), an era of globalization and enormous advances in affluence, technology and science, can also cause a bias (although we will only be able to estimate this in a few decades).  And finally a fourth reservation: especially in the concluding paragraphs, the lyricist in Pinker gets the upper hand and he ventures into a statement of faith in rationalism. Of course, he presents strong arguments that support his theory that the decline of violence in human history ultimately is due to the further advance of reason. But just at that moment he leaves his cautious, nuanced style behind him and his language becomes almost religious (in favor of rationalism); on this instance (after almost 700 pages) he introduces the concept of "modernity", without much clarification, and that’s a bit problematic. Pinker has garnered a lot of praise with this book, but also a huge wave of criticism, both on historical details, on the validity of his statistical material, on his psychological-biological approach and on his ode to rationalism and liberal humanism. The critics of this book certainly have a point in some of those cases. But if you look at the 700 pages in their entirety and go through them thoroughly, then you can hardly accuse Pinker of simplism, naivety or deception: he constantly warns about exaggerated expectations; nothing is definitive, and a relapse is always possible, he regularly states. But at the same time his overall conclusion is very outspoken: "while this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, (our) species has also found ways to bring the numbers down, and allow a greater and greater proportion of humanity to live in peace and die of natural causes. For all the tribulations in our lives, for all the troubles that remain in the world, the decline of violence is an accomplishment we can savor, and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible. "(p. 696) This book is a tough chunk, which takes a lot of effort to wrestle through, and one certainly has not to agree with everything, but it seems to me that this book deserves its place among the most important ones published in the early 21st century! (4.5 stars)     evolution globalisation history               181 reviews3 followers     March 22, 2012     But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. --The Federalist, No. 51, James Madison  This is easily one of the best books of 2011, and I suppose it must already be earmarked as a Pulitzer finalist. It’s about violence, but so much more than that since it strikes at the very core of human nature, the human condition, government, economics, and moral philosophy. Stephen Pinker starts with a simple premise—proving the decline of violence in modern times. This apparently is so controversial to some that he meticulously plots the decline of violence with great historical and statistical detail—this is the descriptive ‘what’ that Dr. Pinker illustrates in the first 2/3rds of the book. The writing is absorbing even if it rings a mildly irreverent tone that betrays a subtle anti-religious bias (especially vis-à-vis politico-religious violence of the Roman Catholic and Old Testament societies—he was a roommate of Harold Bloom after all and is a dedicated humanist) that includes some humorous satire and contemporary references to lighten the mood of such a grim topic. Indeed, his graphic descriptions of torture, rape, suffering and grotesque sadism is enough for even the most macabre minds. Stephen Pinker is a true evolutionary scientist who is adroit in the heuristic of categorization and you can find lists, and lists of lists to aid in understanding the narrative he describes. For example, the declining trend of violence is broken down into these historical themes:   1)	The Pacification Process—our evolution from hunter/gatherers into political, agrarian societies.  2)	The Civilizing Process���included the consolidation of feudal economies into larger kingdoms and empires with central authority, trade and economic specialization. 3)	The Humanitarian Revolution—17th and 18th century that marked the that included the Age of Reason and the European Enlightenment 4)	The Long Peace—a result of a Kantian trifecta of 1) Democracy, 2) Trade and 3) International organizations 5)	The New Peace—arising out of a U.S. led post-cold war globalized world  6)	The Rights Revolutions—exhibited a more finely filtered intolerance of violence on smaller scales that included violence against minorities, women, children, and animals. Within these historical themes we see five major historical forces that helped snuff out violence:  1)	The Leviathan—this includes a Hobbesian social contract which grants to the state a full monopoly on the use of violence from within 2)	Gentle Commerce—closely connected to #4 this force increases economic incentives for cooperation  3)	Feminization—results in a decline of authoritarian/patriarchal based societies and the empowerment of women as intellectual equals who tend to be more risk-averse and less violent  4)	The Expanding Circle—from a mixture of globalization, commerce, and increased access to information this purportedly increases sympathy and helped usher in the Rights revolution that even extended to animals  5)	The Escalator of Reason—leading to higher levels of intelligence and emotional empathy in conjunction with more sophisticated foundation for managing moralized concerns in favor of the flourishing of all humanity The second part of the book is what really interested me and seeks to elaborate the psychological factors that dictate our behavior depending on their interplay with our environment and circumstance. Here the statistical reasoning is a little more squishy and correlational residuals are not quite as well characterized—perhaps leading to creeping confirmational bias. Put aside these minor critiques of this part of the book, the ability to marshal data from such varied fields of study as anthropology, economics (including game theory), social psychology, and cognitive neuroscience into a coherent and powerful explanation of the decline of violence.  Factors that influence violence are broken down into two categories of human nature: Demons that incite to violence and Angels that slaken the thirst for blood. The demons include the primal urge to dominance, revenge, sadism including the banality of evil, and ideologically driven moralized violence. On the other side of the ledger are qualities such as empathy (or more importantly sympathy, Dr. Pinker distinguishes the two), self-control, our moral sense, and	reason. Here, the meat of the book can be found in the chapters on the moral sense. Stephen Pinker adapts from the ethics, moral foundations, and relational models of moral reasoning of other people like Shweder, Haidt, and Fiske. First, to understand the psychology of moral reasoning (as opposed to objective moral truth itself), we are to understand that moralized beliefs are more than just the avoidance of something distasteful, but is a ‘distinctive mode of thinking about an action’. Thus, moralized beliefs are universalized (should apply to everybody), actionable, and punishable. These beliefs spring from relationships since, in Pinker’s view, evolution acted upon the population and there is no such thing as a philosophically independent human being. Moralized norms generally include relationships, a context (at home, in the street, at church, at work, at the beach, etc.), and are centered around a resource (information or knowledge, food, money, land, sex, labor, etc.). These relationships upon which socioeconomic moral reasoning is based are divided into 4 categories:  1)	Communal Sharing—the most basic tribal foundation for moral reasoning emphasizing in-group loyalty, also includes sacred or pure values that are shared within a group and reinforced through rituals and periodic but specific contextual references. 2)	Authority Ranking—e.g., military, paternalistic, totalitarian/fascist, divine right etc. 3)	Equality Matching—gifts, tit-for-tat, first relational moralized norm to recognize individual autonomy, fairness, and reciprocal altruism 4)	Market Pricing/Rational-legal—much more complex relational model of morality that incorporates universal ethical principles, a high level of individual rights, rule-of-law, social contract orientation, and requires a high level of literacy and numeracy along with a grasp of information technology and access to data on price, costs, benefits, risks, alternatives, etc. As an explanation of the basis of moralized norms this seems quite well-developed and accurate. As I read through this chapter, the current debate over the allocation of scarce health care resources came to mind as a good illustration of this relational model of moral reasoning. The argument is usually centered on the diametric poles of the relational models between communal sharing of universalized health care to rational-legal/market pricing model. Here again we see that moralized norms require more than facile affirmation of one or the other relational models since the specific contexts and resources are important. Which relational model should be employed in the state of emergency, or when the resource is a human organ in which a dead individual does not benefit, or when the allocation of the resource in the community is considered a sacred good such as the right to life-sustaining medicine.  Personally, I see a need for a hybrid system that protects sacred values of life, and the protection of the vulnerable (e.g., the elderly and children) with market-pricing and equality matching for preventative or non-emergent care should the patient choose--respecting the autonomy of the patient to make the most rational choice given the risks, costs, benefits, and alternatives. The difficulty with market-based health care, just like the difficulty of running a democracy that this market-based/equality matching system is only functional for the government of a citizenry that is based on the moral foundation of reciprocal altruism and rational-legal system of checks and balances. Like a functioning democracy, a market-based health care system requires high literacy and numeracy rates as well as the dissemination of pricing/cost information (something that the AMA has consistently blocked by restricting access to ICT coding for purposes of pricing across hospitals, specialties and regions). This leads to corruption in which supposed medical principles (e.g., doctors and hospitals who have a fiduciary and moral duty to remain financially disinterested in patient decisions) have the ability to obfuscate their own cost and market prices. With these established cartels, it's not difficult to enrich oneself by choking off a few grains of sand at strategic locations in the billions-dollar health care economy. In this model, there is no difference between the orthopedic surgeon recommending back surgery (that evidence from the Dartmouth ATLAS study shows actually does more harm than good), and the Goldman Sachs executives who traded in collateralized debt obligations, which they 1) controled the price through financial cartels, and 2) were at the same time shorting (had proprietary knowledge that they were bad investments and thus were insuring at low cost against loss of these supposed AAA-rated investments).  Some favor total universalization of health care based on moral norms, but I simply think this ancient hunter-gatherer communal-based economy is insufficient for the maximization of public good by actually rationing health care resources away from those who by definition need it most (e.g., through price controls and misallocation of scarce resources). Just because other industrialized nations have atavistic central rationing of health care as a vestigial throw-back to the devastation of the post-WWII days when virtually every single resource was rationed (e.g., labor, currency, food, shelter, etc.) is not sufficient rationale for a complex and advance economy like the U.S. to regress to the communal-sharing model of health care delivery. Finally, Stephen Pinker is an evolutionary psychologist and a progressive and here his confirmation bias shines through quite strongly in my view. Much has been made of the Flynn effect that made the claim that IQs are actually increasing as people today are evolving on an organic and biological level to be more intelligent than those who came before us just a few decades ago. I and not quite persuaded by the data just yet. Furthermore, there is an assumption that modern western elites who exert social control are currently and likely to continue in the progressive beneficial model; this may be a bit too optimistic. The utility of some form of the Hobbesian social contract for the government monopoly of violence and justice is pretty clearly established by Dr. Pinker, however, caution is warranted in today’s modern age when an fewer and fewer of our ‘best-and-brightest’ sociopolitical/cultural prophets can do increasingly greater damage. This is a view that Pinker seems to acknowledge, but dismiss this line of thinking by citing historical data that the introduction of nuclear weapons or other WMD are uncorrelated residuals in the decline of violence. However historical data do not necessarily determine future relationships between the concentration of greater technical power into the increasingly fewer hands of elite social engineers and the decline of violence. With the exception of those minor critiques, however, I am sure this book will contribute greatly to our cultural understanding of the psychology of violence, and by extention, peace. The ideas found here will no doubt be debated everywhere from college bowl sessions up to the halls of congress. This can only be a good thing since the overriding theme of the book is a very well-qualified optimism for the flourishing of humanity. Update: 3-22-2012, I increased my review to 5 stars because I have found myself going back to my Kindle version of this book over and over again to review it. It has been a sublime pleasure to breath in the expert wordcraft, and the section on the Demons and Better Angels is like a symphony of well-conducted harmonious truths that come together in very a gratifying way. As a fervent believer, I found it fit very nicely into my worldview even though it is written from the perspective of just as fervent a non-believing skeptic. Such a task is very difficult to do since it takes painstaking effort to extricate one's ego (believer and nonbeliever alike) in the search for more objective reason. I say 'reason' because as Heidegger would say: facts and truth presuppose interpretation.     great-scientists history nonfiction               488 reviews677 followers     August 10, 2015   This is a sprawling mess of a book. Flashes of arguably brilliant insight alternate with meandering musings. Fascinating narrow conclusions are drawn from carefully parsed evidence—and then sweeping conclusions are drawn from highly dubious evidence. Historical insights are used incisively in an argument—then the next argument is undermined by total historical illiteracy. At the end, the reader is left uncertain whether he has read 800 pages of genius, 800 pages of authoritative-sounding-but-meaningless fluff, or something in between. But I’ll go with the last one.	Other reviews available online cover most of the ground from nearly every possible angle, so I’ll confine myself to a few, reasonably fresh, points. There is plenty positive to say about the book, but it’s all been said by others, so I’ll mostly steer away from praise, with the note that the entire book is a mixed bag. The only truly fresh point I have is really not substantive, but is interesting and perhaps shows some tendencies in the book. This is that Pinker makes a bizarre claim about table manners. First, Pinker states that historically people were terrified of being stabbed at the dinner table. Maybe. But in any case, to introduce this concept he spends a lot of time talking about how, as a child, he questioned the Western modern “pointless prohibition” in table manners against using one’s knife to move food onto one’s fork. He concludes that such a prohibition is a type of knife taboo preventing spontaneous stabbings at the dinner table. But I have never heard of such an etiquette prohibition. I cannot find any reference to it in any etiquette manual. I cannot find any reference to it on the Internet. In fact, all etiquette references to knife use I can find specifically REQUIRE using a knife to move food onto one’s fork, in lieu of fingers. As far as I can tell, this “rule” is purely a figment of Pinker’s imagination, and maybe an oddity around his house growing up. Why no editor questioned this, I don’t know. It doesn’t really undercut Pinker’s hypothesis in any material way, but it’s just strange, and maybe symptomatic. It’s important to note that for Pinker, violence means not only actions like war, homicide and assault, but more generally any cruel action with a physical component. For Pinker, war and torture are on the same continuum (though not the same thing) as corporal punishment of children and men having fistfights over insults. Reductions in both are considered progress, rather than the first group being considered progress and the second group being considered the sissification of a moribund society. In fairness, though, Pinker does have limits to this continuum—he concludes that some “reductions in violence,” like the elimination of dodgeball for children and the grossly inflated fears of child kidnapping, are silly and not progress at all. Pinker uses no primary sources and the secondary sources he uses are mostly popularizations, many of dubious accuracy, suggesting that he relies little on fresh research and puts his faith in fresh perspectives. Similarly, most of his analysis is analysis by anecdote. Yes, he does have a fair amount of statistics in the first part of the book. But those statistics are confined to two general groups: improvements in European civilization (largely taken, with full attribution, from Clark’s “A Farewell To Alms”), and the prevalence and damages of war. Other than that, it is anecdotes all the way down. And as Lincoln apocryphally said of Spiritualists, for people who like that sort of thing, it’s just about the sort of thing they’d like. But the result is, as with Spiritualism, much of what Pinker has to say is less proof than belief. And to be clear: Pinker’s conclusions are, fundamentally, predicated on his belief system. For Pinker, his belief system has two related pillars: that religion is evil, and that progress is inevitable, as long as we realize that religion is evil. Pinker is a big believer, whether he admits it or not, in the Whig view of history. He views its driver as the removal of religion from human life. In Pinker’s rosy view of the future, everything (at least in European-origin societies) is getting more moral, as people realize that morality has nothing to do with religion, but automatically arises from “the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games.” Of course, Pinker’s desired end state of empathy, minimal violence, and human happiness is exactly that prescribed by Christianity (and not, contrary to myth, by all religions). The Eschaton is nigh, says Pinker!—just without any eschatology. Pinker thinks that we can all ultimately behave like Francis of Assisi but be totally without religion. Maybe. If history is any guide, though, probably not—no atheist society has ever flourished on Earth. But hey—maybe the future will be different! There are many possible criticisms of Pinker’s belief system. One threshold criticism is that Pinker’s violent opposition to religion clouds his judgment badly. Pinker is very anti-religious, and not in an educated, thoughtful way, but in the same way the Ku Klux Klan is violently anti-Catholic. A second threshold criticism is that Pinker is entirely focused on Europe, and his core hypothesis, that we’re becoming less violent people, is confined entirely to advanced modern societies that are both European in their culture and Christian in their ethos, whether or not they are Christian in their observance. Pinker adduces little or no evidence, other than post World War II global statistics of wars, that non-European societies are becoming less violent, and he fails to consider alternative hypotheses for the reduced violence of European societies, such as that they are moribund and declining, in the Lotos Eater phase of their existence. (Again, to be fair, Pinker does draw a pretty clear picture of reduction in European intra-societal violence from 1200 or so on, long before anyone could claim European civilization became moribund as it is today.) Pinker’s obsession with demonstrating that religion only creates evil leads him into nearly continuous gross historical and logical errors. He repeats the silly canard (fabricated by 19th Century American Protestants to smear Roman Catholics) that Giordano Bruno was executed for believing in heliocentrism, a position accepted today by exactly nobody who knows anything (although repeated by noted flim-flam man Neil deGrasse Tyson in the recent re-make of “Cosmos”). He gullibly buys into the Black Legend hook, line and sinker. He actually cites for the cruelty of Pope Paul IV “the ‘Inquisition’ coffee table book.” He specifically cites, in-line with the text, as his major source for “the human toll . . . . in medieval and early modern Christendom” a book called “The Great Big Book of Horrible Things.” He confuses the First Crusade and the People’s Crusade. He cites the Anabaptists as “pacifist forerunners of today’s Amish and Mennonites,” apparently unaware of their activities in Munster (which would actually have reinforced his hypothesis). He explicitly equates as identical the judicial murder of Thomas More with random, on-the-spot beheadings of entire companies of dancing girls who displeased an Indian potentate. And on and on. Pinker says with a straight face “Christian ideology was hostile to any commercial practice or technological innovation that might eke more wealth out of a given stock of physical resources.” His source for this is a quote from popular historian Barbara Tuchman, to the effect that the medieval Church rejected interest and that St. Jerome said “a merchant can seldom or ever please God.” Of course, the cite lends little support to his conclusion, and the conclusion is ludicrous. In reality, the adoption of new commercial practices and technological changes up until the Renaissance was led by or cooperated with by religious entities, in large part to expand the productivity of the vast lands owned by the Church. These advances ranged from corporate, long-time-horizon management of land by monks to a wide variety of technological advances, such as improvements in plowing, threshing and grinding. Pinker also ignores that the medieval Church was the primary instrument of opposition to medieval violence. He talks about how the Church celebrated saints who were gruesomely martyred, implying that rather than being used to show heroism, such examples were somehow used to show how violence against others was good. He ignores the pacifism of the Church (complete until about 1000 A.D., incomplete thereafter, when feudalistic concepts infiltrated, leading in part to the Crusades). He ignores the Peace of God. And so forth. For Pinker, religion is an unmitigated bad, and when it is gone, we will all be happy and free. And he tailors his facts and analysis to fit his conclusion. On the other hand, even with its lacks, the book has many good points. It’s refreshing in its lack of ideology (apart from the ideology of atheism). Pinker does not shrink for ideological reasons from addressing unpleasant points. For example, when he talks about the decline in infanticide, he directly addresses whether it is correct to say infanticide has dropped at the same time that abortion has increased by at least the same amount, since abortion logically is indistinguishable from infanticide. (He concludes, in essence, that people don’t feel that abortion is infanticide, and anyway abortion rates have recently dropped too, which he interprets as reinforcing his hypothesis.) Most writers would have simply said that abortion is not the same thing as infanticide and moved on, afraid of being denounced by their liberal friends and no longer being invited to the right dinner parties.  At the same time, Pinker does manage to pretty frequently fall into occasional silly left-wing tropes. For example, when talking about the demonization of political opponents, he talks about the “victims of Communist atrocities”—but then feels obliged to add also “the victims of their opposite number, the right wing-dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Indonesia and El Salvador.” Equating 100 million people exterminated as part of a deliberate ideological program of Communism with maybe 100,000 killed in civil wars is silly, but pretty much par for the course among leftist types. But, to be fair, given his general ability to resist being politically correct, it’s hard to fault Pinker’s occasional lapses in this area. 	Finally, and oddly, most of the bad reviews on Amazon of Pinker’s book are not objecting to his anti-religious bigotry. Instead, they object to an underlying premise of his thesis—that prior to recorded history, violence was extreme and endemic. I had thought that this was unexceptional—all primitive societies were horrifically brutal and had stratospherically high rates of battle death. This has been common knowledge since Lawrence Keeley, using detailed anthropological data, exploded the myth of the Noble Savage. But apparently there are a large number of, or at least a small number of loud dead enders in this area, who maintain that pre-historical peoples were gentle, meek and mild, gathering nuts and berries hand-in-hand while singing paeans against sexism and racism, in contrast to eeeeevil modern societies. It’s really not worth even considering such silliness, but it’s interesting that fantasists of this sort exist and are willing to attach their names to their fantasies. Anyway—this book may be worth reading if you have a ton of extra time, or if you’re particularly interested in the topic. It has certain parallels to studies of the Great Divergence, and once you realize that what Pinker really means is that Europeans have reduced violence over time, leading to improved societies relative to the rest of the world’s societies, it has even more parallels. But unless you’re interested in reading this bookstop for some specialized reason, you’re probably better off spending your time doing something else.                   356 reviews389 followers     August 8, 2020   A lot of ink has already been spilled on the question of whether Pinker's claim that the violence of man has diminished enormously in the past centuries and especially in the past decades, is inaccurate or not; in other words whether the quantitative (statistical) support of this claim is correct. I am not able to judge the statistical aspect, but I am quite convinced by the material that he has put together, also in graphs (which he obviously always borrowed from others). What strengthens me in this conviction is that Pinker is very careful with that material, always indicating how reliable or unreliable the statistics are, sometimes warning for less strong numbers or for the interpretation given to the data. But it is absolutely impressive how Pinker substantiates and defends his theses, and also supplements them with narrative material (strong stories, which of course have a more subjective side, but make things more concrete; but also classic, narrative studies). The latter I find a commendable approach, to back up the statistical analyzes; it is a kind of methodological reality check, to see if the conclusions based on the numbers do reflect reality. Of course, this is not obvious, because the stock of narratives in theory is inexhaustible, but if this is done in a balanced and nuanced manner, then it is definitely an advantage, and that is certainly the case with Pinker.Here’s a quote that describes his central claim and at the same time indicates how cautious Pinker actually remains: : “The numbers tell us that war, genocide, and terrorism have declined over the past two decades – not to zero, but by a lot. A mental model in which the world has a constant allotment of violence, so that every cease-fire is reincarnated somewhere else as a new war, and every interlude of peace is just a time-out in which martial tensions build up and seek release, is factually mistaken. Millions of people are alive today because of the civil wars and genocides that did not take place but that would have taken place if the world had remained as it was in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The conditions that favored this happy outcome – democracy, prosperity, decent government, peacekeeping, open economies, and the decline of antihuman ideologies— are not, of course, guaranteed to last forever. But nor are they likely to vanish overnight.” Especially the final chapters, with an elaborate psychological analysis of man regarding good and evil, and in particular violence, sketches an anthropological image (not always very flattering) of man that offers a special added value to anyone who focuses on history, and especially the reasons of human behavior. Pinker dives quite deeply into the current state of science, and it requires some perseverence to follow the accumulation of hypotheses and experiments. But it is worthwhile as a historian to wrestle through this because it gives a fairly comprehensive picture of human existence that makes human action much easier to understand. Of course, Pinker places himself very clearly in a context of progress, based on the use of reason. You may have reservations about that, but I always find it a plus when an author puts his arguments on the table, open for scrutiny. And Pinker does so! Absolutely recommended reading.     anthropology global-history world-history               1,320 reviews456 followers     August 26, 2019   "The Better Angels of our Nature" is an impressive intellectual feat, and the snarky tone was entertaining, but it was a bit like reading the phone book (800 pages of lists within lists). Despite the size of Pinker's tome, the nitty-gritty of peace-making is given short shrift, even though I think this is the most important issue.I don't care too much about the decline in violence over many centuries. I already don't want to live in the Middle Ages, and I couldn't if I wanted to. What matters for all of us living today is whether the current "long peace" is sustainable, and on this Pinker disappoints.  The answer to this question requires a thorough analysis of why it is currently so unimaginable that, for example, Germany would attack France, as it did in WWI and WWII. A tremendous amount of active, deliberate effort was put into fighting the entropy that would make that possible, but Pinker glosses over this with abstractions. There's a huge story to tell about everything from the Marshall Plan to the European Union to soccer matches b/w sister cities in neighboring countries.  I'm not a professional historian so I can't address some of the other critiques on Goodreads about whether this book is all B.S. or not.                   1,015 reviews1,163 followers      Read  August 1, 2012   Pinker has disappointed me for so long that it is no surprise to me to discover that this is the work of a charlatan. Here on goodreads try David Giltinan's review .But also http://www.zcommunications.org/realit... is worthy of a read. Is his basic message pretty much that if first world white people aren't dying, then violence is decreasing? And has this been greeted with great approbation in - ummm - the first white world? Oh deary me.     haven-t-read-but sociology
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Decli…
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13543093-the-better-angels-of-our-nature
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13543093-the-better-angels-of-our-nature
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Decli…
2010-10-04
Author
<div><div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/4671027-miquixote"></a></section><section><p>270 reviews45 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/253147145">May 24, 2017</a></section><div><p>Breathtakingly mindless for 2/5 of the book, blowhard the whole way through.<p>Sometimes a good joke is more revealing than 800 pages of blowhardness. Pinker gives himself away with this quote by George Carlin on page 622: I think motivation is overrated. You show me some lazy prick who's lying around all day watching game shows and stroking his penis, and I'll show you someone who's not causing any fucking trouble!...</p><p>...I hope I am not the only one who thinks it is not necessarily a good thing to be reduced to lazy pricks watching game shows and stroking our penises...</p><p>Anybody with a modicum of a background in anthropology, history, sociology and economics should be laughimg themselves silly (if it weren't so disturbing how much influence Pinker has)... </p><p>Pinker proposes 5 ways that have reduced violence and can continue to do so: the Leviathan, Gentle Commerce, Feminization, The Expanding Circle, and the Escalation of Reason. The final 3 I have no argument against. But I have issues with the first 2. The state gets a monopoly on violence and capitalism is caricatured as gentle.</p><p>But there have been moments when violence spiked and recently, so Pinker has to explain it. Pinker conveniently blames Marxism (and leftism in general is caricatured the whole way through) as the singularly destructive ideology of modern times (without acknowledging the dangers of his own classical liberal ideology) and throws in 'a few other individuals' to the mix as the responsibles for the genocides of the 20th century, and the increase in violence in 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Fascism is acknowledged only as the twin of dialectial Marxism. Classical liberalism gets the nod as the ideology that reduces violence (of course Pinker would never admit that classical liberalism is even an ideology though). There is no comprehensive study of how fascism and communism came to be. It is really lazy stretch to say that fascism was just a few flukes of individual psychology, and not give credence to the idea that both fascism and communism came about from the specific conditions of a social system in crisis. Neither is it mentioned that big business actually financed and promoted fascism in Italy and Germany. That would complicate things too much. </p><p>So, nothing about communism coming into being as a reaction to capitalism... it is simply assumed that capitalism has been an overwhelmingly positive contribution to the world, since 'violence has declined since its advent, minus a few inconvenient peaks of violent wars and genocides' which, as I have already said, he attributes to Marxism and a few accidentally placed crazy individuals. Nothing either about theory, philosophy, economics, anthropology, activism owing anything at all to Marx's ideas. Marx isn't even worth the time of day to Pinker, except as an explanation for violence. This should raise the question, really can any intellectual who tries to analyze the history of modern times be taken seriously if they haven't taken the left seriously? how can you call yourself an intellectual if you just shrug off the whole left side of the policial spectrum as ideological nonsense? </p><p>So leftism gets all the blame for the bad stuff, but the increased rights that accompanied the 20th century are not attributed at all to leftist ideas or practice. They are accounted for as simply natural by-products of classical liberalism (ie. capitalism). The Expanding Circle of Empathy, the Escalation of Reason and the Feminization of society have nothing at all to do with leftist ideals. Class struggles never happened. Activists weren't leftists, they were classical liberals. These rights eventually became 'common sense'. If there any battles they were set forth by non-violent classical liberals, and always as peacefully as possible. </p><p>There are plenty of examples of serious breaches of truth here. According to Pinker, Martin Luther King apparently rejected Marx completely. Something patently false: 'King disagreed with Marxist materialism, but he found certain elements of Marxism's economic critiques of capitalism quite insightful' (I May Not Get There With You: the True Martin Luther King, Eric Michael Dyson). In fact, you would be hard-pressed to find any successful activist who doesn't find certain elements of Marxism insightful. But none of that is mentioned here because Pinker is not at an activist, he is status quo, out of touch with reality, pure and simple. </p><p>It is also fairly embarrassing for Pinker to not acknowledge how far from anything even remotely leftist or Marxist several so-called communist and their undoubtely genocidal regimes were. Something akin to blaming Jesus for the Crusades. It is not said that it is a far more convincing argument that Stalinist Russia and Maoist China were actually STATE-CAPITALIST regimes. And indeed ideological twins of fascism, but not at all in the sense that Pinker argues. But if he tried to go there, his simplistic view of everthing would implode. </p><p>Most people who rave against communism base their assumptions on secondary sources. It is clear that Pinker hasn't understood Marx (or even remotely leftist politics). As a fairly well-read leftist, it is obvious to me that there hasn't been a communist state to this day, as much as the leaders of those states have claimed to be. Neither is it mentioned how many different interpretaions of communism there are. He lumps the left all together. But if Pinker were to do so honestly, it would be quite a stretch to suggest that leftism is not about equality, freedom and the destruction of totalitarianism, oppression and alienation. In fact, you would think leftism was fascism the way Pinker describes it. Pinker comes across as a reactionary anti-communist suffering from the Red Scare, still inhabiting the frigid mental landscape of the Cold War. </p><p>But hey, when you are an authority in Harvard, sweeping caricatures and generalizations are allowed. There’s more. According to Pinker, dialectics are simply mysticism and a justification for violent struggle. Class struggle is of course also blown off as mystical dialectical hogwash. Well, that is some feat blowing off dialectics, considering how many of the greatest philosophical works in world in the last 2 centuries have had to deal with the idea of dialectics (because of its intellectual force), but the eminent Steven Pinker waves it off with his magic wand and without anything at all to back it up. </p><p>He also blows off 'intellectuals' in general because 'they are attracted to extreme ideas'. But he wholly contradicts himself when he proposes the superior intellectual value of classical liberalism. Which of course isn't extreme, it is just the obvious rational choice that doesn't even need to be intellectually defended. How arrogant can you get?</p><p>It's also fairly wacky when he argues that 'intelligent people overwhelmingly tend to be liberals'. Based on IQ test scores and surveys of people with high scores he concludes that the smartest people are liberals and the other lesser ones are leftists and conservatives. But what about the smartest of the smart (the intellectuals) being attracted to extremes? This should leave you wondering if these arguments are for real? Apparently so.</p><p>I am not familiar enough with the statistics that Pinker inundates us with to know if 'violence' has actually dropped or not consistently, progressively and continuously throughout history. But our propaganda alarm bells should sound when anyone makes a statement like that. According to Pinker, it is obvious that primitive tribes were the most violent humans ever. I have read some fairly convincing arguments otherwise, but I think it is likely the differences in opinion are going to come in the very definition of violence. The definition of violence by Pinker is dictionary strict, and very limited. Humans sometimes have to fight to survive. Pinker doesn't substantiate any difference in self defense and aggression, justice is mocked, freedom is not even covered. But when class struggle is just vain ideology to him, what can you expect? </p><p>Neither does he take on the prison industrial complex, although he does acknowledge the importance of caging up of the maximum amount of people that are considered most likely to fight back and apparently thinks it a necessary evil if there are 'a few too many' (as deterrence). Apathy or depression is not even mentioned. But of course if you look it up in a dictionary, violence isn't any of those things.</p><p>Since only 100,000 have been killed in Iraq(a disputed low-flying number) and there were at least 1,5 million in Vietnam, apparently US foreign policy is getting way more compassionate. Of course nothing is even mentioned of thinly-covered up US intervention all over the world (like in Latin America). An ignorance easily corrected by leafing through books like 'Killing Hope' by William Blum (on the ongoing American holocaust). A book Chomsky says is 'far and away the best book on the subject'. But the book has leftist leanings, and is therefore intellectually irrelevant to a religiously loyal status quoer. </p><p>Democracy is hailed as a reducer of violence, and justifiably so. However he also has an extremely limited idea of democracy. There is a crisis of democracy right now because of a lack of participation (the Manufacturing of Consent and Public Opinion) and fast-growing awareness of it. What about acknowledging the advent of a type of coercion that creates ignorance, apathy and depression? This is not considered as an element of violence of course. It would even appear to be a positive thing, if it can reduce those violence stats and keep us wanking. Even if certain types of coercion cannot be defined as violence, why not acknowledge it for what it is? </p><p>As said, Pinker targets ideology as a main cause of violence. When ideologies clash it often creates even more violence. Obviously. But it would seem Pinker is unaware of the current ideology’s potential for violence (and many have argued quite well that it is the main present cause of violence today). Currently the ideology of capitalism is being questioned by a large variety of people (because of its weaknesses). If and when that increases there may just be an increase in violence again, and not only from the Leviathan state that Pinker raves so much about. </p><p>Of course Pinker would blame the new ideology if that happened, instead of the old one and all its weaknesses that brought it to the conflict. This is ironic because he does spend some time criticizing conservative ideology for its inability to adapt to progressive change. I argue that Pinker betrays exactly that attribute despite his humanist claims. Liberals and conservatives are the only two electable parties (because neither is so different from the other and neither is at all threatening to the current status quo). But for Pinker to have his moral authority he should also be arguing that if capitalism doesn't work well enough or starts to create bigger problems than it solves (ie. environmental destruction and huge gaps in wealth and debt), it is the one that may actually PROPAGATE violence. But then again we might just sit around watching game shows and stroking our penises. If Pinker is right, that would be ideal.</p><p>Perhaps this can be avoided if the old ideology adapts peaceably. But neither should anyone who analyzes history or anthropology honestly assume that the current ideology is forever. Of course capitalism hasn’t always been there, has only been there for a tiny amount of history, but Pinker sidesteps that. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. The thing is that a large amount of us aren’t convinced it ain’t broke.</p><p>But perhaps Pinker’s main point is that we are less likely to adapt violently no matter what the change. Perhaps so, but denying or misunderstanding certain causes of violence (gross inequality and oppression which lead to new ideologies) will not help the matter. The so-called mystical class struggle and violence around the time of Karl Marx and the following century were actually consequences of the inability of capitalism to adapt to its structural weaknesses. If there were enough reforms the violence caused may not have been necessary, or rather it could have convinced the masses it wasn't necessary to challenge the system. </p><p>However, the inflexibility and fundamentalism of classical liberalism would seem to have actually CAUSED the majority of violent conflicts. One doesn't have to be a Marxist to see that the capitalist system did not adapt appropriately (or peacefully) to the class awareness (or if you prefer inequality awareness) that was developing. Pinker calls 'class awareness' ideology though. A more peaceful adaptation did not come until after World War 2 (with Keynesianism) IN REACTION to THE CLASS AWARENESS. But this has been progressively taken apart since around 1980. The fear of class war retribution has diminished. With the recent austerity measures only being the latest in a series of measures to increase the wealth of the rich at the expense of the middle class and poor. </p><p>But that doesn't mean that a self-defense type of violence will not develop in the near future if the current system doesn't adapt appropriately (rising homelesseness or unemployment could escalate things). The fact that violence actually went down during the 30s Great Depresssion is almost gleefully mentioned by Pinker though. So there really isn't a guarantee that violence will increase. In fact, it would seem that the elite powers are getting impetus from implementing their austerity measures because of Pinkeresuqe ideas of how non-violent we have become.</p><p>Anyhow, if Pinker is right and the world is better off being wankers than trouble-makers, then our intellectuals should be the best wankers. And so for that reason a wanker cannot read trouble-making literature, or leftist perspectives, one cannot at least acknowledge their intellectual validity and consider them. Pinker doesn't acknowledge these debates because he is pushing his own ideology, or rather absurdly and falsely pushing the idea of the 'end of ideology' (which is actually a thinly-veiled support for the current neoliberal utopian ideal). One that is as unsustainable and unrealistic as any utopia or ideology. Keep wanking.</p><p>The book was long and tiresome in many parts, but also very rewarding in the sense that it is an incredibly revealing look at how corrupt and anti-intellectual academics can be. Pinker is arrogant, puffed-up, self-promoting and irresponsible in his ideologizing (ironic isn’t it?) here. In Pinker's mind, it would seem he has earned the right to step right out of his specialty of psychology and linguistics and make sweeping generalizations in anthropology, history, sociology and economics. </p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/4671027?shelf=anthropology">anthropology</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/4671027?shelf=civilization">civilization</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/4671027?shelf=gs-exemplar">gs-exemplar</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/53165-warwick"></a></section><section><p>809 reviews14.4k followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/591838228">April 26, 2013</a></section><div><p>VIOLENCE HAS DECLINED, AND I WILL KICK THE LIVING SHIT OUT OF ANYONE WHO SAYS IT HASN'T<p> Disappointingly, Pinker strikes a slightly less confrontational tone than that, but the basic idea is the same. His thesis is that violence of every kind, from international warfare down to murder and corporal punishment, has been on a steady decline throughout human history, up to and including the present day – and not only does he make this case in considerable detail, but he goes on to give a very wide-ranging discussion of possible political and psychological causes for what's happened. This book is big, and it needs to be: it's built around a vast accumulation of raw evidence. Historical, statistical, sociological, neurobiological, and anecdotal – and I'm slightly confused by some of the negative reviews here, because although you might not like all of his conclusions, it's not easy to argue with the facts when they're laid out in this much detail.</p><p> Not convinced? Wondering if village life in the 30s can really have been as bad as dodging rapists in today's inner cities? Well, prepare for approximately 8,266 graphs and charts proving you wrong in every direction. Leafing through them is at first daunting, then fascinating, then astonishing, and eventually wearying. But they keep coming!</p><p> </p><p> The decline in some forms of violence is so dramatic that the figures have had to be plotted on a logarithmic scale, so vertiginous is their descent. Hitting kids – gone from normal to unacceptable in barely a generation. Murder rates? Dropping like a knackered lift. Paedophiles and child abduction? Statistically speaking, if you wanted your child to have a better-than-average chance of being abducted and held overnight by a stranger, ‘you'd have to leave it outside unattended for 750,000 years’. Terrorism, surely? Nope; in fact ‘the number of deaths from terrorist attacks is so small that even minor measures to avoid them can <i>increase</i> the risk of dying’ – one study suggests that 1,500 more Americans died in the year after 9/11 because they started driving rather than flying.</p><p> Okay then, what about WAR. ‘As of May 15, 1984, the major powers of the world had remained at peace with one another for the longest stretch of time since the Roman Empire.’ This is important, because inter-state warfare is much, much more deadly than the small-'n'-nasty invasions and civil wars that are more common today. And even they are becoming less frequent and less individually deadly.</p><p> Don't get me wrong, this is not a happy-clappy book about mindless optimism, and he is assiduous in stressing that the situation could easily change.</p><blockquote>The point is not that we have entered an Age of Aquarius in which every last earthling has been pacified forever. It is that substantial reductions in violence <i>have</i> taken place, and it is important to understand them.</blockquote><p>Pinker takes a good, long look at several possibilities, and (to my mind at least) identifies three major factors behind the decline. The first is the growth of democracy, which strongly correlates with lower rates of violence across the board, and we get the figures to prove it. The second is the revolution in communications, firstly during the Enlightenment, and then more recently with the birth of the mass media age. Again, huge numbers of studies are adduced to make the point.</p><p> The third factor is what he calls ‘feminization’: women are just less violent than men, and the more involved they are in a society the more peaceful it is. ‘We are all feminists now,’ he concludes, after a typically detailed examination of changing attitudes to, and rights of, women through history. (He is talking about the West here, but even elsewhere the trend is unmistakeable.) Studies suggest that this is not just a <i>consequence</i> of changing attitudes, but a <i>cause</i> of them, particularly given that ‘the one great universal in the study of violence is that most of it is committed by fifteen-to-thirty-year-old men.’ Pinker hones in on the obvious implications:</p><blockquote>Would the world be more peaceful if women were in charge? The question is just as interesting if the tense and mood are changed. Has the world become more peaceful because more women are in charge? And will the world become more peaceful when women are even more in charge? The answer to all three, I think, is a qualified yes.</blockquote><p> When he's finished considering social movements and political changes, he pokes inside your brain. We have pages and pages of various neuro-sociological experiments where people were strapped to an MRI machine and told to slap a puffin in the face, or something, so that various lobes and cortexes could be identified and examined. The question is whether there are anatomical, or evolutionary-psychological, causes for violence, and if so how easily they can be overcome. We get a lot of impressive-looking diagrams like this (I may have remembered some of the details wrong):</p><p></p><p> Pinker is very interesting on the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect">Flynn Effect</a>, which, if you're not aware of it, is the upward trend in general intelligence observed around the world in standardised testing since such things began. Many people that have written on this subject are skeptical that folk nowadays can really be smarter than anatomically-identical humans of a few generations ago, despite what the tests say – but Pinker, after a careful examination of how thought processes are influenced by changing social norms, is not afraid to draw his conclusions, at least in the ethical sphere:</p><blockquote>The other half of the sanity check is to ask whether our recent ancestors can really be considered morally retarded. The answer, I am prepared to argue, is yes. Though they were surely decent people with perfectly functioning brains, the collective moral sophistication of the culture in which they lived was as primitive by modern standards as their mineral spas and patent medicines are by the medical standards of today. Many of their beliefs can be considered not just monstrous but, in a very real sense, stupid.</blockquote><p>Obviously we are into speculative territory here, but I actually found it very heartening and thought-provoking to see someone prepared to follow the evidence that far.</p><p> How's it written? His style is exact without being dense, although he is not averse to the odd cliché (‘capital punishment itself was on death row’), and from time to time his desire to cloak the science in colourful imagery leads him into some awkward prose:</p><blockquote>The age distribution of a population changes slowly, as each demographic pig makes its way through the population python.</blockquote><p>Yikes. Also…and this may sound like a weird thing to pick up on, but once I noticed it I couldn't take my eyes off it…he is absolutely obsessed with telling the reader to ‘recall’ things he's already said.</p><blockquote>Recall the mathematical law that a variable will fall into a power-law distribution…<br />Recall from chapter 3 that the number of political units in Europe shrank…<br />Recall that there were two counter-Enlightenments…<br />Recall that the statistics of deadly quarrels show no signature of war-weariness.<br />…and recall that duelling was eventually laughed into extinction.<br />Recall that the chance that two people in a room of fifty-seven will share a birthday is ninety-nine out of a hundred.<br />England and the United States, recall, had prepared the ground for their democracies…<br />Recall that for half a millennium the wealthy countries of Europe were constantly at each other's throats.<br />Cronin, recall, showed that terrorist organizations drop like flies over time…<br />And recall the global Gallup survey that showed…<br />Recall that narcissism can trigger violence…<br />Recall that the insula lights up when people feel they have been shortchanged…<br />Patients with orbital damage, recall, are impulsive…<br />Recall from chapter 3 the theory of crime…</blockquote><p>Just how much stuff are you expecting me to remember, Pinker?! And surely someone who wrote three books on language has a fucking thesaurus handy?</p><p> There are a couple of minor errors, too, that an editor should have caught. The Polish city of Wrocław is printed in my edition as ‘Wroctaw’; and he also refers to some statistics gathered in the ‘town of Kent’ (there are dozens of towns in Kent, which in the dataset concerned is a county).</p><p>However, and despite my sometimes flippant tone in this review, the truth is that I thought this was a magnificent book – convincingly argued and truly multidisciplinary, so that I felt like I was getting a synthesis of the important studies carried out in half a dozen different fields. It's a big, serious argument that deserves proper consideration, and one that'll give you some ammo to argue back next time you're feeling cynical about the relentless news headlines. I think it's a clear 4.5 – and since Goodreads won't let me do that, I'm inclined to bump it up rather than down.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/53165?shelf=history">history</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/53165?shelf=psychology">psychology</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/53165?shelf=social-history">social-history</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1651956-riku-sayuj"></a></section><section><p>653 reviews6,927 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/243248009">December 8, 2014</a></section><div><p><br /><b>The Skeptic’s Peace</b><p>Pinker warns the reader upfront that the book is huge, and with more than 800 dense pages there is no question about it. It is so wide-ranging that it is fortunate it has such a memorable title - the reader might have easily lost track of where it is all supposed to be heading. Individually, any single section of the book is a throughly entertaining masterpiece, but as a whole, in terms of coherence, and on how the thesis and the direction of the arguments hold together, the book is not as much of a delight. </p><p>But it is an ambitious book and is in some respects a new sort of history - almost a moral history of the world and Pinker deserves praise for the attempt. The next such historian to come along has been given much to work with.</p><p>Pinker is very convincing about the fact that violence has indeed declined; he is even persuasive on why it was but bound to happen. But when it comes to explaining the phenomenon (which he spends most of the book convincing us is real) based on his strength (psychology and evolutionary biology), he comes up slightly short. Pinker says all the right things and spares no punches and doesn’t flinch from taking on the worst arguments the critics might throw at him but his arguments still seem to lack that knockout blow.</p><p>This is not to say that the arguments are weak. Pinker does a remarkable job in his survey of history, of stats and of a multitude of ideas. The scholarship is immaculate, the intentions are noble and the conclusions are plausible but I would still wager that Pinker would fail to convince the majority of his readers. </p><p>Why? Because he ignores the contingent nature of history and he forgets that the 'better angels' has not only made us a more moral society but has also made us a more skeptical society. I was disappointed that Pinker does not explore the preventive powers of sheer skepticism. </p><p>My own thesis, which was evolving as I read Pinker’s, is ultimately that the skeptical mentality is what the ‘civilizing process’ (and the years of bloody wars) has ultimately given us - a conviction that there are no easy answers, no ‘final solutions’. And that is a powerful deterrent to most forms of drastic action, since now it is harder to justify them. This to me is the real cause for optimism (of the measured and skeptical sort, as is our wont now). </p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1651956?shelf=history-civilizations">history-civilizations</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1651956?shelf=media-hyped">media-hyped</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1651956?shelf=pop-history">pop-history</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/166376-david"></a></section><section><p>865 reviews1,271 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/273624614">February 15, 2012</a></section><div><p>This seems like a stunning misstep by the normally brilliant Steven Pinker. His ability to write with extraordinary force and clarity has been demonstrated repeatedly in two separate areas of expertise -- linguistics and cognitive science. Unfortunately, the brilliance of his earlier books in those areas is nowhere in evidence in this regrettable dog's breakfast of a book. <p>I found it almost unreadable - poorly argued, undisciplined, self-indulgent, and - despite its grotesquely bloated length (800 pages) - support for its main thesis is woefully inadequate, dependent on a highly selective interpretation of existing data and completely unconvincing. Pinker can sling the statistical jargon (Poisson processes, power laws, the gambler's fallacy, the Gini coefficient) like a pro, but all the jargon in the world cannot make up for his recurrent habit of over- or mis-interpreting data whose limitations he consistently glosses over. </p><p>The jacket cover breathlessly promises "more than a hundred graphs and maps". Any graph is open to misinterpretation. Three of the most common ways of doing so are (i) selective interpretation (ignoring or explaining away the data that don't fit one's preconceived ideas) (ii) inappropriate extrapolation beyond the range of available data and (iii) failure to acknowledge the data's limitations, such as likely sources of bias, or extreme sparsity of information. </p><p>Pinker commits each of these errors, with such numbing frequency that one loses all respect. We are seriously asked to draw conclusions from a graph of the "rate of battle deaths in state-based armed conflicts between 1900 and 2005" (Figure 6-1) <b>while being instructed to ignore the figures for the first and second world wars</b>. After all, "the world has seen nothing close to that level since". This kind of rubbish insults the intelligence. Or you could look at Figure 7-28. Lest you be distracted by the actual data, Pinker has helpfully superimposed some very impressive looking solid lines documenting his cheerful belief in the rise of vegetarianism. These are much darker than the actual data points, presumably in the hope that the reader might be distracted from noting their complete lack of fit to the data. Worried about racially motivated killing of black people? Here are the yearly data (number of such killings) from 1996 to 2008:</p><p>5,3,3,4,3,3,3,4,1,2,1,1,1</p><p>Pinker's gleeful trumpeting of a five-fold reduction seems to rest on a pretty flimsy foundation to me. Not to mention being a little premature. </p><p>But nothing as inconvenient as facts, or their absence, can stand in the way of a man who has already decided he knows the answer. The threat of nuclear holocaust? Exaggerated, because - as any fool can see - nuclear weapons have never been used in wartime since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One imagines this argument must be of great comfort to those who survived those particular "anomalies". Just as Pinker's breezy insistence that the only meaningful way to interpret the number of people killed in a given conflict is relative to the world's population at the time is surely meaningless to anyone who has lost a family member in battle. It's at best breathtakingly insensitive; some would find it deeply offensive. </p><p>To anyone who respects the scientific method, this is a horrifyingly bad book, one which completely obliterates Pinker's credibility. Don't waste your time.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/166376?shelf=disappointing">disappointing</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/166376?shelf=intellectual-con-artist-at-work">intellectual-con-artist-at-work</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/166376?shelf=never-gonna-finish">never-gonna-finish</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/3583387-nebuchadnezzar"></a></section><section><p>39 reviews361 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/296539460">March 18, 2012</a></section><div><p>When an academic steps outside his or her field of expertise, it's best to brace yourself for a torrent of nonsense. Steven Pinker, whose work in linguistics and psychology I greatly enjoy, has made a habit of using that work as a springboard to foist his pet political theories on the public. Whereas his previous attempt in <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/5752.The_Blank_Slate_The_Modern_Denial_of_Human_Nature">The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature</a> was a vehicle for his ideological ramblings, it was at least not based on a gaping statistical flaw and had some value in refuting common misconceptions, even if it did so in a fundamentally dishonest way.<p>Whatever redeeming qualities to be found in Better Angels are far outweighed by the failure of Pinker's thesis. Has violence actually declined? If not, the rest is window dressing. Pinker quickly notes that the reader will be skeptical of his thesis off the bat -- we are inclined to believe the world is getting more violent due to our constant exposure to it in the media, which is biased toward reporting bad news, criminality, etc. No doubt he is correct in this. It is well known that crime rates in the United States have been in decline for the past 20-30 years yet many continue to believe that crime is on the rise. This likely comes from a bit of selective reporting mixed with confirmation bias; the proverbial man searching for his keys under the streetlight.</p><p>The main reason I was immediately skeptical about this thesis was that I had seen it before! The general thrust of Pinker's argument appears in a brief section in The Blank Slate and a TED talk he adapted that into a few years back. (<a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html">http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinke...</a>) Here he totally mangles basic anthropology and archaeology. The chart he presents is a misinterpretation of data from Lawrence Keeley's <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/328446.War_Before_Civilization">War Before Civilization</a> -- anyone familiar with the societies he presents knows that most of them are not nomadic hunter-gatherer bands but partly or fully sedentary and horticulturalist, e.g., the Gebusi and Yanomamo. (As an aside, I find the use of Keeley ironic as he argues against a biological view of warfare in the book while Pinker is an ardent supporter of this view.) Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha devote an entire section to deconstructing this <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/7640261.Sex_at_Dawn_The_Prehistoric_Origins_of_Modern_Sexuality">Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality</a> (a book not without its own problems, as Ryan and Jetha play Rousseau to Pinker's Hobbes). (An adapted excerpt can be found here: <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/sex-dawn/201103/steven-pinkers-stinker-the-origins-war">http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/s...</a>) </p><p>Using modern hunter-gatherer societies (or at least what Pinker thinks are hunter-gatherer societies) as stand-ins for pre-historic societies is a rookie mistake. The degree to which modern hunter-gatherers have been displaced and influenced by industrial societies and nation-states has been one of the big debates over the last half-century in anthropology. Thus, whether they are representative of some "state of nature" at all is highly questionable. (See this brief summary of the "hunter-gatherer revisionist debate" by Thomas N. Headland for an overview and references: <a href="http://www.sil.org/~headlandt/huntgath.htm">http://www.sil.org/~headlandt/huntgat...</a>) Pinker notes this at one point but then completely forgets about it in taking his own cooked numbers at face value.</p><p>Even if we accept Pinker's definition of violence, the whole undertaking itself is an exercise in guesswork and absurdity. There were no census programs or bureaus of statistics throughout much of history. Written records of war often inflate or deflate the body count depending on whose side you're reading from (and as we know, winners write the history books) and the archaeological record is spotty in a large number of places. Perhaps we can get fairly accurate body counts here and there, but there are large swaths of history that we essentially have to just guess at. Fortunately, the good folks at Quodlibeta, actual historians, have broken down a good deal of the historical and statistical flaws in the book (starting here): <a href="http://bedejournal.blogspot.com/2011/11/steven-pinker-and-an-lushan-revolt.html">http://bedejournal.blogspot.com/2011/...</a></p><p>Considering he has been "refining" this argument since The Blank Slate (read: futilely polishing a turd), Pinker seems unlikely to back down. His FAQ released to "respond" to criticism completely dodges the fact that he's pulled a good deal of his numbers straight from his nether region. (See Quodlibeta again for an appropriately snarky take-down: <a href="http://bedejournal.blogspot.com/2011/12/this-is-bogus-statistic.html">http://bedejournal.blogspot.com/2011/...</a>) At some point, it begins to stretch credulity that he doesn't realize there's a hole big enough to drive an eighteen-wheeler through in this argument. (This does, however, make the book a useful litmus test to see which critics will gush how "thoroughly researched, amply documented, and strongly argued" something is as long as you flash a few fancy charts 'n graphs and pseudo-intellectual smoke and mirrors their way. Unfortunately, it seems that the answer is "A whole lot of them.")</p><p>Once you realize the entire book is a house of cards that's more or less already collapsed, the rest of it becomes an incredible grind. As above, the rest is just window dressing, a game of make believe. Sure, there's some interesting parts about, say, the psychology of aggression and a few delicious nuggets and tidbits of trivia along the way. Digging through the rough for them seems a rather pointless exercise, though, especially where it's already been done better. Large chunks of his argument are recycled from other authors such as <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/12397.Peter_Singer">Peter Singer</a> and <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/47029.Lynn_Hunt">Lynn Hunt</a>.</p><p>The end result is a whiggish history where sense and nonsense blend together seamlessly, thus negating any use the layperson might find in it. The presentation of history too often crosses into the cartoonish, being loaded down with ad hoc theorizing deployed to save the book's overarching narrative. Pinker's goal is, at base, to push his ideology, his own brand of secular humanism he claims to be based in "Enlightenment values." It is an ideology whose values I happen to largely share, but history demonstrates that anything can be taken too far. This is why Pinker is forced to downplay or omit the excesses of the Enlightenment such as the French Revolution with its Jacobins and Cult of Reason.</p><p>The irony here is that Pinker reveals himself to be as much of a romantic as his ideological opponents. The doomsayers appeal to a mythical past to buttress their claims (Arthur Herman has written an amusing account of this phenomenon in <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/684476.The_Idea_of_Decline_in_Western_History">The Idea of Decline in Western History</a>), but the optimists of modernity similarly appeal to a mythical future. While the notion that the kids these days are just rotten and the world is going to hell in a hand-basket has been with us for millennia, one of the central narratives of modernity has been a belief in a steady incline. With an increasingly global economy and the inevitable advance of science and technology, the high priests of modernity preach time and again, we are surely on our way to the best of all worlds. Predicting the future direction of humanity, though, has proven to be a fool's game, a bit of off-track betting for the intellectual class.</p><p>While Pinker never commits to this teleological narrative wholesale, he does bang the drum for the steady march of progress quite a bit throughout the book. Obviously, while I don't pine for the days of King Cotton or colonial Africa, I don't find much comfort in the fact that while the number of debt and sex slaves has exploded in absolute numbers, their proportion of the total population has decreased. Oh, how marvelous!</p><p>What <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/5454596.Bjorn_Lomborg">Bjorn Lomborg</a> did for environmental issues, Pinker has done for the history of violence.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/3583387?shelf=hack-jobs-and-bullshit">hack-jobs-and-bullshit</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/3583387?shelf=history">history</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/3583387?shelf=politics-and-political-philosophy">politics-and-political-philosophy</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/25582110-kate-savage"></a></section><section><p>643 reviews111 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/785503852">January 22, 2014</a></section><div><p>Make me a t-shirt that says “I read an 800-page book and all I got from it was this lousy review.”<p>The Good:<br />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. </p><p>The bad: everything else.</p><p>How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Conquistadors:</p><p>“Though imperial conquest and rule can themselves be brutal, they do reduce endemic violence among the conquered” (56).</p><p>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.</p><p>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><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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."</p><p>(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.)</p><p>Hatin’ on the Poors:</p><p>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).</p><p>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.</p><p>Racism is a thing of the past, says P, before he says a bunch of racist shit.</p><p>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).</p><p>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><p>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.</p><p>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.”</p><p>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.</p><p>But as P shows, racism is only natural. Babies are racist, after all (523).</p><p>And Sexism:</p><p>“We’re all feminists now,” says the man who’s never been a feminist (404).</p><p>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).</p><p>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)</p><p>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.</p><p>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><p>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).</p><p>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.”</p><p>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.</p><p>Progress Comes from People like Steve Pinker:</p><p>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.</p><p>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).</p><p>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.</p><p>Adjusting all violence to per-capita:</p><p>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.</p><p>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?</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>(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.)</p><p>Making meaning and meaninglessness:</p><p>P can't edit his arguments down -- he's writing 800 pages, after all, everything in!</p><p>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.</p><p>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).</p><p>I mean, come on, you're not even moving these to a footnote?</p><p>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)</p><p>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.</p><p>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)</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>And about cooking the books</p><p>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?</p><p>Love affair with enlightenment and capitalism</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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).</p><p>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.”</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>I’ve seen a lot of victim-blaming in my days, but never anything so blatant and disgusting as this.</p><p>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. </p><p>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).</p><p>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.</p><p>Burying Truth:</p><p>"In absolute numbers, of course, civilized societies are matchless in the destruction they have wreaked. But --”(47)<br />“Europe’s ability to kill people [through the present] outpaced its ability to breed more of them. But --”(230)<br />“European governments may have brutalized the natives when conquering a colony and putting down revolts, but --”(307).<br />“The law may be an ass, but --”(538)</p><p>Howard Zinn wrote:</p><p>“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.”</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/4252261-tom-la"></a></section><section><p>585 reviews217 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/532678625">November 23, 2022</a></section><div><p>I love optimistic books, and there is a lot of optimism in the almost 800 pages of "The better angels of our nature". At the same time, I find it impossible to give a single opinion about this behemoth of a book, because I found some of its elements truly excellent, some ok, and some absolutely scream-out-loud dreadful, so I'll try to explain.<p>In brief: </p><p>- the great: the quality of the writing is superb. This is one of the best books I've ever read in terms of clarity of exposition and effectiveness of the writing. Also, at the very beginning the author outlines the structure of the book, which gives you a clear mental map of what you're getting into. As a plus, Pinker peppers his prose with anecdotes, jokes and references to pop culture (a bit like Malcolm Gladwell) that enliven the experience. I know some may not enjoy that. I do.</p><p>- the good: the analysis of the decrease in violent behavior throughout history is deep and overall fairly convincing. Pinker acknowledges the fact that we are missing a lot of crucial data (about deaths and violence in the past), and he's received a lot of criticism for presenting a thesis that's partially based on guesswork, but I think there is a lot of value in making the layman (like me) think about these topics, and at least in trying to find some general patterns. Some reviewers hated his methodology, or the way he handles some piece of data - all fair. I think it all makes for a healthy discussion.</p><p>- the not so good: is that Pinker didn't make much of an attempt to present a truly global perspective on the subject: in this book, Western world = The World. China, India, Africa, South America... marginal "who knows?" footnotes. "Religion" = Christianity. He explains that European history has the most available data, but I'm not the only one to think that he could have made a much better effort in this regard. </p><p>- the dreadful is where Pinker lets his underlying personal New Atheist agenda seep through without any restraint. Sadly, this lowers the level of the book in many parts to pure tripe, in particular when it comes to the very subjective reasons behind the apparent decrease in violence throughout history. </p><p>On page 642 Pinker spells out exactly what the main problem with his own book is: "<i>Even the scientists are piling on. Human beings are led by their passions, say many psychologists, and deploy their puny powers of reason only to rationalize their gut feelings after the fact</i>". Ironically, that is precisely what he ended up doing with this book. </p><p>To be clear, this has nothing to do with Pinker's titular argument in favor the decline of violence, which as I said I found fairly convincing and rational. No, Pinker's emotional, irrational underlying argument is the following: </p><p>1) Enlightenment humanism, secularism and atheism are the only cultural forces for good in the world. <br />2) Religions have been purely a destructive, negative force throughout history, therefore our planet will be a much better place when religions have completely disappeared. </p><p>THAT is where the author's heart is. </p><p>"<i>As if biology didn't make things bad enough, the Abrahamic religions ratified some of our worst instincts with laws and beliefs that have encouraged violence for millennia</i>".</p><p>Incidentally, I just found out that Pinker and Richard Dawkins are buddies and share the same New Atheist credo. That gave me a sudden bout of nausea... Dawkins, the Grand Master of Missing The Point himself! </p><p>Watching Pinker zig-zag his way through his own version of world history where religion has caused only mayhem and suffering is like watching a professional skier slalom down through the obstacles. You have to admire his incredible ability to make it through without tripping over every few seconds. </p><p></p><p>For example: in Pinker's world, the "<i>Rights Revolutions show that a moral way of life requires a decisive rejection of instinct, culture, religion, and standard practice. In their place is an ethics that is inspired by empathy and reason and stated in the language of rights.</i> [ ] <i>This conclusion, of course </i> [but OF COURSE!], <i> is the moral vision of the Enlightenment and the strands of humanism and liberalism that have grown out of it. The Rights Revolutions are liberal revolutions</i>". </p><p>Under this light, it becomes hard to reconcile and explain how Martin Luther King, perhaps the greatest protagonist in the "Rights Revolutions", was a Baptist preacher who dedicated his life to worship, prayer and to following Jesus Christ as a role model. But no worries! Slalomist Pinker turns his skis swiftly and manages to dismiss MLK's adherence to Christianity almost completely! </p><p>What a feat, ladies and gentlemen!! Here he goes:</p><p>"<i>MLK, as a graduate student in theology, was, of course, conversant with the Bible and orthodox theology. But he also read renegade theologians such as Walter Rauschenbusch, who criticized the historical accuracy of the Bible and the dogma that Jesus died for people's sins. King then embarked on a serious study of the social and ethical theories of the great philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle down to ... [etc. etc.].". "King was profoundly inspired by Gandhi's theory of nonviolent resistance not as a moralistic affirmation of love, as nonviolence had been in the teaching of Jesus</i>". </p><p>And now - pay very close attention. After this microscopic cherry-picking, later on, on page 677 comes the master stroke. Here’s how Pinker references his ridiculously insufficient excursus through MLK's cultural influences:</p><p>"<i>As we saw, Martin Luther King rejected mainstream Christian theology and drew his inspiration from Gandhi, secular Western philosophy, and renegade humanistic theologians</i>".</p><p>Wait wait wait ..... we "saw" what??? The only thing you said was that he read some books, that is all we "saw". We never "saw" that MLK "rejected mainstream Christian theology"! Oh, what a number he just pulled there. Of course, an anti-christian MLK would fit perfectly in Pinker's nice little box. If only it wasn't a complete fabrication! Maybe, if we stretch it a bit, King was a "liberal Christian", but still very deeply and fully embracing Christian theology. <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Writings-show-King-as-liberal-Christian-2623685.php">www.sfgate.com/news/article/Writings-...</a></p><p>For King, his Christian faith was far more than a source of soaring rethoric. It was the boundless reservoir of the colossal courage he would need to risk his life day after day. Frankly, I find Pinker's statements about MLK's faith quite offensive. </p><p>So it is with unbelievably misguided violence (pun intended) that Pinker strips our history of any trace whatsoever of the positive influence of religion and religious people on the world, while focusing only on the stereotypical negative stories (of course, confusing "religion" with "corrupted clergy").</p><p>As I said above, what Pinker really means with Religion is Christianity, because it's the only one he keeps referring to, and he doesn't seem to know much at all about Hinduism or Buddhism. </p><p>"<i>Very little good has come from these ancient tribal dogmas. [List of stereotypical pub-banter-level bad things that the Church did] Defenders of religion claim that the two genocidal ideologies of the 20th century, fascism and communism, were atheistic. But the first claim is mistaken and the second irrelevant</i>". </p><p>Pinker is often leaving rationality aside to go FANTASTICALLY off the rails like this. Aside from the fact that he is wrong, what is even the point of this argument? What value does a defense of atheism bring to this book? </p><p>Pinker then constructs a couple of sentences aimed at resolving and clarifying why he has chosen to completely ignore religion in the 800 pages of "The better angels of our nature":</p><p>"<i>Religion plays no single role in the history of violence because religion has not been a single force in the history of anything.</i> [Says the erudite expert on religion, as we have just seen] <i>The vast set of movements that we call religions have little in common but their distinctness from the secular institutions that are recent appearances on the human stage</i>". </p><p>Ok. So, let me get it straight: you find it reasonable to metaphorically pee on 100% of what goes under "religion" because you say it's always been so diverse and multifaceted that its overall impact on history is, in the end, completely irrelevant? There is no fundamental golden rule, no consolidated drive for empathy and compassion, no focus on respect for human life across the main religions? The declaration of Human Rights has been inspired exclusively by Enlightenment humanism, and not at all by Christian values? You are actually using the horrors committed by a small part of the clergy to invalidate all the positive messages of religion and, more importantly, the useful and positive initiatives that most religious institutions pursue throughout the world (and very rarely make it to the news - like these <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/17/100-religious-groups-doing-good_n_5460739.html">www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/17/100...</a>) ?</p><p>After these statements, it's not surprising that the author forgets to articulate how "secular ideas" possess this ideal quality of being "a single force in the history of something" that religions do not have. As if everyone who was ever inspired by secular ideas behaved in the same way and went exactly in the same direction - the BEST direction, of course. </p><p>Here Pinker goes on to perform some more professional skiing to get around other obstacles, like the excesses of the French Revolution, Cult of Reason etc., at the risk of losing his pants: </p><p></p><p>I thought people who kill, or in general use violence, do it in the name of anything at all: good, bad, old, new, religious beliefs, political beliefs, and science- or reason-based beliefs (a small example: the interpretation of Darwinism by the Columbine killers).</p><p>More in general, I wonder: was it really that difficult for Pinker to admit that all types of cultural movements, religious and non-religious, have been influencing each other and impacting the history of violence in many different ways? Why did he need to defend secular ideologies as if they'd never been the inspiration for violence or violent acts? And why did he pinpoint all these cultural movements as a cause "in themselves" for violence and war? How would communism IN ITSELF or atheism IN ITSELF or Christianity IN ITSELF cause atrocities and wars? They are ideas: words on paper. None of these ideas was ever a specific order to commit atrocities. I've always thought that, in reality, bad or deranged people are the ones who read those words and bend them to their basic, animal desires. </p><p>But again, Pinker is a human being himself, and each human being needs to worship something - we are powered by emotions, not by reason. As much as he tries to tackle this immense subject with pure rationality, his personal opinions come through loud and clear and crash to a pulp any of his efforts to sound objective and fully rational. </p><p>So, in the end, to go back to the main official thesis of this book: violence has probably decreased, overall. We can talk forever about the type of statistics used by Pinker in this book, but it seems he could be right, and I hope he is. </p><p>As for the reasons behind the decrease, as discussed, Pinker gets irrational about it, for understandable reasons (his wife). Here is his own explanation from his website: "<i> It was only through the intellectual influence of my wife, the philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, that I understood the logic connecting them. She explained to me how morality can be grounded in rationality, and how secular humanism is just a modern term for the world view that grew out of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment (in particular, she argues, from the ideas of Spinoza). To the extent that the decline of violence has been driven by ideas, it’s this set of ideas, which I call Enlightenment humanism, which has driven it, and it offers the closest thing we have to a unified theory of the decline of violence</i>". </p><p>A crucial passage here is "To the extent that the decline of violence has been driven by ideas". No one knows how much this is! It could be 0.2%! But Pinker certainly thinks the history of ideas has been much more impactful on reality than what it actually has been. </p><p>This is a common misjudgement of academics: many of them tend to give far too much practical importance to ideas, books and cultural movements, and too little to money and power. </p><p>If violence has decreased, I see no evidence that the decrease has been directly and mainly caused by the advent of the Enlightenment ideas, as Pinker is trying to convince us with this book. Those ideas were certainly a big piece of the puzzle, a great inspiration, just like many other ideas have been a positive inspiration. But fundamentally, I think what needs to be credited most of all is: military technology, increased wealth and global commerce, a change in the cost / profit scenarios of violence, the increased spread of information, and therefore better risk assessment tools. Maybe, but only maybe, we could also add to this list some steps forward on the path of evolution of our collective consciousness. </p><p>--------------------------</p><p>Here is a good book that quietly destroys the myth of Enlightenment perfection: "In defense of Faith", by David Brog </p><p>Here are some interesting articles that talk about Pinker's world view:</p><p>On his view of scientism:<br /><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/aug/23/steven-pinker-language-poole">http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013...</a></p><p>On his New Atheist credo:<br /><a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/scienceonreligion/2013/08/steven-pinker-stop-bashing-religion-its-hurt-science/">http://www.patheos.com/blogs/scienceo...</a></p><p>On his (mis)understanding of religion:<br /><a href="http://bedejournal.blogspot.com/2008/04/steven-pinker-on-religion.html?m=1">http://bedejournal.blogspot.com/2008/...</a></p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/155663-david-rubenstein"></a></section><section><p>801 reviews2,502 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/283778889">January 9, 2014</a></section><div><p>In this book, Steven Pinker explores a very controversial thesis, that is, violence is declining. Different types of violence are declining on multiple time scales. It would seem like the twentieth century had some major wars and plenty of genocide to make his thesis sound rather foolish. But in the first seven chapters he shows lots and lots of statistics to back up his thesis. In the eighth and ninth chapters he also explores the scientific reasons for violence and the reasons for increasingly non-violent behavior. <p>The book is very comprehensive--it is quite long and detailed. The first chapters are not particularly "heavy" reading, but towards the end of the book, it can be tough-going--but fascinating throughout.</p><p>Pinker tackles the main objection to his thesis--the three worst dictators of the twentieth century (Hitler, Stalin, Mao) were responsible for an immense amount of violence, deaths and misery. Some of the reviewers here at Goodreads have remarked that Pinker underestimates the number of deaths that are attributable to Mao. Perhaps he did grossly underestimate the numbers--I really don't know.</p><p>Pinker makes an interesting point about the recent theory, raised in the book <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/1202.Freakonomics_A_Rogue_Economist_Explores_the_Hidden_Side_of_Everything__Freakonomics___1_">Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything</a>, that crime in the United States declined in the past few decades, because of the legalization of abortion in 1973. The idea is that the reduction in unwanted children led to fewer violence-inclined youths. Pinker argues that after 1973, the proportion of children born to vulnerable women actually increased, rather than decreased.</p><p>One of the reasons for the decline in violence is the increase in literacy and reading. Pinker argues that the transmission of new ideas in books has acted as a liberal force in society. He shows that during the Middle Ages, most people were religious and believed in the <i>literal</i> truth of the bible. Heretics were everywhere, and were persecuted in wars, massacres, pogroms, executions and torture. Nowadays, while religious people "believe" in the bible, most do not take such a literal interpretation. They don't think that it is moral to invade a city and kill--or take as slaves--every single person. A higher value is placed on human life, because of the "shift from valuing <i>souls</i> to valuing <i>lives</i>." Pinker writes, </p><blockquote>The theory that religion is a force for peace, often heard among the religious right and its allies today, does not fit the facts of history.</blockquote> Later, he writes, <blockquote>The world has far too much morality.</blockquote> Very true indeed.<p>Pinker shows how game theory plays a big role in the evolution of morality. In fact, he defines morality as the opportunity for positive-sum games. In so much of history, people played in zero-sum or even in negative-sum games. For example, war is usually a negative-sum game, in the sense that so many people die and suffer, that the gains to the victor are completely overwhelmed by the losses to both sides. </p><p>Nowadays, the language of violence is often cloaked in "bureaucratese", in words like purges, deportations, bombardments, pacification, rectification, ethnic cleansing, collateral damage, and rendition. These euphemisms help to self-exculpate the perpetrators of violence, and make violence seem to be justified or involuntary. </p><p>Pinker discusses in some detail the factors that he believes have led to decreased violence in recent times. He talks a lot about the concept of <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/91953.Leviathan">Leviathan</a> from the book by this name by Thomas Hobbes. According to Pinker, the presence of a legitimate, strong central government helps to reduce violence, at least on a personal basis. People are less inclined to violence when they think that punishment is likely. (Not always true, but usually.) </p><p>He describes how "gentle commerce" helps to "turn zero-sum warfare into positive-sum mutual profit ... sweetening the outcome of mutual pacifism with the mutual gains of exchange." Pinker also shows how "feminization" has helped to move society "... away from a culture of manly honor, with its approval of violent retaliation for insults, toughening of boys through physical punishment, and veneration of martial glory."</p><p>One of the most interesting--and potentially useful--parts of the book is his analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The root of the problem is that there are so many <i>sacred</i> concepts on both sides. A sacred concept is one that is not subject to negotiation--it is completely <i>off the table</i>. People will not compromise on their sacred values, but they might compromise on so-called "pseudo-sacred" values. Pinker describes evidence that both sides might be willing to <i>declare</i> compromises through symbolic concessions, even though they are not actually willing to <i>perform</i> on their compromises. Pinker writes, </p><blockquote>To find <i>anything</i> that softens the opposition of Israeli and Palestinian fanatics to what the rest of the world recognizes as the only viable solution to their conflict is something close to a miracle.</blockquote> It all has to do with the symbolic framing of a peace agreement.<p>There are certain parts of the book that might make a squeamish reader cringe--there are some short descriptions of barbaric tortures. If you can get through (or skip) those parts, then you will find a fascinating theory developed from the point of view of scientific scholarship--sociology, psychology, and evolutionary biology. As with all of Steven Pinker's writings, this book is fascinating, comprehensive, and sure to be controversial. He has (most of) the facts behind him, and it is difficult to argue against his major points. </p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/155663?shelf=biology">biology</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/155663?shelf=ethics">ethics</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/155663?shelf=history">history</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/35434974-kevin"></a></section><section><p>269 reviews564 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1066604628">November 17, 2022</a></section><div><p>This book asserts that violence has decreased. I can set this aside as a worthy discussion. However, that is just the hook to catch readers. The purpose here is spreading ideologies to explain <b>why</b> violence has decreased.<p><b>The Bad</b>:<br />Well, it turns out Pinker puts much of his faith in the <b>status quo</b> (i.e. power) as directly responsible, i.e. the State ("Leviathan") and Capitalism ("Gentle Commerce"). </p><p>Let us consider status quo bias:<br />1) One can argue that it is <b>resistance</b> to power that has brought much of the decrease in violence we see today! After all, slavery and colonialism were the most profitable Capitalist ventures, backed and enabled by the growth of States. Elites sure are innovative at <b>co-opting grassroots demands</b> (and then smugly taking credit for it!), like the liberal elite property-holders who did all they could to thwart democracy ("mob rule") until it became advantageous to run as "democrats" (while power migrated from the political sphere to the private economic sphere of one-dollar-one-vote). </p><p>2) Even if such violent power structures were capable of forcing an increase in material production, must we assume they are the only options? Have we really reached "<b>The End of History</b>" in finding the optimal social system, as <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/32633.Francis_Fukuyama">another status quo shill</a> put it? (Indeed, we might soon reach the end of history given <b>climate change</b> and other destruction of crucial Earth systems, but never mind that; Pinker just picks out the "science" that conforms to status quo triumphalism)<br />...Euro/Americentric Liberal elitists and their useful idiots (Pinker?) place their faith in "the Enlightenment" (similarly, the "Founding Fathers") as the foundational social movement in human history, but we should look beyond Orwellian history, towards accounts that do not just assume whatever is written by the victors is the totality of reality. The autonomous communities not requiring and openly resisting the violent shepherding by authority are indeed written out of history... </p><p>I tried to re-read these 800+ pages to give a thorough unpacking, but frankly there are better uses of one's time. I am thankful for <b>
 <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2290478277">The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions</a>
</b> which brings an accessible dose of <b>decolonization</b> ideologies to expose just how atrocious Pinker's ideologies are. </p><p>...and these beautiful (negative) reviews, enjoy!<br /><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/785503852?book_show_action=true&amp;from_review_page=1">Brilliant review #1</a><br /><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/253147145?book_show_action=false&amp;from_review_page=1">Brilliant review #2</a><br /><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/238329819?book_show_action=false&amp;from_review_page=1">Inception of spicy reviews</a><br /><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/273624614?book_show_action=true&amp;from_review_page=1">...and one more</a><br />...in fact, there's an entire book (<a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/41051083.Reality_Denial_Steven_Pinker_s_Apologetics_for_Western_Imperial_Violence">Reality Denial: Steven Pinker’s Apologetics for Western-Imperial Violence</a>), co-written by <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/7985.Edward_S__Herman">Edward S. Herman</a> (who also lead the co-writing of that famous Chomsky book on foreign policy media: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2075902259">Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media</a>)</p><p><b>The Missing</b>:<br />I used to first recommend the following critiques on power and appraisal of popular resistance and decision-making for Western audiences given their accessibility. They are still useful:<br />-<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2075920080">Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky</a><br />-<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1095781325">The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement</a></p><p>However, to appreciate why socialism in 20th century revolutions took place in the Global South/periphery is to build the historical context of the <b>violence of global capitalism</b>. This is crucial to avoid becoming the smug Western armchair critic that sees everyone else as primitive/violent/"totalitarian"/"anti-democratic"/"not real socialism", while at the same time failing to prevent the exportation of bombs and embargoes, or achieving economic democracy at home. Where to start?</p><p>1) I'm accumulating a playlist on Global South Socialism, featuring <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/10707.Vijay_Prashad">Vijay Prashad</a>, <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/21234.Michael_Parenti">Michael Parenti</a>, <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/367522.Utsa_Patnaik">Utsa Patnaik</a>, <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/2771988.Max_Blumenthal">Max Blumenthal</a>, etc.: <b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSQhQoKnYhTXceMPfa4MYyJjnm5ScFIZ_">https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...</a> </b><br />--Highlights include:<br />i) <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/21234.Michael_Parenti">Michael Parenti</a>:<br />-on Cuban Revolution: <b><a href="https://youtu.be/npkeecCErQc">https://youtu.be/npkeecCErQc</a> </b><br />-full: <a href="https://youtu.be/O8k0yO-deoA?t=27">https://youtu.be/O8k0yO-deoA?t=27</a> <br />ii) <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/10707.Vijay_Prashad">Vijay Prashad</a><br />-on <b>ideological censorship</b>: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jKcsHv3c74">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jKcs...</a> <br />-"The Many Lives of Communism in the Third World": <a href="https://youtu.be/NZXh2Guebhg?t=104">https://youtu.be/NZXh2Guebhg?t=104</a><br />-<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3400391327">Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations</a><br />-<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2075869876">The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World</a><br />-<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2075870125">The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South</a></p><p>2) Books on the history of global capitalism not glossing over its violence and contradictions: <br />-accessible intros: <br />-<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2075894568">Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism</a> (has reformist blind-spots towards empire, but very accessible intro to the history of economic development where long-term productivity gains require nurturing/protection from ruthless short-term market competition)<br />-<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2661299837">The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry</a><br />-<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2076294721">Capitalism: A Ghost Story</a> <br />-<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2076168012">A People's History of the United States</a> (history from below instead of by the winners)<br />-<a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/185099.A_People_s_History_of_the_World">A People's History of the World</a><br />...deeper dives:<br />-<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3865335980">Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present</a><br />-<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2122888077">Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World</a><br />--<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2075867825">Debt: The First 5,000 Years</a><br />-<a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/2690635.Perilous_Passage_Mankind_and_the_Global_Ascendancy_of_Capital">Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital</a></p><p>3) Capitalism as the end of history?<br />-Intro on capitalism's dynamism being at the same time its volatility: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2497354356">Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails</a><br />-Structural alternatives? <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3534877165">Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present</a><br />-Capitalist growth on a finite planet: <br />-<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3432909941">Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World</a><br />-<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2501281520">Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System</a><br />-Capitalist State as a tool to manage class conflict: <br />-<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2075901174">A Brief History of Neoliberalism</a><br />-<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2076290954">The State and Revolution</a></p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/35434974?shelf=critique-violence">critique-violence</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/35434974?shelf=theory-psych">theory-psych</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/35434974?shelf=theory-violence">theory-violence</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/5864678-jan-rice"></a></section><section><p>509 reviews427 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/975673510">September 29, 2016</a></section><div><p>Steven Pinker has written a monster of a book. He has used his intelligence to crunch a huge volume of material. He has made a number of great points to which I'm sure to be referring often.<p>Yet despite all the insights and accompanying drum rolls, I am suspicious of the dramatic hypothesis, the grand prediction that humankind has learned in any permanent sense to be kinder and gentler. That hypothesis is a welcome change from all the dystopian predictions, and I do think I, and western civilization in general, has it pretty good right here and now in terms of space to survive and thrive. I just don't think it's necessarily a permanent pinnacle. And when people are thumping their chests and seeing themselves as representing that pinnacle, well, that's concerning--even though he insists his views are scientific and not in the least messianic. So, if Steven Pinker had been a little more humble and had spoken of current times as pretty nice for some without necessarily approaching the best of all possible worlds, I could better countenance him. But Steven Pinker can be hard to take and he doesn't do humble.</p><p>Here's a cartoon making fun of Obama from the right--and of the notion that violence has declined. But, as when we see ten feet of snow and sneer at "global warming," everything is not always as it appears!</p><p><br />--Ramirez, 06-17-2014</p><p>On the other hand, given all the predictions of doom for the world that are in circulation, it's good to hear thinking from the other angle for a change. We need it. Having leaned too far one way, maybe the only way to get back in form is to lean the other way. And that's why, when I finish complaining, I'll be touching on some of Pinker's many surprising assertions, despite not being a Pinkerite.</p><p>But, first, here are some more of my objections.</p><p>Steven Pinker has thrown so many ideas and hypotheses into this book, and he's such a fast talking, smooth intellect that it's hard to evaluate all of it--as though he were some rogue trader wheeling and dealing beyond the capacity of his would-be supervisors. You can't help but be impressed by his moves even when they're too fast to follow and you know he's sometimes pulling a fast one.</p><p>Steven Pinker doesn't do justice by his opponents. I remember the Platonic principle I learned in <i>Plato at the Googleplex</i>--that you haven't refuted an argument unless you have it in its best articulation. Straw men won't do. We hear references to opposing ideas and their proponents but in this book it's assumed that Pinker's views represent the "normal" and "best" views. I mean his views that the current commercial economy and individualism do represent the best of all possible worlds. I may even agree with him, but my point is that not everyone does. </p><p>One of Pinker's main arguments for the decline of violence is that a lower percentage of humans suffer violence now than in the early modern period, medieval times, the Renaissance, or in antiquity or prehistory. Yes, a lot of people suffered violence in the 20th century, but, according to him, a lower percentage. But, if more people suffer now but are a lower percent of the total population, is that really less violence? Did anybody ask the particular sufferers? If each human is an end in him- or herself, and a greater number are suffering, can that really be considered evidence for the decline of violence?</p><p>Actually, I took that line of argument--asking what the individuals themselves would have had to say--straight from Pinker's mouth:</p><blockquote>Ho Chi Minh was correct when he prophesied, "Kill ten of our men and we will kill one of yours. In the end, it is you who will tire." The American democracy was willing to sacrifice a tiny fraction of the lives that the North Vietnamese dictator was willing to forfeit (<i>no one asked the proverbial ten men how they felt about this</i>), and the United States eventually conceded the war of attrition despite having every other advantage. (p. 309)(my italics)</blockquote><p>Something similar happens--the author's doing what he himself reprimands others for--in the area of religion. Over and over, Pinker comes down hard on religion, blaming it for the violence and excesses of earlier eras. Yet he has to employ the most fundamentalist interpretations and he has to ignore aspects that run counter to that thesis, and all in a field that is outside his area of expertise. He has to take things literally and his interpretations as the one-and-only interpretations, laid down once and for all, for example, to take a common and conventionally-made criticism: </p><blockquote>The overriding principle was that animals exist for the benefit of humans. In the Hebrew Bible, God's first words to Adam and Eve in Genesis 1:28 are "Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." (p. 458)</blockquote><p>And he has to pick out only the aspects of scripture that he finds distasteful. And use whatever "God said" in some Bible verse as if an actual historical event to compare to "other" historical events. Apparently he must even keep the King James flavor (<i>moveth</i>).</p><p>Expounding on the meaning of seemingly arbitrary and bizarre but nevertheless rigidly required manners and rules of etiquette, Pinker studies their history. But studying the history of religion that way wouldn't advance Pinker's argument, while blindness to any such thing does, so he leaves it in the dark. "<i>What you see is all there is</i>," as <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/72401.Daniel_Kahneman">Daniel Kahneman</a>, another cognitive psychologist, says. My early impression from the quotes that were up when I started out was that most casual readers were reading <i>The Better Angels of Our Nature</i> primarily to hear Steven Pinker diss religion and reinforce their own views.</p><p>In an apparent spirit of fairness, Pinker disses the New Testament, too, but he reserves most of his ire for the Hebrew Bible. Let that be a lesson for you, Christians who disrespect your Old Testament. You are doing the work of atheists for them. </p><p>Speaking of cognitive psychology, Pinker pretty much worships at the alter of reason. Doing otherwise wasn't something that was going to advance his thesis; the reader will have to look <a href="http://janetrice.blogspot.com/2013/09/part-iii-science-of-rules-religion-and.html">elsewhere</a> for the limits of reason and for the understanding of consciousness as a system of attention rather than as some pristine space for free choice.</p><p>One more criticism: I was surprised by a clear inconsistency on Pinker's part. This author loves local authority, and, on the national level, <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/91953.Leviathan">Leviathan</a>--a central government large and powerful enough to reserve violence to itself and wield it in an increasingly disinterested and just manner--as an alternative to a wild, wild west scenario of every man for himself. Yet when it came to the international level he argues correlationally for a "Democratic Peace" theory, calling the "empire" theory of peace "cynical." (p. 281) Huh?</p><p>And going back to religion for a minute, what about God and religion as a means to call up a symbolic "Leviathan," long before there could be an actual central government in that role. He hints as much on p. 539, quoting from Martin Daly and Margo Wilson's 1988 book <i>Homicide</i> on the subject of our retention of a "just deserts" approach to justice as opposed to adopting a purely utilitarian "deterrence" approach:</p><blockquote>From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, this almost mystical and seemingly irreducible moral imperative is the output of a mental mechanism with a straightforward adaptive function: to reckon justice and administer punishment by a calculus which ensures that violators reap no advantage from their misdeeds. The enormous volume of mystico-religious bafflegab about atonement and penance and divine justice and the like is the attribution to higher detached authority of what is actually a mundane, pragmatic matter: discouraging self-interested competitive acts by reducing their profitability to nil.</blockquote><p>Pinker himself goes on to argue that just deserts itself may serve a deterrent function, and that if we were to get rid entirely of the just deserts, "retributive" aspect, making the justice system "too narrowly utilitarian," then "malefactors would learn to game it. Just deserts can close off that option."</p><p>I think it is here, in those words, and in waffling sprinkled throughout the book on the subject of religion, that Pinker concedes the value of of the very phenomenon against which he becomes so exercised. But he doesn't get that he has done so.</p><p>I got the impression that Steven Pinker really, really wants his theory that our better angels have won to be true. More on that at the end...</p><p>Now to some of his thought-provoking assertions and conclusions:</p><p>Prehistorical hunter-gatherer times were not some idyllic period during which the world was populated by noble savages free from the corrupting influence of civilization. On the contrary, life was nasty, brutish and short; those times were dominated by sneaky, murderous, rapacious raiding parties. Things had to settle down considerably before anybody could write or read any books, people! Yes, it was two steps forward, one step backward for eons; people lost health and strength when they traded in hunting and gathering for agriculture--but still!</p><p>Nor were medieval times some idyllic period over which to nostalgically yearn. That would be "cutting off your nose to spite your face," nose-snipping being one common response to a slight. Honor was priceless but life was cheap. The way we feel now--that our bodies belong to us and are ours to care for--a perception that seems to reflect "reality" but is of recent, modern derivation. It is an attitude we anachronistically think always existed. Instead, individualism developed gradually. With modern times we no longer belonged to some warlord or king; and with the spread of trade we had to get inside the head of the prospective trading partner and see others as we see ourselves..as we see others.... </p><p>The biggest problems for a society come with an overload of young males. And, yet, the confounding preference for male babies that drives female infanticide in many cultures!</p><p>Infanticide itself is far from being some aberration attributable to the impact of modern stress and alienation. Infanticide was the norm from time immemorial--if it helped the survival of current young whose viability was already established, circumstances being such that a mother could care for only so many.</p><p>This kind of thinking--some people don't want to hear it! It's enough to garner threatening letters for poor scientists.</p><p>Genocide is not a disease of modernity either. We've just learned to recognize it, that's all. Life used to be a permanent holocaust for nameless multitudes, in slavery and through the impact of war and violence. No one thought anything was wrong with it unless it happened to you, says Pinker. Murderous death was supposed to represent the verdict of history, of God, in accordance with a way of thinking only lately subject to question. </p><p>In this day of competition for victimhood (at best a two-edged sword!), silence in the aftermath of genocide seems inconceivable, but if genocide was a <i>just verdict</i>, no wonder that, at first, Holocaust survivors couldn't talk about it. I am told that changed for American Jews in consequence of the 1967 Six Day War. Did that raise the possibility of an alternative verdict?</p><p>I want to digress here on how views on the suffering of violence are shifted around in religious narratives. Some ideas have begun to consolidate themselves while I've been working on this review but since they <i>are</i> off the beaten path of the review I'll hide them. </p><p>In particular I came back to Galatians 3:13 in which Paul turns around the crucifixion of Christ from the "curse of the law" to a blessing. That has always bothered me because Deuteronomy 21:22-23 doesn't say being hanged (or crucified) is a curse. (The Jewish Study Bible and the NRSV share an editor; the translations and footnotes are very similar.) It says that leaving the body out and unburied is the curse (affront to God)--basically the same as for Sophocles' Antigone and her brother whom Cleon considered a traitor and wouldn't let her bury, to the misfortune of all. In biblical times--meaning Hebrew biblical times--stoning was the method. The final redaction was around the time of the Exile, when crucifixion didn't yet loom large. The Hebrew bible--"the law" in Paul's terms--recognized that, atypically, some traitor-types might be hanged or impaled; in that case, leaving the body exposed might well be part of the punishment. So the bible, to circumscribe such practices, said the body must not be exposed and left overnight to become carrion. The bible, in other words, sided with the morals of Sophocles' <i>Antigone</i>. <i>That</i> is what Deuteronomy is saying.</p><p>But, by post-testamental--make that <i>inter</i>testamental times, if you're from a Christian tradition--that had changed. The sadistic execution method of crucifixion had become unfortunately well-known, and, by then, that's what people thought of when they read those Deuteronomy verses. Here's an article I came across--the first few pages, anyway: <a href="http://www.tsm.edu/sites/default/files/Faculty%20Writings/LeMarquand%20-%20Cursed%20be%20everyone.pdf">http://www.tsm.edu/sites/default/file...</a> So, I think Paul thought what he thought and wrote what he wrote--and isn't the part about suffering a bad end as a curse typical? Isn't turning that upside down what religions do? But, "the Law" didn't say that being crucified is a curse.</p><p>No gas chambers? We may think genocide requires modern technology, but it doesn't. Just lock a town's population in a building and come back in two weeks. Think of the sieges of the ancient world, or of chariots, the advanced weapons of a long-ago day.</p><p>And, now--political correctness. For Pinker, PC is the residue of changes that have occurred and that we've therefore forgotten about. </p><blockquote>During the transition to modernity, people did not fully appreciate that they were undergoing changes aimed at reducing violence, and once the changes were entrenched, the process was forgotten. When Europeans were mastering norms of self-control, they felt like they were becoming more civilized and courteous, not that they were part of a campaign to drive the homicide statistics downward. Today we give little thought to the rationale behind the customs left behind by that change.... ...(A) civilizing offensive can leave a culture with a legacy of puzzling customs, peccadilloes, and taboos. ... The code of etiquette bequeathed by this and other Rights Revolutions is pervasive enough to have acquired a name. We call it political correctness.</blockquote><p>He also thinks we become amnesiac about the degree of change. We forget what the past was really like. We say little has changed. That is related to PC, enabling us to keep our guard up against the return of "the bad old days," and it also enables activists to exhort us to do more. In other words, exaggeration. If we had to acknowledge how much better things are, could we get away with it? People say racism is just as bad as it always was, but it isn't. Same for antisemitism. Not so far. </p><p>My husband was taking a Greek course last fall. In Georgia, people over 65 can take college courses for free within the state university system if there is space--isn't that nice? In connection with his course we could attend some lectures on antiquity, and at one the doctoral candidate made reference to the Greek "dark ages" (from about 1200-800 BCE). There was an African-American woman of uncertain age--meaning not young (but younger than I, as nearly everyone is getting to be) in the audience. I mention her ethnicity for any light that may shed on her reply, and what she did, during the question-and-answer period, is take issue with the "dark ages" designation, for, she said, we shouldn't make such a designation given that <i>this</i> is such a dark age. </p><p>That exemplifies the point Pinker was making re forgetting what the past was really like and exaggerating the problems of the present, even as we all sat safe, secure, comfortable and diverse, discussing our esoteric subject.</p><p>That segues to the Moralization Gap. </p><p>Say I've done something to you. From your point of view, you were my victim. Our perspectives are going to be very different. Mine will be that whatever I did wasn't all that serious. At any rate it was a long time ago. Did I really have a choice? What can one expect, anyway? My stance is going to tend toward you should get over it already, and, while you're at it, stop being so over-sensitive. Meanwhile, you don't see it that way, not by a long shot. Whatever it is lives on in your memory and your heart. For you, not forgetting is more than common sense; it's a sacred trust. </p><p>In short, the Moralization Gap is about the impact of self-interest on our views and dealings with each other, a potentially fruitful method of analysis for understanding the dynamics of a situation and why it's so hard to get along.</p><p>According to Pinker the scientist is usually going to side <i>against</i> the past as a living cause and <i>with</i> what's over being over. So, in other words, he's assuming whatever it is <i>is</i> over.</p><p>One can envisage still more angry letters and protests against that poor scientist.</p><p>Why does Pinker need to believe at all costs in his Enlightenment values? It occurs to me that for a <i>philosophe</i> who is not from the religious majority it's distinctly unpalatable to consider what it would be like if the hands of the majority tradition were to be untied. What would happen to his vaunted authority then?</p><p>And yet when he goes on and on with his criticism of the Hebrew bible, it sounds like sucking up to that majority, as if to say "Listen to me: I'm putting them down; I'm not like them." And, in that way, he's reminiscent of Marx.</p><p>Here's a 2008 article by Jerry Muller asserting the triumph of ethnonationalism. If Muller's assertions are correct, they undermine Pinker's general hypothesis. (<i>Foreign Affairs</i> allows non-subscribers one article a month and two if you register.) <a href="http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/63217/jerry-z-muller/us-and-them">http://www.foreignaffairs.com/article...</a><br />Here, critics try to refute Muller but don't succeed: <a href="http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/64457/james-habyarimana-macartan-humphreys-daniel-posner-jeremy-weinst/is-ethnic-conflict-inevitable">http://www.foreignaffairs.com/article...</a></p><p>Finally, don't think that all that's here is all there is. This review isn't very systematic. Or comprehensive; for example, there's game theory and the Prisoner's Dilemma in the evolution of cooperation. Or the concept "self-determination of peoples" as instigator of blood baths....</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/5864678?shelf=audio">audio</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/5864678?shelf=history">history</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/5864678?shelf=morality-justice">morality-justice</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1931383-faruk-ahmet"></a></section><section><p>5 reviews32 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/694008151">July 22, 2016</a></section><div><p>Loathing is the word. It infuriated me. You'd think that after all these years one would stop being surprised by this style of typical new-atheist/liberal argumentation but when I see this much cherrypicking, oversimplification, handwaving and western supremacism shoved into a single book, I still get all worked up. And of course, it doesn't help that they call themselves "The Brights" and "The Enlightened" etc. I mean, who does that? Even if I was intellectually convinced by their arguments, I still wouldn't wanna hang around these jerks.<p>His main thesis is simple and for anyone brought up after the 19th century, overly familiar: We were savages, then we were saved by Science and Reason. Not all of us, of course, only Europeans and Americans at first, but thanks to Capitalism (or as he labels it, <i>the gentle commerce</i>), everywhere else is catching up slowly, too. One time this evil thing called Communism had suddenly sprung up out of nowhere and caused many deaths and suffering but it was ultimately defeated by the Allies of Light. Etc.</p><p>"If you'd suggest occupying another country today, everyone would laugh at you and they'd think you were crazy; it is a thing of the past", he says (paraphrasing). So what about Iraq or Afghanistan? Panama, Bolivia, Vietnam, Libya and countless other bloody conflicts and interjections by the Western forces, mainly USA? Oh, they are not "wars", he says, but merely unfortunate but "defensive" actions taken by civilized nations to protect their democratic ways. Isn't it incredibly telling that in an EIGHT-HUNDRED-page book about the history of world politics and violence, the word "imperialism" is not uttered at all. Not even once.</p><p>There are a myriad of graphs and numbers stuffed inside. But the way he handles them and the way he chooses the sources he gets them from is so blatantly manipulative that it's cringe-inducing. A source repudiates his claims about "The Long Peace" and "the waning of war", and draws a bleak picture of the condition the world is in outside TheCivilizedNations? Well they are extremist, communist, leftist fanatics, you can't trust their data. Here, we have a government-funded organization that prints out numbers that fit my theory beautifully; surely they're the trustworthy ones. In one of the most embarrasing moments of the book, «<i>we are seriously asked to draw conclusions from a graph of the "rate of battle deaths in state-based armed conflicts between 1900 and 2005" (Figure 6-1) <b>while being instructed to ignore the figures for the first and second world wars</b></i>»**. Why should we ignore two world wars, while looking at the history of wars, you ask? Because "after all, the world has seen nothing close to that level since". It was a fluke. This is kinda like saying "please don't call it murder just because there's a body lying on the floor with a knife in the back, since it's not like we see something like that everyday". Forgive me for the vulgar language, but this reminds me of a lovely Turkish idiom: "If my aunt had balls, she would be my uncle".</p><p>Well, I could go on and on (like this occasionally biased and contrived -leftists!- but <i>very</i> detailed and informative <a href="http://goo.gl/fAz0Mp">review does</a>) but you get the gist. In the end, it's not that I find the claim that violence in general is getting comparatively subsided (and it's at least partially thanks to Western Civilization) completely worthless. It doesn't even have to be a glorious, total, irreversible change of paradigm to be worth praising. If we are living in a marginally better, more peaceful world, we should know about it, and understand the why and the how so we can push it further. If it really turns out that the Westerners are morally superior and more evolved or something, so be it; it's not the premise that bugs me at all, but if it takes this much deceptive and manipulative "scholarship" to prove a point, maybe we should at least raise an eyebrow in mild suspicion before patting our world of gentle commerce in the back, you know.</p><p>**Quote from <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/273624614">David's review</a>, because I'm too lazy to look it up myself.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1931383?shelf=history">history</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1931383?shelf=non-fiction">non-fiction</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6852430-fourtriplezed"></a></section><section><p>443 reviews90 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2012070760">December 14, 2018</a></section><div><p>What an interesting read! If the idea is to give the reader food for thought this book more than nourishes. <p>My approach to this book was a bit different than is usual. I have tended to write a review and then read others. Not in this case. I read many good reviews and few that were critical so was very open to being a critic. I am of the opinion that a few did not take note of what Pinker wrote. He got some numbers wrong was a fairly common complaint. He may have and admits as much. A few times he made it clear that his numbers were estimates based on researchers who are respected in the field. “…. so there is no single correct estimate” he writes on page 60 of my copy. Page 168 “….. no one knows exactly how many were killed…..” when discussing holy slaughters. In fact Pinker supports scepticism as he suggested on page 217 when discussing the Enlightenment. </p><p>As a westerner living a very comfortable life in Australia I was intrigued to read a comment by US politician John Kerry on page 417. “We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorist are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance. As a former law-enforcement person, I know we’re never going to end prostitution. We’re never going to end illegal gambling. But we’re going to reduce it, organised crime, to a level where it isn’t on the rise. It isn’t threatening people’s lives every day, and fundamentally it’s something that you continue to fight, but it’s not threatening the fabric of your life” He was right of course but he became “unfit to lead” and had to back pedal as the reality is that the authorities may well have reduced and contained crime, by cripes don’t tell the people that because the media will not be happy unless they are able to make you feel bad about just about every part of your life. Less violence? How dare that be considered when there is news to sell. And take it in your stride as you are not going to get hit by the Mafia? Bah! </p><p>This book covered a variety of female issues and after conversation elsewhere I even read On Rape by Germaine Greer. Hardly an area I knew much about. Glad I did. Perhaps blokes my age, 60ish, need to get of their fat arses and not think they rule the world as Pinker has given a very good case that the rise of feminist thought has been good for our collective health. While reading this I came across this item on the repulsive practise of female circumcision. Yes the item says caution is required but it is good to read that progress is taking place. </p><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/nov/07/fgm-rates-in-east-africa-drop-20-years-study-shows">https://www.theguardian.com/global-de...</a></p><p>This book has some fascinating sub chapters and one on page 572 called Whence The Rights Revolution? should thrill the hearts of all book readers. Among other things is a fivefold increase in books published from 1960 to 2000. The information we are getting seems to just make us collectively smarter when it comes to treating each other with a little bit of respect and not get on our high horse and want to smash the face in of our neighbours be they next door or in the nation next door. </p><p>So does Pinker say we are in for even less violence in the future? No! In fact he makes it abundantly clear that one bit of lunacy can change everything. I personally am very unsure we have rosy future. I am like the next father of children and worry about the environment, that a loony with a nuke will go mad but the book itself is in fact not really about that. It is about the data that shows violence has dropped and gives several reasons why. Disagree with the reasons by all means but also enjoy the fact you have more chance of dying in a car crash than by a terrorist attack no matter what the newspapers tells you.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/6852430?shelf=history">history</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/6852430?shelf=my-non-fiction">my-non-fiction</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/396341033">September 24, 2012</a></section><div><p>I have a peripheral awareness that Pinker awakens red penitus in a goodly proportion of his stalwart readers: but I don’t know why. I shan’t delve into this before I write up ‘better angels’: don’t want to be distracted by ‘noise’. <p>800 pages of socio-economic postulating: always an inexact science, is going to rub someone the wrong way hither or thither. We see what we want to see, and 800 pages of the ‘humanities’ is like waving a red flag to a bull: plenty of scope to flare up, statistically speaking, and isn’t that just what we love to do best: exploit the ‘Moralizing Gap’ to justify our own world view:we’re brushed up dammit: well, OK, we may not be able to prove a point statistically, mathematically, economically, biologically or physically, but give me the humanities, I say: and see if I know my oochie from my achie. </p><p>The subject centre stage here is violence, (mainly in the westen hemisphere, where data is more readily available)and the overarching conclusion is that it has decreased over time: in terms of war, rape, homicide and any other conceivable physical violation against the person. </p><p>No one, as far as I am aware, has disagreed with this overall premise, although certain definitions of violence are under debate : e.g. the high prevaleence of infanticide has been supplanted with high levels of abortion, so in this particular area Pinker’s hypothesis does not hold up: but this is and other instances are outliers in the more general scenario of violence reduction.</p><p>Pinker’s starting premise is the biological impulse, the Darwinian hegemony for survival . This type of thinking will either resonate or repel. But it is an important point because if you’re going to go down the route of biological justification, then its inadmissible to switch and bait halfway through as Pinker does. And he does so by positing the issue of excessive violence in terms of biological necessity, but resolves its decrease through ambiguous channels such as self control, empathy, reverse morality and, incongruously, and ultimately, the Flynn effect.</p><p>Hence the incompatibility? How can something which starts off as nature be dampened by nurture? Huh? Huh?</p><p>On the surface, all of the theories Pinker posits withstands microscopic examination: the Civilizing Process (e.g. the contract between man and state) does indeed explain the decline in violence: prior to Henry II introducing the state vs Jane Doe as opposed to Joe Bloggs vs Jane Doe, violence was the only way out: you smacked your feudal neighbours about, or you lost out. The aristocracy were just as likely as the hoi polloi to ‘engage’ in a good brawl. After the change in law, it wasn’t so beneficial. The upper and middle classes modified their behaviour. The lower classes persisted (and persist), because they have never fully bought into the state-citizen contract (and to be fair, neither has the state, on their behalf). Other influencing factors intervene: commerce, the integration of minorities in spheres of influence which engender the ‘rights revolution’, the pacifying influence of women, the clear demarcation of national borders, the influx of democracy, the redefinition of moral values.</p><p>And you know what: its all true. All of it. All of these trends decreased violence. And not one person can nary say it didn’t. But how exactly:well, Pinker’s final analysis is: mainly, Reason. Now, I’ve cut and pasted this next section from Peter Singer in the New York Times book review, because he rightly summarises Pinker’s position and I am too lazy to. I’m saving my fire for the constructive anlaysis after:</p><p>‘Pinker’s claim that reason is an important factor in the trends he has described relies in part on the “Flynn effect” — the remarkable finding by the philosopher James Flynn that ever since I.Q. tests were first administered, the scores achieved by those taking the test have been rising. The average I.Q. is, by definition, 100; but to achieve that result, raw test scores have to be standardized. If the average teenager today could go back in time and take an I.Q. test from 1910, he or she would have an I.Q. of 130, which would be better than 98 percent of those taking the test then. Nor is it easy to attribute this rise to improved education, because the aspects of the tests on which scores have risen most do not require a good vocabulary or even mathematical ability, but instead test powers of abstract reasoning. ......</p><p>Pinker argues that enhanced powers of reasoning give us the ability to detach ourselves from our immediate experience and from our personal or parochial perspective, and frame our ideas in more abstract, universal terms. This in turn leads to better moral commitments, including avoiding violence. It is just this kind of reasoning ability that has improved during the 20th century. He therefore suggests that the 20th century has seen a “moral Flynn effect, in which an accelerating escalator of reason carried us away from impulses that lead to violence” and that this lies behind the long peace, the new peace, and the rights revolution. Among the wide range of evidence he produces in support of that argument is the tidbit that since 1946, there has been a negative correlation between an American president’s I.Q. and the number of battle deaths in wars involving the United States. ‘</p><p>Here is where I wade in now: First of all, surely the Flynn effect is fallacious? There has been much debate about the accuracy of IQ tests in general, and how they are loaded with prescribed sense-data which automatically ‘disqualifies’ intelligent people who have not been immersed in the culture of this sense data. Second, the mode in which abstract reasoning is included in standardised tests is very easily a ‘learnable’ rather than an ‘applicable’ commodity, whose sequences have been incorporated in thousands of ephemeral ways in the educational system to begin with, and routinely tested over time. To use the Flynn effect as some overarching proof that we are ‘smarter’ than our predecessors is a travesty. But no more so than Pinker’s next theory, that ‘Reason’ has finally got the upper hand and carried us away ‘from impulse led violence’. This must be intuitively wrong, even to a philosophical novice. How can Reason deal with a biological impulse? In fact, when has Reason ever successfully ‘eliminated’ a biological impulse? Need I remind Pinker about the painful, unnecessary and degrading experiments in say trying to ‘reason with homosexuals’ that they have other choices? Conversely, I’m pretty certain no amount of reasoning will sway my biological sexual impulses either. Obviously countless other examples pertain. Pinker!!!<br />And yet violence has gone down. How to explain this, then? Given I don’t buy Pinker’s theory, I’m going to have to have a go at this myself. Why not? </p><p>First, Pinker concedes the impulse to violence is biologically driven. Then, buried deep within the 800 page text is a study by Preston and de Waal in 2002 ‘aversiveness of conspecifics in pain’, which basically translates into primates (and humans) having a natural inbred revulsion to inflicting violence on other primates/humans (backed up by Stanley Milgram’s shock experiment and the Trolley Problem). On a separate note, there is also the well known concept of ‘crowd mechanics’: or how we all fall into rank when the mob rules. My personal theory here is that, based on the studies above, it is possibility that violence was ‘overexaggerated’ in early history to begin with, due to lack of behaviour limiting controls. Perhaps in the wild these might be say greater geographical distances between competing primate groups. In human history, perhaps it was the state contract which modified an unnaturally rampant exhibition of violence between competitors in close proximity.(picture two pitbulls in a ring: excessiveness, eh?) Effectively then, an ‘overly violent’ population was stabilised to its natural levels. But this is not the whole story. ‘Better Angels’ shows we have gone one further, and overt violence is now perhaps below what might be considered the natural equilibrium. How did this happen? </p><p>Well, it didn’t. The first thing that I must concede if I am to accept that violence is a biologically driven impulse, is that it simply can NOT have been dissipated, and certainly not by Reason. The question then is, where did the violence go? Its not easily seen as a subject-object agreement, so what happened? Its been redirected, I think. We’re not rid of it, we’re simply rechanneling in a ‘non statistical’ way. Its not with a little trepidation I’m going to mention the xBox and film now. I realise I might be relegated to cuckoo territory (my only consolation is I’ll be sharing it with Pinker though!). </p><p>In the first half of the last century we had two world wars to keep us busy (and I think anybody would agree a combined total of over 40 million casualties is enough to keep anyone’s bloodthirsty instinct at bay), in the 60s there was the Vietnam war and the most intense cold war stand off ever (Bay of Pigs), and from the eighties onwards, we have: well, video games. The xBox (and read here all its technical predecessors and contemporaries) cuts across class, race, age divide and unite men (yes, men) in an indiscriminate guts and glory campaign. Usage is phenomenal., and all inclusive. If you’re old enough to hold the controller: you’re in. Its the new passage of initiation: four year olds sat next to fourteen year olds next to forty year olds: killing, massacring, rampaging, destroying and eviscerating (apparently the only taboo is raping: there is no button for it. Says Pinker). If its not the xBox its organised sport in a way well, in a way sport hasn’t been organised ever before. Not for nothing do we have the football hooligans and the mandatory Saturday matches. And finally. Film. This is something I’ve been ‘doing’ for the last month and a half: I’ve traversed the chronological gamut of film, and I find that the level of violence in film ‘now’ is phenomenal compared to anything found before the 1960s, with ever escalating etudes since. Its gotten so bad, that at the moment we are in a new era of image making: and I call it gender segregation. The majority of current offerings seem to run across gender biased lines: mindless violent action for the men, where the directors don’t even pretend to be aiming for all round inclusivity, tempered with a backlash for women: just as silly a regression in stereotypical ‘romcom’ where no allowances are made for the non chicklit minded. Cinema is divided, in a way it never was prior to the 1960s onwards. Which serves no one well. But apropos of violence: this is where its all happening. Behind the scenes, where the victims are not ‘real’ people, and the statistics don’t register. Which means, of course, that the problem of violence hasn’t gone away. </p><p>It will resurface in all its glory. Just give it the right time and place.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/6163905?shelf=2012">2012</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1662632-richard"></a></section><section><p>1,131 reviews1,007 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/221728145">February 10, 2017</a></section><div><p>Steven Pinker certain ranges widely in intellectual circles. Although he is nominally a professor of psychology at Harvard, but even with specialties (per Wikipedia) in experimental psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, he somehow dove into history to present one of the best TED Talks, back in 2007: <i>
 <a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html">Steven Pinker on the myth of violence</a>
</i> (watch those nineteen minutes, if you haven't already).<p>Wonderfully, he has now followed that presentation up with an entire volume.</p><p>Peter Singer wrote the glowing review of this book for the New York Times, and that somewhat lengthy essay is itself well worth reading: <i>
 <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/books/review/the-better-angels-of-our-nature-by-steven-pinker-book-review.html">Is Violence History?</a>
</i>.</p><p>Update — the Autumn 2011 issue of the excellent pop sociology quarterly <i>The Wilson Quarterly</i> also enthusiastically recommends the book (with minor caveats) in <i>
 <a href="http://www.wilsonquarterly.com/blog/index.cfm/Current_Books/2011/10/17/peace-on-earth">Peace on Earth</a>
</i>.</p><p>Update — Just got this from the library; must read within three weeks since the number of holds will prevent me from renewing. Curiously, the podcast I was listening to on the way to the library was on a related topic. The U.C. Berkeley School of Law professor (and socioologist) Franklin Zimring wrote an article back in August on the precipitous decline in crime in New York City, and was interviewed by the charming SciAm editor Steve Mirsky, <i>
 <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=the-city-that-became-safe-what-new-11-08-09"> The City That Became Safe: What New York Teaches about Urban Crime and Its Control</a>
</i>. Check it out!</p><p>Update — just stumbled on a brief Q&amp;A with the Economist <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2011/11/qa-steven-pinker-0">here</a>. Poked around and found a review, also covering <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/11796285.A_History_of_Violence_From_the_End_of_the_Middle_Ages_to_the_Present">A History of Violence: From the End of the Middle Ages to the Present</a>, titled <i>
 <a href="http://www.economist.com/node/21531411">Punchline</a>
</i>; and a summation by the Economist blogger Buttonwood at <i>
 <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/buttonwood/2012/01/violence-history">A Cause for Celebration</a>
</i>.</p><p>Yet another update — since I bought the book, I'm hoping to read it again after I finish a few others. Meanwhile, I've found a few other reviews and interviews.</p><p>The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Warburton">philosopher Nigel Warburton</a> interviews Steven Pinker on the <i>Social Science Bites</i> podcast. A transcript of the interview is <a href="http://www.socialsciencespace.com/2012/11/podcast-steven-pinker-on-violence-and-human-nature/">here</a>, along with a downloadable PDF or audio MP3.</p><p>Pinker was interviewed on the <a href="http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/12276">Charlie Rose Show</a>.</p><p>A review of the book on the GuardianUK Observer column by John Naughton, <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/oct/15/steven-pinker-better-angels-violence-interview"> Steven Pinker: fighting talk from the prophet of peace</a>.</p><p><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/audio/2011/nov/07/science-weekly-extra-podcast-steven-pinker">An audio interview</a> from the GuardianUK's Science Weekly podcast.</p><p>A text interview with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Harris_(author)">author Sam Harris</a> (who is Pinker's friend and wrote the introduction to Pinker's book), <a href="http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/qa-with-steven-pinker"> Twilight of Violence</a>.</p><p>A vigorously negative review (albeit simplistic and misguided, in my quick, and as-yet contingent appraisal) by the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_N._Gray">philosopher John Gray</a> in Prospect Magazine, <a href="http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/john-gray-steven-pinker-violence-review/">Delusions of peace</a>.</p><p>Finally, the book's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature">Wikipedia page</a> has additional citations in the praise and criticism sections.<br />­</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1662632?shelf=awaiting-big-review">awaiting-big-review</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1662632?shelf=nonfiction">nonfiction</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1662632?shelf=own">own</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/36819318-scott"></a></section><section><p>288 reviews291 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1549923653">September 10, 2017</a></section><div><p>Are you afraid of being of being attacked or murdered? Do you think our society is becoming more violent and less safe? If you watch the news, read the papers and listen to politicians it would be logical to be afraid of the seemingly rising tide of violence and criminality in the world. However, Steven Pinker's <i>The Better Angels of Our Nature</i> will show you your feelings are misguided- crime and violence in society is lower than it has ever been, and our often idealized past (even the recent past) was a very violent and scary place.<p>Before you read this book (and you should read it) be aware that it is Looooong. Weighing in at 832 pages <i> The Better Angels of our Nature</i> is no reading Everest, no Tolstoy, but each of those pages is a heavy bit of paper, drowning in a kudzu of fascinating facts and info that has spread to near every sentence. It was a long march to the final page, but trust me, it was worth it.</p><p>This is a fascinating and constantly surprising read. Pinker presents the perfect antidote for the doom, gloom and bolt-your-doors crime hysteria present in the media. I already knew that we live in a comparatively safe era of history- the lack of recent Viking raids on my apartment block is noticeable - but Pinker makes it clear that this is by far the safest period of human history that there has ever been. Present-day developed nations make even the 1970s and 80s look like a time when to step outside was to enter a gritty urban version of the hunger games, complete with roving packs of armed rapists (the sexual violence stats for those decades are genuinely horrifying).</p><p>The United States, sadly, is still more violent than Europe or Australasia, but even with all the shootings and killings of recent years the cold hard statistics show that Americans are still safer than ever. This completely flips the established narrative in politics and the media, and the hard data shows that suicide is a greater threat than murder, or even from war and natural disasters combined. The average person in twenty-first century society is more likely to die by their own hand than they are by the hands of others. </p><p>The reality of contemporary crime and violence is completely contrary to the apocalyptic vision presented by fearmongering politicians and news outlets and <i>The Better Angels of our Nature</i>, or at least a summary of Pinker’s findings, should be compulsory reading for anyone standing for public office. Pinker's book stands as an engaging testament to how much progress we have made in making our broader human society far less violent.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/36819318?shelf=history">history</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/36819318?shelf=non-fic">non-fic</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/957634-daniel-clausen"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>9 books455 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2028201893">November 2, 2017</a></section><div><p>Steven Pinker’s "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined" is a big ambitious book. Perhaps too big, perhaps too ambitious. And perhaps, too sprawling for its own good. One could opt for a Peace Studies reader and get a more eclectic taste of what research is out there. Would it be as comprehensive as this book? Maybe, maybe not, but you would get the benefit of tasting the many kinds of literature through many different voices. <p>Here, we get a great deal of peace science, behavioral science, religious literature and more, all sifted through one scientific (and often brilliant) voice. Much research is included in this volume, and the many references often drown out the voice, but the voice is also in control of how we receive the literature. </p><p>So, what is the book -- polemical argument, scientific memoir, or reference volume? I doubt it knows the answer. </p><p>The point of the book is simple: to outline how violence has decreased, and to answer why so that we may learn from our successes and continue to replicate them. </p><p>The book might strike some as counter-intuitive -- in the time of Rwanda, Darfur, Iraq, mass-casualty terrorism, runaway gun violence in the US, and much, much more, it would seem like our times are just "another bloody century". Surely, if we subtract the effects of nuclear weapons in deterring warfare between major powers, and on top of that, if we discount the way modern battlefield medicine has led to a decrease in fatalities from warfare (many are still wounded and crippled), then our century can't be that much more peaceful than others. And there is also the other issue, the possible historical contingency of our own "long peace" (much like the long relative peacefulness between the Napoleonic wars and the first World War). One really bloody hegemonic war between nuclear powers might be all that's needed to eliminate our current gains. </p><p>And yet there is a surprising body of evidence that suggests that violence has decreased that spans across multiple disciplines. Pinker makes the case that this trend is deep, enduring, and possibly sustainable. Ancient and medieval societies took genocide, rape, mutilation and other types of violence as given. All of these forms of violence were permissible as long as customs and traditions were adhered to. </p><p>For me, the most interesting aspects of the book are the tracking of the rights movements and the civilizing processes. These are truly fascinating aspects of the evolving peace that I was not fully aware of. I think for many of the scholars coming to this book with some background in peace studies or studies of violence, they will have a similar reaction to mine. I know that...and I know that...and I know that...but ah!, I didn't know that! </p><p>This speaks to the benefit of having such a comprehensive volume. Peace researchers who are aware of one of type of literature might be bored by some chapters of the book, and yet, find themselves enthralled by others. </p><p>Overall, a fantastic read and one that I would readily recommend to others.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/957634?shelf=books-of-2017">books-of-2017</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/957634?shelf=international-relations-classics">international-relations-classics</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/8079403-max"></a></section><section><p>337 reviews288 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2199965554">January 12, 2018</a></section><div><p>Pinker goes into voluminous detail to show us that violence has steadily declined in human society since prehistoric times. In this well-structured work rich with statistics, charts, and the ideas of influential scholars he identifies six prevailing trends: The Pacification Process, the Civilizing Process, the Humanitarian Revolution, the Long Peace, the New Peace, and the Rights Revolutions. Turning from history to psychology he identifies five inner demons that lead us to violence: Predation, dominance, revenge, sadism, and ideology. Then he identifies four better angels: Empathy, self-control, morality and reason. He gives us a brief review of violence in human history before explaining each trend and the underlying psychology. Below is my recap.<p>The first trend, the <b>Pacification Process</b>, explains the decline of violent deaths as a percentage of the population from the time of prehistoric tribes to today’s modern nation states. Incessant feuding and raiding between tribes gave way to organized societies that enforced laws and weighed more carefully the consequences of war. The decline has been steady but not smooth with large conflicts and exterminations causing big blips in the trend line but not breaking it. </p><p>The second trend, the <b>Civilizing Process</b>, explains how people acquired manners and standards of behavior that were less prone to violence. Pinker attributes much of both processes to Hobbes Leviathan, the state. From 5000 fiefdoms in 15th century Europe came 30 nations in 20th century Europe. As these states grew in size, so did strong central authority. Laws, rules and norms on behavior were imposed to ensure loyalty and stability decreasing internal violence. Increased commerce created interdependence between states also engendering stability and reducing the benefits of interstate conflict. The degree of violence in a country or even a region in the US is best explained by acceptance of the rule of law. The rule of law is not accepted where governments are weak or by people in remote regions or by people who feel discriminated against. In these situations street law replaces government laws, honor systems prevail and personal disputes are much more likely to end in violence.</p><p>The third trend, the <b>Humanitarian Revolution</b>, developed from the Enlightenment which began in the seventeenth century led by philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. The Humanitarian Revolution challenged sadism, despotism and cruel punishments for people and animals. The invention of the printing press had resulted in an explosion of books and rapid increase in literacy. Reading, particularly popular novels which induced vicarious emotion, led to shared ideas, values and perspective crossing traditional community lines. People from different backgrounds congregating in cities and increased international trade contributed to the Humanitarian Revolution as did the Civilizing Process. Prior to the Humanitarian Revolution the world was brutish and cruel. Pinker goes into great detail about many popular tortures that were widely enjoyed such as burning witches and dangling cats over fires for evening fun. Communities even purchased prisoners from other jurisdictions so they could hold executions for public entertainment. Reading this section is like reading about a completely different world. Barbara Tuchman’s <i>A Distant Mirror</i> provides good background.</p><p>The fourth trend Pinker calls the <b>Long Peace</b>. He is referring to the relatively peaceful period since WWII. He also points to the long period of relative European peace between the Napoleonic Wars and WWI. Pinker goes back further amassing a plethora of statistical measures to posit that the trend of the world since at least the fifteenth century is towards fewer wars and fewer war deaths as a percentage of world population. This holds true even considering the huge casualties of WWI and WWII and other deadly calamities. Pinker believes nationalism and territorial conquest are on the decline as Enlightenment values such as human rights take hold. The humanitarian influence is strongly reinforced by the now readily available real-time graphic pictures of war. He sees hope in the number of countries that have stopped conscription and the slower than expected rate of nuclear proliferation. He goes back 200 years to Kant who pointed out three forces that promoted peace – democracy, international trade, and international organizations. All three have experienced recent dramatic growth supporting Pinker’s trends of pacification, civilizing, and humanitarianism to support peace. </p><p>The fifth trend is the <b>New Peace</b>. This encompasses the period following the end of the Cold War in 1989 up to the time Pinker wrote the book, published in 2011. Pinker analyses different types of wars (interstate, non-state, and civil), mass exterminations (racial and political) and terrorism to show the world has continued to become more peaceful. He points out how our perceptions have changed. Compare the 5,000 Americans and 100,000 Iraqis that have died during this period in Middle Eastern conflicts to the 58,000 Americans and 1,000,000 or more Vietnamese who died in that conflict. What shocks today would have seemed far less significant just decades prior. Once, even genocide didn’t raise the eyebrows of those not affected. Pinker discusses modern exterminations including the Armenian genocide, Soviet collectivization, the Holocaust, Chinese land reform, and Rwandan genocide. Political instability, ethnic divisions and ideology all play roles leading to authoritarianism and genocide. Terrorism has always afflicted the world. But reliable statistics are available only going back to the 1970’s. Western Europe has seen a steady decline of terrorism as has the US with major exceptions: 9-11 in 2001 and to a lesser extent the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Pinker points out with the exception of 2001 and 1995 “more Americans were killed each year from lightening, deer, peanut allergies, bee stings, and ‘ignition or melting nightwear’ than by terrorist attacks.” So the recent trend, despite all the histrionics, is toward less violence, but it only takes one megalomaniac with nuclear weapons to undo all the trend lines.</p><p>The sixth trend Pinker calls the <b>Rights Revolutions</b>, which were primarily due to the increase in access to information exposing people to new ideas and different viewpoints. Contributing are democracies which promote access and prosperity which allows people to focus beyond necessity. Pinker describes five Rights Revolutions:</p><u>Civil Rights</u>: From the lynchings of the American South to the pogroms of Russia, racial and religious violence has persisted throughout history. In America only since Truman integrated the armed forces in 1948 and Johnson signed the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 did change begin to take hold. Today most Americans accept diversity and respect differences. <br /><u>Woman’s Rights</u>: Rape and wife beating have been endemic in every society. Women were regarded as property. Rape was considered a crime against the husband or father. Not until the late middle ages did Western views begin to change and so.me cultures still haven’t. It wasn’t until the 1970’s that states in the U.S. began to pass laws against husbands raping their wives. As late as the 1970’s women were denied credit unless their husbands signed. A 1974 law made that illegal. Change has been dramatic in the last fifty years with the “me too” movement the latest iteration of progress. <br /><u>Children’s Rights</u>: Until recently 10-15% of all children were killed shortly after birth. Infanticide has been regularly practiced by all types of societies. Mothers did it to ensure the survival of other children. Men did it because they did not believe the child was theirs. Both men and women did it because the child was a girl. For children that survived, beating or at least spanking them was considered good parenting until the last half of the twentieth century. Today the danger may be that parents are obsessively controlling their children’s lives and taking “safety” precautions that are counterproductive. Children should be allowed to learn how to play without adults around. Parental influence has its limits. Children take on the values and vernacular of their peers. <br /><u>Gay Rights</u>: As late as 1969 homosexuality was illegal in every U.S state except Illinois. That gay and lesbian marriage is now legal and widely accepted in the U.S. is to me the most unanticipated of all the gains in human rights in my lifetime. <br /><u>Animal Rights</u>: Abuse of animals like abuse of humans has a long history and only in the last decades has the issue come to the forefront. Rising concern over the humane treatment of pets, farm animals, and laboratory animals has spawned action groups and regulations to protect animals. Cock fighting and dog fighting are outlawed many places and even bullfighting is on the decline. This is a far cry from primitive, ancient and medieval societies where torturing animals for fun was widely practiced.<p>Next Pinker describes the psychology that predisposes us to violence. He describes the Moralization Gap, self-serving biases used to justify our actions and feelings. This gap enables perpetrators and victims to create widely different narratives of the same event. He even digs into brain structure to explain how violent and anti-social impulses are generated and to further discredit the concept of pure evil. The ingredients for evil lurk inside all of us. One is reminded of Solzhenitsyn’s observations that, “…the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” and “To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good...” Pinker identifies what he terms the five demons that drive violent behavior: </p><u>Predation</u> is exploitive, practical violence done for personal gain. <br /><u>Dominance</u> is characterized by actions that tell others - Don’t mess with me, I’m in charge. Narcissistic (grandiose, needs admiration, lacks empathy) political leaders are particularly violence prone. Thwarted narcissists feel humiliated leading to envy and rage. Virulent nationalism and tribalism can form in the presence of group narcissism. <br /><u>Revenge</u> is a common urge and major cause of violence. Empathy, dependence and close connections can modulate revenge. <br /><u>Sadism</u>, inflicting pain for pleasure, is hard for most of us to understand. It can grow out of predation and punishment. It is largely an acquired taste. People in control of others can slide into sadism. <br /><u>Ideology</u> justifies violence as a means to an end for the greater good. People in tightly knit groups feed off each other making violence seem reasonable. When the group is dominant others behave like sheep and pretend to believe. Euphemisms, gradualism, diffusing responsibility, distancing from and denigrating victims are common techniques that lead to moral disengagement.<p>Lastly Pinker reviews four “Better Angels”, those traits that mitigate violence: </p><u>Empathy</u>, often used in the sense of sympathy or compassion, has several meanings. One is perspective taking which refers to seeing things from someone else’s point of view. Another is theory of mind, trying to figure out someone else’s thoughts and emotions. Empathy is typically applied disproportionately to individuals in the same community, or who share our values, or are cute. Thus empathy does not embody fairness. Expanding our perception of interconnectedness with others can expand our circle of empathy and altruistic behavior. <br /><u>Self-Control</u> often means delaying gratification. It’s fair to discount future benefits but many of us discount them far too much. Individual self-control is rooted in brain structure and function including the workings of hormones and neurotransmitters. But it can be cultivated. The Civilizing Process by setting behavioral norms has helped us make substantial improvements over the centuries. <br /><u>Recent Biological Evolution</u> (not a better angel) has been proposed based on varying demographics in birth and death rates, but there is not adequate proof for this. The Humanitarian Revolution, The Rights Revolution and significant recent declines in crime have happened too rapidly for biological evolution to be a factor. <br /><u>Morality and Taboo</u> have shifted. Pinker reviews several models. The shift has been from morals based on purity, community and authority which appeal to social conservatives to those based on fairness, individual autonomy and rationality which are values embraced by social liberals. The shift is reflected in recent changes in minority, women’s and gay rights. <br /><u>Reason</u> despite newsworthy examples to the contrary is on the rise. It reduces violence by identifying the absurd, promoting self-control and even morality. It introduces the concept of proportionality which is essential to fairness. For whatever purpose reason originally developed, its continued expansion to other areas is only natural. IQ test do show people are getting smarter, at least in the area of abstract reasoning, a skill that is developed as educational levels, science, technology and a symbol rich environment have increased. This does not mean underlying general intelligence has increased only the way it is applied has changed. The development of abstract reasoning promotes cooperation, liberalism, economic literacy and democracy; all of which help reduce violence. <p>To put this all together Pinker looks, “for common threads in the Pacification Process, the Civilizing Process, the Humanitarian Revolution, The Long Peace, the New Peace and the Rights Revolutions. Each should represent a way in which predation, dominance, revenge, sadism, or ideology has been overpowered by self-control, empathy, morality, or reason.” He identifies forces that turned out not to be important to the six trends: Weaponry and disarmament, resources and power, affluence, and religion and ones that did matter: The Leviathan, gentle commerce, feminization, the expanding circle of sympathy and the escalator of reason. It is popular to opine nostalgically on the good old days and extol the simpler more natural life of past centuries and eons, but as Pinker points out those past times for most people were harsh, bitter and much more violent.</p><p>Pinker makes a convincing and well documented case that we have gone from a society where violence is the accepted and expected norm to one where violence has diminished to the point that we look on it as an aberration. He takes pains to not predict the future even though the many statistical trend lines Pinker presents imply that we might expect more of the same in the future. I’m not swayed by statistical implications for the future but his analysis of the forces at play give me hope. Pinker’s thesis is not uncontroversial. However, despite its detractors, it has won many awards and significant endorsements. But even if you don’t buy in to Pinker’s conclusions, there is much food for thought. This book is for readers with a serious interest. It is well written and clear but there is a lot to digest and I think most readers will be best served by patience and allotting the time necessary to take it all in. It is, as widely claimed, a very important book that can change the way you look at the world and the human animal that is dictating its future.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/8079403?shelf=science">science</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/7672661-lois-bujold"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>154 books37.5k followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/652168585">June 27, 2013</a></section><div><p>After a steady recent diet of short-attention-span theater internet surfing, it was very interesting to dive into a dense read that took me a week to chew through. (I am not a very fast reader, but I'm usually faster than that.) The exercise of following a really long, complex, sustained argument was probably good for me.<p>Seven chapters of convincing examination of historical evidence to the best approximation that could be managed, all of which jibes well with what I know or have experienced of history, followed by three chapters of attempts to figure out the <i>why</i> of the what. Pinker was pretty good about fencing off his facts from his hypotheses with suitable disclaimers. Several times he more-or-less interrupts his narrative to give the reader tutorials on basic statistics, in a desperate bid to bring his audience up to speed so that they can understand his data and how he massages it to get it to yield up more understanding. I was very interested in the brief survey of recent formulations in neurology and cognitive psychology that he used to underpin his arguments. </p><p>I was also reminded of a classic little book from the 50s, <i>How to Lie with Statistics</i> by Darrell Huff, which should really be required reading for every voter and consumer. (It has been reprinted in paperback and is now available on Kindle, I'm pleased to note.) Pinker, I think, is trying very hard to tell the truth with statistics; that little book would help ground one's evaluation either way.</p><p>I was charmed by how many of my own humanist beliefs about history and human nature were supported variously, not to mention how many of the jokes and cultural references I got, but naturally, I would be; Pinker and I are of the same generation and share a certain amount of world-view, after all. I am pretty fond of the modernity that cocoons me and has repeatedly saved my life, and he does not underrate it, either. Not everything worked for me in his arguments, but enough did for going on with. He footnotes the hell out of everything, which I appreciate. Along the way he dropped recs for what sounds like a lot of potentially interesting further reading, should I find energy for it. (31 pages in very small print of sources one could go check up, ditto.)</p><p>Highly recommended. </p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/9517361-blaine-snow"></a></section><section><p>137 reviews84 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/371549671">July 8, 2016</a></section><div><p>This book is sure to anger or confuse just about everyone who cares about the world today, but particularly those who love to hate the idea of cultural progress: "What? You gotta be kidding - violence has declined over time? No frikin' way - just look at the news." But be assured - after you read only a few pages of this book, you'll be reminded of what life used be like in the foreign country called The Past and you just might change your tune and recognize how, for large sectors of the world's population, life today is less violent, less brutal, and less cruel. <p>Pinker's basic thesis is that, no matter how you look at the data, no matter what time frame, no matter what part of the world or what era, and no matter what form it takes, violence, cruelty, and brutality in human society has declined over time. With over 700 pages of detailed charts, data, and references to other such studies (such as the books "Homicide" by Daly/Wilson and Keeley's "War Before Civilization"), Pinker demonstrates the astonishing fact that, despite the continued violence everywhere in the world today, much of today's world lives in a time of relative peace and safety unknown to past generations. It's not an argument that violence has been eliminated but that there is a pacification and civilizing process at work in history in which violence in its many forms has been decreasing over time. It is especially an argument for the success of secularism, modernity, liberalism, the democratic state, and societies based in law and order, an argument many just don't want to hear. Many of my friends simply refuse to read it because they're unwilling to challenge their adherence to some version of the narrative that "the world is going down the toilet" and that some version of modern western culture is the reason why. They may be right in some sense but they're not in terms of what Pinker is talking about. </p><p>When you are able (willing?) to separate out just how Pinker is framing "violence" from your overall view of violence in today's world, his argument becomes crystal clear. He is quite aware that there still exists cruelty, slavery, and horrific brutality in today's world but, like the difference between the institutionalized, culturally-sanctioned slavery of the past and the clandestine forms of human trafficking of today (not to mention the sheer numbers difference), there really has been progress here as there has in so many other areas. </p><p>Pinker's book deals mostly with human-on-human violence and to a lesser extent, human-on-animal violence. While the evidence he presents points to an ongoing decline in the former, it could be argued that human&gt;animal and human&gt;natural world violence has actually increased as human populations increased. The question for Pinker is: have certain privileged parts of the world's population gained a relatively violence-free society at the expense of the continued violation-destruction of nature, of plant and animal species? </p><p>Edited: Jan2016</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/9517361?shelf=all-time-favorites">all-time-favorites</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/9517361?shelf=history-cultural">history-cultural</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/9517361?shelf=social-science-theory">social-science-theory</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1944947-barnaby-thieme"></a></section><section><p>497 reviews225 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1270033092">May 13, 2021</a></section><div><p>I was recently listening to a <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01by8ms">BBC interview</a> with two historians on the An Lushan rebellion, and the interviewer read a passage from Pinker's book in which he argued that this Chinese civil war was important evidence for his thesis that human violence used to exist on a scale we would now find hard to believe. When the interviewer read some of Pinker's death statistics about the rebellion, both of them spontaneously burst into laughter and one of them asked "What on earth is his evidence for that?" <p>What, indeed? Pinker relies throughout this book overwhelmingly on the death statistics for major historical events compiled by a librarian and published to his personal website in his spare time. Pinker explains that he finds the hobby website impressive, and argues that as a librarian, he can utilize source material better than most academics, i.e., than trained historians. If you think I'm joking, <a href="&lt;a href=">look for yourself</a>.</p><p>No, I'm afraid this book is the joke, and it makes a joke of its credulous audience, making specious, anti-empirical, and fatuous arguments fueled by intellectual narcissism. </p><p>What if the situation were reversed? That is, what if a history professor wrote an eclectic book on cognitive linguistics that was fundamentally at odds with the consensus of trained experts in the discipline, and that relied largely for support on a single source, which was itself entirely the work of an amateur? </p><p>I think such a book would quite likely be universally regarded as a laughingstock. However, we live in a generation in which the increasing consensus among intelligentsia holds that scientists hold the answers to questions that used to be addressed by the humanities, and so Pinker's book is not only accepted as plausible, but widely lauded and championed, including by people who should know better, like Bill Gates. Indeed, many of its chief boosters seem to be techno-utopians already deeply committed to the notion that gains in technology are a rising tide that lifts all boats. This is a work that flatters its secular humanist audience by suggesting we have learned our lesson and, by and large, moved past our brutish origins, carried on the wings of science, progress, and bourgeois values. </p><p>Apparently scientific progress doesn't include historiography, which anyone is qualified to do. </p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1944947?shelf=hated">hated</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1944947?shelf=history">history</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6132231-owlseyes"></a></section><section><p>1,634 reviews257 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2205853912">May 25, 2022</a></section><div><p><b>"War is peace"</b><br />in: NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR, by George Orwell<p><a href="https://imgur.com/T9zuItZ">
 
</a><br />Magic Mirror, do tell me, which one is </p><s>Rosier</s>Pinker??<p>I still don’t figure it out, in what planet psychologist Pinker lives on. I have watched him many times insisting on “things are getting better”. Due to his studies on violence, he sees there is less violence amongst humans. He adds to this optimistic picture: “we’re getting more humane”. </p><p><a href="https://imgur.com/YqSmQoQ">
 
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</a></p><p>One thing is reported, numerical cases of violence, in wars, in crime etc. Another different thing, is the human nature. Despite his studies going back in thousands of years, he just doesn’t report on the POTENTIAL for violence; I mean, atomic weapons still exist today (in big numbers, and in several nations), as well as chemical and biological ones. Should an atomic war conflagrate (say, in the Korean peninsula) (God forbid!), </p><s>The Day After</s>the next day the book of Pinker would be just obsolete. Yes, you cannot cope with (the idea of) the numbers killed. Pinker, the one who had affirmed “nuclear weapons are useless”, would be instantly refuted. For good. <p><a href="https://imgur.com/mOWYfx0">
 
</a></p><p>Deep down in the human nature, violence does exist. Let’s not put some sort of </p><s>pink</s>rosy camouflage, in the human nature. I've been thinking about Africa in this and the past century; Mao's China and Russia under Stalin, and other examples, which should make Pinker think thrice, at least,... about demons.<p>I would like Pinker to comment on the Mandalay Bay hotel shooting, in Las Vegas, the past October. And on similar cases.</p><p><a href="https://imgur.com/dtWVCsz">
 
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</a><br />(decline? what decline??)</p><p>UPDATE</p><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCm9Ng0bbEQ">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCm9N...</a><br />Here Pinker is good with numbers; yet, he didn't include mass shootings in the US. How many since the Mandalay Hotel have occurred up to the present moment??</p><p>UPDATE (for 2018 and 2019, for Pinker to check it out)</p><p><a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-mother-jones-full-data/">https://www.motherjones.com/politics/...</a></p><p>UPDATE</p><p>"It's Insane We're Having A 'Debate' Over Whether It's Acceptable To Assault A Journalist" (1st of July 2019) Pinker wrote on Twitter, regarding what happened in Portland. Yes, by Antifa people. Pinker is slowly waking up apropos VIOLENCE.</p><p> UPDATE</p><p>This is an important interview because Pinker goes nuclear. 😛</p><p><a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/rainerzitelmann/2020/03/02/steven-pinker-evolution-has-saddled-our-species-with-many-irrational-and-destructive-psychological-traits/amp/">https://www.forbes.com/sites/rainerzi...</a></p><p>UPDATE</p><p>How much of a "humanist"?</p><p><a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/stink-academic-hypocrisy-steven-pinker-usurps-humanist-values/amp/">https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/aut...</a></p><p><a href="https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/07/15/us/steven-pinker-harvard.amp.html">https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nyti...</a></p><p>UPDATE</p><p>( This is for Pinkerites)</p><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/sep/28/steven-pinker-celebrity-scientist-at-the-centre-of-the-culture-wars">https://www.theguardian.com/science/2...</a></p><p>UPDATE</p><p>Besides the war in Ukraine (it's been 3 months!), much sadly, I would like to add the Texas shooting. <br /><a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/24/uvalde-texas-school-shooting-00034864">https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05...</a></p><p>---<br />"For when they might say, "Peace and security," then suddenly destruction comes upon them, as the labor pains to her having in womb; and they shall not escape."<br />in: 1 Thessalonians 5:3</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/6132231?shelf=6-major-declines">6-major-declines</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/6132231?shelf=deep-down">deep-down</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/6132231?shelf=forensic-archeology">forensic-archeology</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/13162061-amirography"></a></section><section><p>198 reviews123 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1451485984">May 15, 2017</a></section><div><p>Mind-blowing book! I have never read a book about history and statistics that was this interesting. I love how Steven Pinker argues with countless studies and a great logical validity. <br />This book is a must-read book for anyone interested in sociology, history, politics and environment. This book breaks the long romanticized picture of the past which has been filled with nostalgia and confirmation biases. <br /></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/13162061?shelf=cognitive-science">cognitive-science</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/13162061?shelf=next">next</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/13162061?shelf=philosophy">philosophy</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1045774-mehrsa"></a></section><section><p>2,234 reviews3,663 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1741853412">January 15, 2023</a></section><div><p>there are some missing connections and it's an ethnocentric view of violence. Like did enlightenment ideas also diminish violence in the East?</p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/7232207-fiona"></a></section><section><p>319 reviews344 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/661077462">January 2, 2016</a></section><div><p>Did this really take two and a half years to read? I see that it did. I picked it up after a new-ish boyfriend press-ganged me into seeing Pinker talking about his new book - this one - in Edinburgh, and thinking that it sounded fascinating and potentially relevant to a PhD I was considering doing. Well, the PhD idea is discarded, and as for the boyfriend, I swapped Pinker for <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14201.Jonathan_Strange_Mr_Norrell">Susanna Clarke</a> and moved in with him. He finished my book first.<p>The premise of <i>The Better Angels of Our Nature</i> is that the world is getting less violent. I read about the first half fairly slowly, as it marched through prehistory and the Middle Ages, with graph upon graph and source upon source - I mean, that's pretty uncontentious, isn't it? That there are far fewer beheadings and settlement-on-settlement raids and Hundred Year Wars as we get through history past the Enlightenment. Knowing next to nothing of east Asian history, I was interested to read about things like the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Lushan_Rebellion">An Lushan Rebellion</a> and a brief history of belligerent Mongols. There are parts on international armed conflict, on genocide, on civil war. I spent a year studying humanitarian law. It felt like a lot of the coursework from that year, albeit a bit rearranged. So far so good, Mr. Pinker; I accept where you're going with this.</p><p>I put the book down, for a very long time. Then in November 2015 two things happened in quick succession: the Paris bombings, followed quickly by the vote in the UK Parliament to bomb Syria. I'm in Scotland, and a more dyed-in-the-wool pacifist you'll not find. So I picked this back up, to keep reading the sections about armed conflict in the twentieth century, because I wanted to be reminded (convinced?) that the world is broadly heading in the right direction.</p><p>I mean, it is. It is; but we're not anywhere near out of the woods yet. And we probably won't be in my lifetime. But maybe we will. Pinker's point is not that violence has gone away. He makes few predictions. (Five years down the line, his predictions on conflict in the Middle East have proved too optimistic. But hold that thought a moment longer.) He plots a direction, and the direction is more peaceful. It seems to involve more things being classed as atrocities and abuses - but that's because we're rightly outraged these days by things that nobody would have cared about fifty or a hundred or three hundred years ago.</p><p>Finally he talks neuroscience and psychology. Do your thing, Steven; that's more your area than mine, so I'll take your word for it.</p><p>Let's come back to the optimism of Mr. Pinker. Because he is very optimistic! Let's get the biggie out of the way first, shall we?:</p><blockquote><i>In early 2011, as this book was going to press, a swelling protest movement deposed the leaders of Tunisia and Egypt and was threatening the regimes in Jordan, Bahrain, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. The outcome is unpredictable, but the protesters have been almost entirely non-violent and non-Islamist, and are animated by a desire for democracy, good governance, and economic vitality rather than global jihad, the restoration of the caliphate, or death to infidels. Even with all these winds of change, it is conceivable that an Islamist tyrant or radical revolutionary group could drag an unwilling populace into a cataclysmic war. But it seems more probable that "the coming war with Islam" will never come. Islamic nations are unlikely to unite and challenge the West: they are too diverse, and they have no civilization-wide animus against us.</i> (p443)</blockquote><br />...Oops. Well, he did hedge his bets, I suppose.<p>Where he didn't hedge his bets, and where he consequently rather lost me a bit, was when he focused on the US a bit more specifically. When I mentioned to a friend a few weeks ago that I was reading Pinker, she clucked her tongue at me and said, "Oh dear - does he think sexism is over yet?" That's overstating it a bit, but the impression I got was, well, <i>yes</i> - it really is as if he thinks sexism is pretty much winding up, and the civil rights movement put paid to racism and racist violence decades ago. After 500+ pages of meticulous research, it seemed like a glaring oversight to just assume that the various -isms had just upped and finished since 1980. No, it didn't seem like a glaring oversight: the quickly glossed-over suggestion that racism in the US is a relic of days gone by made me think there were things Pinker wasn't telling me. This is a 1100-page book, of which the last 300 pages are entirely citations, and here I am accusing the author of leaving things out. Well, I'm gonna, 'cause I feel like he has. No fifth star for you, Steven.</p><p>And yet I'm still mostly on his side. I'm no <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/13/john-gray-steven-pinker-wrong-violence-war-declining">John Gray</a>, whose arguments seem to be of the "when you say 'it's got better', I hear 'everything's fine', which it's not" and "I know tribal people and they don't fight each other, therefore science" varieties (and, I might add, get neatly steamrollered by Pinker himself <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/20/wars-john-gray-conflict-peace">here</a> - I do so love a good academic spat in the Guardian...). Earlier this year, I proofread an essay criticising Pinker (don't ask how I arrived there; terribly unlikely circumstance is how), apparently on the twin bases that how could you possibly <i>know</i> that 15th century middle England executed more people than were executed in 21st century Oxford; and the ever-classic "but NUCLEAR!"</p><p>It plays with an idea that I don't think I'll ever fail to be interested by: it's why I loved <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21023409-the-wake">The Wake</a> so much last year, and the idea is of a magical past where everyone was nice to each other and had conversations at the dinner table, and none of these horrible new-fangled innovations existed yet to ruin everything. I love this idea! I love what it makes us do, how it makes people react, how intoxicating they (we) find it, how they'll fight so hard to show that it's real - and yet it never was. It's the ultimate bittersweet hope, the most incredible Escher-like illusion, and I just find that the most fascinating thing. There never was an Eden! There never was a perfect 1950s family, or a perfect 1880s family, or however far back you'd like to go! The government never was more competent, and people never had more common sense! The world of your childhood was nowhere near as good as this one, you just weren't looking at the crap bits! The best thing about <i>The Better Angels of Our Nature</i>, or I think, is the same thing that means it's going to wind up people who want to be wound up by it: it's a testament to things getting better, faster. Which if you ask me they absolutely, irrefutably are. Ask yourself this: whenabouts in history would you rather live?</p><p>I mean, I still think he's a bit overoptimistic in places. But at least I'll agree that his views, my views, and the best the world can be are tending to converge. Plus he's a great writer, you know. Stay for the prose, frankly.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/7232207?shelf=books-i-have-taken-to-dinner">books-i-have-taken-to-dinner</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/7232207?shelf=i-also-read-nonfiction-occasionally">i-also-read-nonfiction-occasionally</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/7232207?shelf=recommended-to-me">recommended-to-me</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/2876105-marc"></a></section><section><p>3,023 reviews1,011 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2376179738">May 22, 2018</a></section><div><p>Anyone who follows me on this site knows that I rarely give high scores to books; I like to make very clear distinctions and to indicate what is just good and what is outstanding. And this book is one of those that belongs to the top category: not because it is a perfect one (see below), but because of the breadth, the depth, the insightful, well-founded, nuanced and yet daring way in which Steven Pinker has tackled the very delicate subject of violence throughout human history.<p>It is not feasible to give a thorough presentation of this book. Because it actually is several books together: 1. a global, especially quantitative approach to physical violence in human history in which Pinker establishes that there’s a steady but very clear decline; 2. a tentative explanation of that decline on the macro-level, in which he focuses on the processes of humanization and civilization; and finally 3. a thorough analysis on the microlevel of good and evil in man in general, with particular attention to biological and psychological aspects that promote or reduce violence (our demons and our angels).</p><p>For me, Pinker's presentation is absolutely convincing, both in his observations and in his analysis. It is in line with my inner conviction (which of course is based on personal perception, rational analysis, as well as emotional orientation), but it also fits in with much of what I have read over the past years, especially on history. Pinker is 100% right that we have to get rid of romantic nostalgia and cultural pessimism (“the past was better, now we go from bad to worse”), which is no more than a reactionary reflex, motivated by emotional (especially fear), ideological and religious blindness. For him it is no coincidence that modernity (with its emphasis on rationality) has gone hand in hand with a humanitarian and civilization-revolution that has led, among other things, to a marked reduction in violence worldwide. And that is true, despite the daily flow of negative news coverage on conflicts and injustices that still plague our world.</p><p>Yet, as already indicated, this is not a perfect book. For example, I have some reservations about Pinker's tendency to give great emphasis on evolutionary-biological aspects in his search for explanations; I understand that, because that focus has become a trendsetter in his field of study (social psychology in the broadest sense of the word) and has certainly clarified many things. But the sometimes implicit suggestion of Pinker that these are ultimate clarifications (necessary ànd sufficient) seems rather exaggerated to me. Fortunately, he nuances in other places.</p><p>Second caveat: Pinker regularly warns against statements about future developments, and cites the well-known saying that social scientists better not make any predictions, because they already have so much trouble dealing with the past. Yet Pinker in this book regularly formulates optimistic expectations for the future and that is strange. At the moment, 2018, for example, the world looks slightly different than when he wrote this book (2009-2011) and his unbridled belief in the further advance of liberal humanism and rationalism isn’t that probable any more.</p><p>Third reservation: Pinker continually illustrates his observations with both general statistical material and specific experiments. What is striking is that these studies are mainly Western (in particular American) oriented. Pinker does make attempts to break out geographically and culturally, but still, his evidence is almost entirely Western (American-European). And that involves a great risk of bias. Also his focus on our recent history (after the second world war), an era of globalization and enormous advances in affluence, technology and science, can also cause a bias (although we will only be able to estimate this in a few decades). </p><p>And finally a fourth reservation: especially in the concluding paragraphs, the lyricist in Pinker gets the upper hand and he ventures into a statement of faith in rationalism. Of course, he presents strong arguments that support his theory that the decline of violence in human history ultimately is due to the further advance of reason. But just at that moment he leaves his cautious, nuanced style behind him and his language becomes almost religious (in favor of rationalism); on this instance (after almost 700 pages) he introduces the concept of "modernity", without much clarification, and that’s a bit problematic.</p><p>Pinker has garnered a lot of praise with this book, but also a huge wave of criticism, both on historical details, on the validity of his statistical material, on his psychological-biological approach and on his ode to rationalism and liberal humanism. The critics of this book certainly have a point in some of those cases. But if you look at the 700 pages in their entirety and go through them thoroughly, then you can hardly accuse Pinker of simplism, naivety or deception: he constantly warns about exaggerated expectations; nothing is definitive, and a relapse is always possible, he regularly states. But at the same time his overall conclusion is very outspoken: "<i>while this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, (our) species has also found ways to bring the numbers down, and allow a greater and greater proportion of humanity to live in peace and die of natural causes. For all the tribulations in our lives, for all the troubles that remain in the world, the decline of violence is an accomplishment we can savor, and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible.</i> "(p. 696)</p><p>This book is a tough chunk, which takes a lot of effort to wrestle through, and one certainly has not to agree with everything, but it seems to me that this book deserves its place among the most important ones published in the early 21st century! (4.5 stars)</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2876105?shelf=evolution">evolution</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2876105?shelf=globalisation">globalisation</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2876105?shelf=history">history</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1360651-joseph-d-walch"></a></section><section><p>181 reviews3 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/244302775">March 22, 2012</a></section><div><p><blockquote> <b>But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. <br />--The Federalist, No. 51, James Madison</b></blockquote><p>This is easily one of the best books of 2011, and I suppose it must already be earmarked as a Pulitzer finalist. It’s about violence, but so much more than that since it strikes at the very core of human nature, the human condition, government, economics, and moral philosophy. Stephen Pinker starts with a simple premise—proving the decline of violence in modern times. This apparently is so controversial to some that he meticulously plots the decline of violence with great historical and statistical detail—this is the descriptive ‘what’ that Dr. Pinker illustrates in the first 2/3rds of the book. The writing is absorbing even if it rings a mildly irreverent tone that betrays a subtle anti-religious bias (especially vis-à-vis politico-religious violence of the Roman Catholic and Old Testament societies—he was a roommate of Harold Bloom after all and is a dedicated humanist) that includes some humorous satire and contemporary references to lighten the mood of such a grim topic. Indeed, his graphic descriptions of torture, rape, suffering and grotesque sadism is enough for even the most macabre minds. Stephen Pinker is a true evolutionary scientist who is adroit in the heuristic of categorization and you can find lists, and lists of lists to aid in understanding the narrative he describes. <br />For example, the declining trend of violence is broken down into these historical themes: </p><blockquote><b>1)	The Pacification Process</b>—our evolution from hunter/gatherers into political, agrarian societies. <br /><b>2)	The Civilizing Process</b>���included the consolidation of feudal economies into larger kingdoms and empires with central authority, trade and economic specialization.<br /><b>3)	The Humanitarian Revolution</b>—17th and 18th century that marked the that included the Age of Reason and the European Enlightenment<br /><b>4)	The Long Peace</b>—a result of a Kantian trifecta of 1) Democracy, 2) Trade and 3) International organizations<br /><b>5)	The New Peace</b>—arising out of a U.S. led post-cold war globalized world <br /><b>6)	The Rights Revolutions</b>—exhibited a more finely filtered intolerance of violence on smaller scales that included violence against minorities, women, children, and animals.</blockquote><p>Within these historical themes we see five major historical forces that helped snuff out violence:</p><blockquote><b>1)	The Leviathan</b>—this includes a Hobbesian social contract which grants to the state a full monopoly on the use of violence from within<br /><b>2)	Gentle Commerce</b>—closely connected to #4 this force increases economic incentives for cooperation <br /><b>3)	Feminization</b>—results in a decline of authoritarian/patriarchal based societies and the empowerment of women as intellectual equals who tend to be more risk-averse and less violent <br /><b>4)	The Expanding Circle</b>—from a mixture of globalization, commerce, and increased access to information this purportedly increases sympathy and helped usher in the Rights revolution that even extended to animals <br /><b>5)	The Escalator of Reason</b>—leading to higher levels of intelligence and emotional empathy in conjunction with more sophisticated foundation for managing moralized concerns in favor of the flourishing of all humanity</blockquote><p>The second part of the book is what really interested me and seeks to elaborate the psychological factors that dictate our behavior depending on their interplay with our environment and circumstance. Here the statistical reasoning is a little more squishy and correlational residuals are not quite as well characterized—perhaps leading to creeping confirmational bias. Put aside these minor critiques of this part of the book, the ability to marshal data from such varied fields of study as anthropology, economics (including game theory), social psychology, and cognitive neuroscience into a coherent and powerful explanation of the decline of violence. </p><p>Factors that influence violence are broken down into two categories of human nature: Demons that incite to violence and Angels that slaken the thirst for blood. The demons include the primal urge to dominance, revenge, sadism including the banality of evil, and ideologically driven moralized violence. On the other side of the ledger are qualities such as empathy (or more importantly sympathy, Dr. Pinker distinguishes the two), self-control, our moral sense, and	reason. Here, the meat of the book can be found in the chapters on the moral sense. Stephen Pinker adapts from the ethics, moral foundations, and relational models of moral reasoning of other people like Shweder, Haidt, and Fiske. First, to understand the psychology of moral reasoning (as opposed to objective moral truth itself), we are to understand that moralized beliefs are more than just the avoidance of something distasteful, but is a ‘distinctive mode of thinking about an action’. Thus, moralized beliefs are universalized (should apply to everybody), actionable, and punishable. These beliefs spring from relationships since, in Pinker’s view, evolution acted upon the population and there is no such thing as a philosophically independent human being. Moralized norms generally include relationships, a context (at home, in the street, at church, at work, at the beach, etc.), and are centered around a resource (information or knowledge, food, money, land, sex, labor, etc.). These relationships upon which socioeconomic moral reasoning is based are divided into 4 categories:</p><blockquote><b>1)	Communal Sharing</b>—the most basic tribal foundation for moral reasoning emphasizing in-group loyalty, also includes sacred or pure values that are shared within a group and reinforced through rituals and periodic but specific contextual references.<br /><b>2)	Authority Ranking</b>—e.g., military, paternalistic, totalitarian/fascist, divine right etc.<br /><b>3)	Equality Matching</b>—gifts, tit-for-tat, first relational moralized norm to recognize individual autonomy, fairness, and reciprocal altruism<br /><b>4)	Market Pricing/Rational-legal</b>—much more complex relational model of morality that incorporates universal ethical principles, a high level of individual rights, rule-of-law, social contract orientation, and requires a high level of literacy and numeracy along with a grasp of information technology and access to data on price, costs, benefits, risks, alternatives, etc.</blockquote><p>As an explanation of the basis of moralized norms this seems quite well-developed and accurate. As I read through this chapter, the current debate over the allocation of scarce health care resources came to mind as a good illustration of this relational model of moral reasoning. The argument is usually centered on the diametric poles of the relational models between communal sharing of universalized health care to rational-legal/market pricing model. Here again we see that moralized norms require more than facile affirmation of one or the other relational models since the specific contexts and resources are important. Which relational model should be employed in the state of emergency, or when the resource is a human organ in which a dead individual does not benefit, or when the allocation of the resource in the community is considered a sacred good such as the right to life-sustaining medicine. </p><p>Personally, I see a need for a hybrid system that protects sacred values of life, and the protection of the vulnerable (e.g., the elderly and children) with market-pricing and equality matching for preventative or non-emergent care should the patient choose--respecting the autonomy of the patient to make the most rational choice given the risks, costs, benefits, and alternatives. The difficulty with market-based health care, just like the difficulty of running a democracy that this market-based/equality matching system is only functional for the government of a citizenry that is based on the moral foundation of reciprocal altruism and rational-legal system of checks and balances. Like a functioning democracy, a market-based health care system requires high literacy and numeracy rates as well as the dissemination of pricing/cost information (something that the AMA has consistently blocked by restricting access to ICT coding for purposes of pricing across hospitals, specialties and regions). This leads to corruption in which supposed medical principles (e.g., doctors and hospitals who have a fiduciary and moral duty to remain financially disinterested in patient decisions) have the ability to obfuscate their own cost and market prices. With these established cartels, it's not difficult to enrich oneself by choking off a few grains of sand at strategic locations in the billions-dollar health care economy. In this model, there is no difference between the orthopedic surgeon recommending back surgery (that evidence from the Dartmouth ATLAS study shows actually does more harm than good), and the Goldman Sachs executives who traded in collateralized debt obligations, which they 1) controled the price through financial cartels, and 2) were at the same time shorting (had proprietary knowledge that they were bad investments and thus were insuring at low cost against loss of these supposed AAA-rated investments). </p><p>Some favor total universalization of health care based on moral norms, but I simply think this ancient hunter-gatherer communal-based economy is insufficient for the maximization of public good by actually rationing health care resources away from those who by definition need it most (e.g., through price controls and misallocation of scarce resources). Just because other industrialized nations have atavistic central rationing of health care as a vestigial throw-back to the devastation of the post-WWII days when virtually every single resource was rationed (e.g., labor, currency, food, shelter, etc.) is not sufficient rationale for a complex and advance economy like the U.S. to regress to the communal-sharing model of health care delivery.</p><p>Finally, Stephen Pinker is an evolutionary psychologist and a progressive and here his confirmation bias shines through quite strongly in my view. Much has been made of the Flynn effect that made the claim that IQs are actually increasing as people today are evolving on an organic and biological level to be more intelligent than those who came before us just a few decades ago. I and not quite persuaded by the data just yet. Furthermore, there is an assumption that modern western elites who exert social control are currently and likely to continue in the progressive beneficial model; this may be a bit too optimistic. The utility of some form of the Hobbesian social contract for the government monopoly of violence and justice is pretty clearly established by Dr. Pinker, however, caution is warranted in today’s modern age when an fewer and fewer of our ‘best-and-brightest’ sociopolitical/cultural prophets can do increasingly greater damage. This is a view that Pinker seems to acknowledge, but dismiss this line of thinking by citing historical data that the introduction of nuclear weapons or other WMD are uncorrelated residuals in the decline of violence. However historical data do not necessarily determine future relationships between the concentration of greater technical power into the increasingly fewer hands of elite social engineers and the decline of violence.</p><p>With the exception of those minor critiques, however, I am sure this book will contribute greatly to our cultural understanding of the psychology of violence, and by extention, peace. The ideas found here will no doubt be debated everywhere from college bowl sessions up to the halls of congress. This can only be a good thing since the overriding theme of the book is a very well-qualified optimism for the flourishing of humanity.</p><p>Update: 3-22-2012, I increased my review to 5 stars because I have found myself going back to my Kindle version of this book over and over again to review it. It has been a sublime pleasure to breath in the expert wordcraft, and the section on the Demons and Better Angels is like a symphony of well-conducted harmonious truths that come together in very a gratifying way. As a fervent believer, I found it fit very nicely into my worldview even though it is written from the perspective of just as fervent a non-believing skeptic. Such a task is very difficult to do since it takes painstaking effort to extricate one's ego (believer and nonbeliever alike) in the search for more objective reason. I say 'reason' because as Heidegger would say: facts and truth presuppose interpretation.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1360651?shelf=great-scientists">great-scientists</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1360651?shelf=history">history</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1360651?shelf=nonfiction">nonfiction</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/9628169-charles-haywood"></a></section><section><p>488 reviews677 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1239424464">August 10, 2015</a></section><div><p>This is a sprawling mess of a book. Flashes of arguably brilliant insight alternate with meandering musings. Fascinating narrow conclusions are drawn from carefully parsed evidence—and then sweeping conclusions are drawn from highly dubious evidence. Historical insights are used incisively in an argument—then the next argument is undermined by total historical illiteracy. At the end, the reader is left uncertain whether he has read 800 pages of genius, 800 pages of authoritative-sounding-but-meaningless fluff, or something in between. But I’ll go with the last one.<p>	Other reviews available online cover most of the ground from nearly every possible angle, so I’ll confine myself to a few, reasonably fresh, points. There is plenty positive to say about the book, but it’s all been said by others, so I’ll mostly steer away from praise, with the note that the entire book is a mixed bag.</p><p>The only truly fresh point I have is really not substantive, but is interesting and perhaps shows some tendencies in the book. This is that Pinker makes a bizarre claim about table manners. First, Pinker states that historically people were terrified of being stabbed at the dinner table. Maybe. But in any case, to introduce this concept he spends a lot of time talking about how, as a child, he questioned the Western modern “pointless prohibition” in table manners against using one’s knife to move food onto one’s fork. He concludes that such a prohibition is a type of knife taboo preventing spontaneous stabbings at the dinner table. But I have never heard of such an etiquette prohibition. I cannot find any reference to it in any etiquette manual. I cannot find any reference to it on the Internet. In fact, all etiquette references to knife use I can find specifically REQUIRE using a knife to move food onto one’s fork, in lieu of fingers. As far as I can tell, this “rule” is purely a figment of Pinker’s imagination, and maybe an oddity around his house growing up. Why no editor questioned this, I don’t know. It doesn’t really undercut Pinker’s hypothesis in any material way, but it’s just strange, and maybe symptomatic.</p><p>It’s important to note that for Pinker, violence means not only actions like war, homicide and assault, but more generally any cruel action with a physical component. For Pinker, war and torture are on the same continuum (though not the same thing) as corporal punishment of children and men having fistfights over insults. Reductions in both are considered progress, rather than the first group being considered progress and the second group being considered the sissification of a moribund society. In fairness, though, Pinker does have limits to this continuum—he concludes that some “reductions in violence,” like the elimination of dodgeball for children and the grossly inflated fears of child kidnapping, are silly and not progress at all.</p><p>Pinker uses no primary sources and the secondary sources he uses are mostly popularizations, many of dubious accuracy, suggesting that he relies little on fresh research and puts his faith in fresh perspectives. Similarly, most of his analysis is analysis by anecdote. Yes, he does have a fair amount of statistics in the first part of the book. But those statistics are confined to two general groups: improvements in European civilization (largely taken, with full attribution, from Clark’s “A Farewell To Alms”), and the prevalence and damages of war. Other than that, it is anecdotes all the way down. And as Lincoln apocryphally said of Spiritualists, for people who like that sort of thing, it’s just about the sort of thing they’d like. But the result is, as with Spiritualism, much of what Pinker has to say is less proof than belief.</p><p>And to be clear: Pinker’s conclusions are, fundamentally, predicated on his belief system. For Pinker, his belief system has two related pillars: that religion is evil, and that progress is inevitable, as long as we realize that religion is evil. Pinker is a big believer, whether he admits it or not, in the Whig view of history. He views its driver as the removal of religion from human life. In Pinker’s rosy view of the future, everything (at least in European-origin societies) is getting more moral, as people realize that morality has nothing to do with religion, but automatically arises from “the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games.” Of course, Pinker’s desired end state of empathy, minimal violence, and human happiness is exactly that prescribed by Christianity (and not, contrary to myth, by all religions). The Eschaton is nigh, says Pinker!—just without any eschatology. Pinker thinks that we can all ultimately behave like Francis of Assisi but be totally without religion. Maybe. If history is any guide, though, probably not—no atheist society has ever flourished on Earth. But hey—maybe the future will be different!</p><p>There are many possible criticisms of Pinker’s belief system. One threshold criticism is that Pinker’s violent opposition to religion clouds his judgment badly. Pinker is very anti-religious, and not in an educated, thoughtful way, but in the same way the Ku Klux Klan is violently anti-Catholic. A second threshold criticism is that Pinker is entirely focused on Europe, and his core hypothesis, that we’re becoming less violent people, is confined entirely to advanced modern societies that are both European in their culture and Christian in their ethos, whether or not they are Christian in their observance. Pinker adduces little or no evidence, other than post World War II global statistics of wars, that non-European societies are becoming less violent, and he fails to consider alternative hypotheses for the reduced violence of European societies, such as that they are moribund and declining, in the Lotos Eater phase of their existence. (Again, to be fair, Pinker does draw a pretty clear picture of reduction in European intra-societal violence from 1200 or so on, long before anyone could claim European civilization became moribund as it is today.)</p><p>Pinker’s obsession with demonstrating that religion only creates evil leads him into nearly continuous gross historical and logical errors. He repeats the silly canard (fabricated by 19th Century American Protestants to smear Roman Catholics) that Giordano Bruno was executed for believing in heliocentrism, a position accepted today by exactly nobody who knows anything (although repeated by noted flim-flam man Neil deGrasse Tyson in the recent re-make of “Cosmos”). He gullibly buys into the Black Legend hook, line and sinker. He actually cites for the cruelty of Pope Paul IV “the ‘Inquisition’ coffee table book.” He specifically cites, in-line with the text, as his major source for “the human toll . . . . in medieval and early modern Christendom” a book called “The Great Big Book of Horrible Things.” He confuses the First Crusade and the People’s Crusade. He cites the Anabaptists as “pacifist forerunners of today’s Amish and Mennonites,” apparently unaware of their activities in Munster (which would actually have reinforced his hypothesis). He explicitly equates as identical the judicial murder of Thomas More with random, on-the-spot beheadings of entire companies of dancing girls who displeased an Indian potentate. And on and on.</p><p>Pinker says with a straight face “Christian ideology was hostile to any commercial practice or technological innovation that might eke more wealth out of a given stock of physical resources.” His source for this is a quote from popular historian Barbara Tuchman, to the effect that the medieval Church rejected interest and that St. Jerome said “a merchant can seldom or ever please God.” Of course, the cite lends little support to his conclusion, and the conclusion is ludicrous. In reality, the adoption of new commercial practices and technological changes up until the Renaissance was led by or cooperated with by religious entities, in large part to expand the productivity of the vast lands owned by the Church. These advances ranged from corporate, long-time-horizon management of land by monks to a wide variety of technological advances, such as improvements in plowing, threshing and grinding.</p><p>Pinker also ignores that the medieval Church was the primary instrument of opposition to medieval violence. He talks about how the Church celebrated saints who were gruesomely martyred, implying that rather than being used to show heroism, such examples were somehow used to show how violence against others was good. He ignores the pacifism of the Church (complete until about 1000 A.D., incomplete thereafter, when feudalistic concepts infiltrated, leading in part to the Crusades). He ignores the Peace of God. And so forth. For Pinker, religion is an unmitigated bad, and when it is gone, we will all be happy and free. And he tailors his facts and analysis to fit his conclusion.</p><p>On the other hand, even with its lacks, the book has many good points. It’s refreshing in its lack of ideology (apart from the ideology of atheism). Pinker does not shrink for ideological reasons from addressing unpleasant points. For example, when he talks about the decline in infanticide, he directly addresses whether it is correct to say infanticide has dropped at the same time that abortion has increased by at least the same amount, since abortion logically is indistinguishable from infanticide. (He concludes, in essence, that people don’t feel that abortion is infanticide, and anyway abortion rates have recently dropped too, which he interprets as reinforcing his hypothesis.) Most writers would have simply said that abortion is not the same thing as infanticide and moved on, afraid of being denounced by their liberal friends and no longer being invited to the right dinner parties.</p><p> At the same time, Pinker does manage to pretty frequently fall into occasional silly left-wing tropes. For example, when talking about the demonization of political opponents, he talks about the “victims of Communist atrocities”—but then feels obliged to add also “the victims of their opposite number, the right wing-dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Indonesia and El Salvador.” Equating 100 million people exterminated as part of a deliberate ideological program of Communism with maybe 100,000 killed in civil wars is silly, but pretty much par for the course among leftist types. But, to be fair, given his general ability to resist being politically correct, it’s hard to fault Pinker’s occasional lapses in this area.</p><p>	Finally, and oddly, most of the bad reviews on Amazon of Pinker’s book are not objecting to his anti-religious bigotry. Instead, they object to an underlying premise of his thesis—that prior to recorded history, violence was extreme and endemic. I had thought that this was unexceptional—all primitive societies were horrifically brutal and had stratospherically high rates of battle death. This has been common knowledge since Lawrence Keeley, using detailed anthropological data, exploded the myth of the Noble Savage. But apparently there are a large number of, or at least a small number of loud dead enders in this area, who maintain that pre-historical peoples were gentle, meek and mild, gathering nuts and berries hand-in-hand while singing paeans against sexism and racism, in contrast to eeeeevil modern societies. It’s really not worth even considering such silliness, but it’s interesting that fantasists of this sort exist and are willing to attach their names to their fantasies.</p><p>Anyway—this book may be worth reading if you have a ton of extra time, or if you’re particularly interested in the topic. It has certain parallels to studies of the Great Divergence, and once you realize that what Pinker really means is that Europeans have reduced violence over time, leading to improved societies relative to the rest of the world’s societies, it has even more parallels. But unless you’re interested in reading this bookstop for some specialized reason, you’re probably better off spending your time doing something else.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/26055396-sense-of-history"></a></section><section><p>356 reviews389 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2377510927">August 8, 2020</a></section><div><p>A lot of ink has already been spilled on the question of whether Pinker's claim that the violence of man has diminished enormously in the past centuries and especially in the past decades, is inaccurate or not; in other words whether the quantitative (statistical) support of this claim is correct. I am not able to judge the statistical aspect, but I am quite convinced by the material that he has put together, also in graphs (which he obviously always borrowed from others). What strengthens me in this conviction is that Pinker is very careful with that material, always indicating how reliable or unreliable the statistics are, sometimes warning for less strong numbers or for the interpretation given to the data. But it is absolutely impressive how Pinker substantiates and defends his theses, and also supplements them with narrative material (strong stories, which of course have a more subjective side, but make things more concrete; but also classic, narrative studies). The latter I find a commendable approach, to back up the statistical analyzes; it is a kind of methodological reality check, to see if the conclusions based on the numbers do reflect reality. Of course, this is not obvious, because the stock of narratives in theory is inexhaustible, but if this is done in a balanced and nuanced manner, then it is definitely an advantage, and that is certainly the case with Pinker.<p>Here’s a quote that describes his central claim and at the same time indicates how cautious Pinker actually remains: : “<i>The numbers tell us that war, genocide, and terrorism have declined over the past two decades – not to zero, but by a lot. A mental model in which the world has a constant allotment of violence, so that every cease-fire is reincarnated somewhere else as a new war, and every interlude of peace is just a time-out in which martial tensions build up and seek release, is factually mistaken. Millions of people are alive today because of the civil wars and genocides that did not take place but that would have taken place if the world had remained as it was in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The conditions that favored this happy outcome – democracy, prosperity, decent government, peacekeeping, open economies, and the decline of antihuman ideologies— are not, of course, guaranteed to last forever. But nor are they likely to vanish overnight.</i>”</p><p>Especially the final chapters, with an elaborate psychological analysis of man regarding good and evil, and in particular violence, sketches an anthropological image (not always very flattering) of man that offers a special added value to anyone who focuses on history, and especially the reasons of human behavior. Pinker dives quite deeply into the current state of science, and it requires some perseverence to follow the accumulation of hypotheses and experiments. But it is worthwhile as a historian to wrestle through this because it gives a fairly comprehensive picture of human existence that makes human action much easier to understand.</p><p>Of course, Pinker places himself very clearly in a context of progress, based on the use of reason. You may have reservations about that, but I always find it a plus when an author puts his arguments on the table, open for scrutiny. And Pinker does so! Absolutely recommended reading.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/26055396?shelf=anthropology">anthropology</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/26055396?shelf=global-history">global-history</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/26055396?shelf=world-history">world-history</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/2199404-andy"></a></section><section><p>1,320 reviews456 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/318540843">August 26, 2019</a></section><div><p>"The Better Angels of our Nature" is an impressive intellectual feat, and the snarky tone was entertaining, but it was a bit like reading the phone book (800 pages of lists within lists). Despite the size of Pinker's tome, the nitty-gritty of peace-making is given short shrift, even though I think this is the most important issue.<p>I don't care too much about the decline in violence over many centuries. I already don't want to live in the Middle Ages, and I couldn't if I wanted to. What matters for all of us living today is whether the current "long peace" is sustainable, and on this Pinker disappoints. </p><p>The answer to this question requires a thorough analysis of why it is currently so unimaginable that, for example, Germany would attack France, as it did in WWI and WWII. A tremendous amount of active, deliberate effort was put into fighting the entropy that would make that possible, but Pinker glosses over this with abstractions. There's a huge story to tell about everything from the Marshall Plan to the European Union to soccer matches b/w sister cities in neighboring countries. </p><p>I'm not a professional historian so I can't address some of the other critiques on Goodreads about whether this book is all B.S. or not.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/2658311-notgettingenough"></a></section><section><p>1,015 reviews1,163 followers</p></section></div><section><section><p><b>Read</b></p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/381583974">August 1, 2012</a></section><div><p>Pinker has disappointed me for so long that it is no surprise to me to discover that this is the work of a charlatan. Here on goodreads try <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/166376-david">David Giltinan's review </a>.<p>But also <a href="http://www.zcommunications.org/reality-denial-steven-pinkers-apologetics-for-western-imperial-violence-by-edward-s-herman-and-david-peterson">http://www.zcommunications.org/realit...</a> is worthy of a read.</p><p>Is his basic message pretty much that if first world white people aren't dying, then violence is decreasing? And has this been greeted with great approbation in - ummm - the first white world? Oh deary me.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2658311?shelf=haven-t-read-but">haven-t-read-but</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2658311?shelf=sociology">sociology</a></ul></section></section></article></div></div>||||I|||| * Home
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 The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

 Steven Pinker

 4.16
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 Believe it or not, today we may be living in the most peaceful moment in our species' existence. In his gripping and controversial new work, New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker shows that despite the ceaseless news about war, crime, and terrorism, violence has actually been in decline over long stretches of history. Exploding myths about humankind's inherent violence and the curse of modernity, this ambitious book continues Pinker's exploration of the essence of human nature, mixing psychology and history to provide a remarkable picture of an increasingly enlightened world.
 Genres Nonfiction History Psychology Science Philosophy Sociology Politics
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 806 pages, Paperback

 First published October 4, 2010

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 About the author

 Steven Pinker

 66 books 9,341 followers
 Steven Arthur Pinker is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science. Pinker is known for his wide-ranging explorations of human nature and its relevance to language, history, morality, politics, and everyday life. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as the New York Times, Time, and The New Republic, and is the author of numerous books, including The Language Instinct , How the Mind Works , Words and Rules , The Blank Slate , The Stuff of Thought , The Better Angels of Our Nature , The Sense of Style , and most recently, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress .

 He was born in Canada and graduated from Montreal's Dawson College in 1973. He received a bachelor's degree in experimental psychology from McGill University in 1976, and then went on to earn his doctorate in the same discipline at Harvard in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, then became an assistant professor at Harvard and then Stanford University. From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. (Except for a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1995-6.) As of 2008, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard.

 Pinker was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in 2004 and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in 2005. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv, McGill, and the University of Tromsø, Norway. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003. In January 2005, Pinker defended Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, whose comments about the gender gap in mathematics and science angered much of the faculty. On May 13th 2006, Pinker received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.

 In 2007, he was invited on The Colbert Report and asked under pressure to sum up how the brain works in five words – Pinker answered "Brain cells fire in patterns."

 Pinker was born into the English-speaking Jewish community of Montreal. He has said, "I was never religious in the theological sense... I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew." As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969. His father, a trained lawyer, first worked as a traveling salesman, while his mother was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has two younger siblings. His brother is a policy analyst for the Canadian government. His sister, Susan Pinker, is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and the author of The Sexual Paradox and The Village Effect .

 Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too divorced. He is married to the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, the author of 10 books and winner of the National Medal of the Humanities. He has no children.

 His next book will take off from his research on "common knowledge" (knowing that everyone knows something). Its tentative title is: Don't Go There: Common Knowledge and the Science of Civility, Hypocrisy, Outrage, and Taboo .

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 Miquixote
 270 reviews 45 followers
 May 24, 2017
 Breathtakingly mindless for 2/5 of the book, blowhard the whole way through.

 Sometimes a good joke is more revealing than 800 pages of blowhardness. Pinker gives himself away with this quote by George Carlin on page 622: I think motivation is overrated. You show me some lazy prick who's lying around all day watching game shows and stroking his penis, and I'll show you someone who's not causing any fucking trouble!...

 ...I hope I am not the only one who thinks it is not necessarily a good thing to be reduced to lazy pricks watching game shows and stroking our penises...

 Anybody with a modicum of a background in anthropology, history, sociology and economics should be laughimg themselves silly (if it weren't so disturbing how much influence Pinker has)...

 Pinker proposes 5 ways that have reduced violence and can continue to do so: the Leviathan, Gentle Commerce, Feminization, The Expanding Circle, and the Escalation of Reason. The final 3 I have no argument against. But I have issues with the first 2. The state gets a monopoly on violence and capitalism is caricatured as gentle.

 But there have been moments when violence spiked and recently, so Pinker has to explain it. Pinker conveniently blames Marxism (and leftism in general is caricatured the whole way through) as the singularly destructive ideology of modern times (without acknowledging the dangers of his own classical liberal ideology) and throws in 'a few other individuals' to the mix as the responsibles for the genocides of the 20th century, and the increase in violence in 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Fascism is acknowledged only as the twin of dialectial Marxism. Classical liberalism gets the nod as the ideology that reduces violence (of course Pinker would never admit that classical liberalism is even an ideology though). There is no comprehensive study of how fascism and communism came to be. It is really lazy stretch to say that fascism was just a few flukes of individual psychology, and not give credence to the idea that both fascism and communism came about from the specific conditions of a social system in crisis. Neither is it mentioned that big business actually financed and promoted fascism in Italy and Germany. That would complicate things too much.

 So, nothing about communism coming into being as a reaction to capitalism... it is simply assumed that capitalism has been an overwhelmingly positive contribution to the world, since 'violence has declined since its advent, minus a few inconvenient peaks of violent wars and genocides' which, as I have already said, he attributes to Marxism and a few accidentally placed crazy individuals. Nothing either about theory, philosophy, economics, anthropology, activism owing anything at all to Marx's ideas. Marx isn't even worth the time of day to Pinker, except as an explanation for violence. This should raise the question, really can any intellectual who tries to analyze the history of modern times be taken seriously if they haven't taken the left seriously? how can you call yourself an intellectual if you just shrug off the whole left side of the policial spectrum as ideological nonsense?

 So leftism gets all the blame for the bad stuff, but the increased rights that accompanied the 20th century are not attributed at all to leftist ideas or practice. They are accounted for as simply natural by-products of classical liberalism (ie. capitalism). The Expanding Circle of Empathy, the Escalation of Reason and the Feminization of society have nothing at all to do with leftist ideals. Class struggles never happened. Activists weren't leftists, they were classical liberals. These rights eventually became 'common sense'. If there any battles they were set forth by non-violent classical liberals, and always as peacefully as possible.

 There are plenty of examples of serious breaches of truth here. According to Pinker, Martin Luther King apparently rejected Marx completely. Something patently false: 'King disagreed with Marxist materialism, but he found certain elements of Marxism's economic critiques of capitalism quite insightful' (I May Not Get There With You: the True Martin Luther King, Eric Michael Dyson). In fact, you would be hard-pressed to find any successful activist who doesn't find certain elements of Marxism insightful. But none of that is mentioned here because Pinker is not at an activist, he is status quo, out of touch with reality, pure and simple.

 It is also fairly embarrassing for Pinker to not acknowledge how far from anything even remotely leftist or Marxist several so-called communist and their undoubtely genocidal regimes were. Something akin to blaming Jesus for the Crusades. It is not said that it is a far more convincing argument that Stalinist Russia and Maoist China were actually STATE-CAPITALIST regimes. And indeed ideological twins of fascism, but not at all in the sense that Pinker argues. But if he tried to go there, his simplistic view of everthing would implode.

 Most people who rave against communism base their assumptions on secondary sources. It is clear that Pinker hasn't understood Marx (or even remotely leftist politics). As a fairly well-read leftist, it is obvious to me that there hasn't been a communist state to this day, as much as the leaders of those states have claimed to be. Neither is it mentioned how many different interpretaions of communism there are. He lumps the left all together. But if Pinker were to do so honestly, it would be quite a stretch to suggest that leftism is not about equality, freedom and the destruction of totalitarianism, oppression and alienation. In fact, you would think leftism was fascism the way Pinker describes it. Pinker comes across as a reactionary anti-communist suffering from the Red Scare, still inhabiting the frigid mental landscape of the Cold War.

 But hey, when you are an authority in Harvard, sweeping caricatures and generalizations are allowed. There’s more. According to Pinker, dialectics are simply mysticism and a justification for violent struggle. Class struggle is of course also blown off as mystical dialectical hogwash. Well, that is some feat blowing off dialectics, considering how many of the greatest philosophical works in world in the last 2 centuries have had to deal with the idea of dialectics (because of its intellectual force), but the eminent Steven Pinker waves it off with his magic wand and without anything at all to back it up.

 He also blows off 'intellectuals' in general because 'they are attracted to extreme ideas'. But he wholly contradicts himself when he proposes the superior intellectual value of classical liberalism. Which of course isn't extreme, it is just the obvious rational choice that doesn't even need to be intellectually defended. How arrogant can you get?

 It's also fairly wacky when he argues that 'intelligent people overwhelmingly tend to be liberals'. Based on IQ test scores and surveys of people with high scores he concludes that the smartest people are liberals and the other lesser ones are leftists and conservatives. But what about the smartest of the smart (the intellectuals) being attracted to extremes? This should leave you wondering if these arguments are for real? Apparently so.

 I am not familiar enough with the statistics that Pinker inundates us with to know if 'violence' has actually dropped or not consistently, progressively and continuously throughout history. But our propaganda alarm bells should sound when anyone makes a statement like that. According to Pinker, it is obvious that primitive tribes were the most violent humans ever. I have read some fairly convincing arguments otherwise, but I think it is likely the differences in opinion are going to come in the very definition of violence. The definition of violence by Pinker is dictionary strict, and very limited. Humans sometimes have to fight to survive. Pinker doesn't substantiate any difference in self defense and aggression, justice is mocked, freedom is not even covered. But when class struggle is just vain ideology to him, what can you expect?

 Neither does he take on the prison industrial complex, although he does acknowledge the importance of caging up of the maximum amount of people that are considered most likely to fight back and apparently thinks it a necessary evil if there are 'a few too many' (as deterrence). Apathy or depression is not even mentioned. But of course if you look it up in a dictionary, violence isn't any of those things.

 Since only 100,000 have been killed in Iraq(a disputed low-flying number) and there were at least 1,5 million in Vietnam, apparently US foreign policy is getting way more compassionate. Of course nothing is even mentioned of thinly-covered up US intervention all over the world (like in Latin America). An ignorance easily corrected by leafing through books like 'Killing Hope' by William Blum (on the ongoing American holocaust). A book Chomsky says is 'far and away the best book on the subject'. But the book has leftist leanings, and is therefore intellectually irrelevant to a religiously loyal status quoer.

 Democracy is hailed as a reducer of violence, and justifiably so. However he also has an extremely limited idea of democracy. There is a crisis of democracy right now because of a lack of participation (the Manufacturing of Consent and Public Opinion) and fast-growing awareness of it. What about acknowledging the advent of a type of coercion that creates ignorance, apathy and depression? This is not considered as an element of violence of course. It would even appear to be a positive thing, if it can reduce those violence stats and keep us wanking. Even if certain types of coercion cannot be defined as violence, why not acknowledge it for what it is?


 As said, Pinker targets ideology as a main cause of violence. When ideologies clash it often creates even more violence. Obviously. But it would seem Pinker is unaware of the current ideology’s potential for violence (and many have argued quite well that it is the main present cause of violence today). Currently the ideology of capitalism is being questioned by a large variety of people (because of its weaknesses). If and when that increases there may just be an increase in violence again, and not only from the Leviathan state that Pinker raves so much about.

 Of course Pinker would blame the new ideology if that happened, instead of the old one and all its weaknesses that brought it to the conflict. This is ironic because he does spend some time criticizing conservative ideology for its inability to adapt to progressive change. I argue that Pinker betrays exactly that attribute despite his humanist claims. Liberals and conservatives are the only two electable parties (because neither is so different from the other and neither is at all threatening to the current status quo). But for Pinker to have his moral authority he should also be arguing that if capitalism doesn't work well enough or starts to create bigger problems than it solves (ie. environmental destruction and huge gaps in wealth and debt), it is the one that may actually PROPAGATE violence. But then again we might just sit around watching game shows and stroking our penises. If Pinker is right, that would be ideal.

 Perhaps this can be avoided if the old ideology adapts peaceably. But neither should anyone who analyzes history or anthropology honestly assume that the current ideology is forever. Of course capitalism hasn’t always been there, has only been there for a tiny amount of history, but Pinker sidesteps that. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. The thing is that a large amount of us aren’t convinced it ain’t broke.

 But perhaps Pinker’s main point is that we are less likely to adapt violently no matter what the change. Perhaps so, but denying or misunderstanding certain causes of violence (gross inequality and oppression which lead to new ideologies) will not help the matter. The so-called mystical class struggle and violence around the time of Karl Marx and the following century were actually consequences of the inability of capitalism to adapt to its structural weaknesses. If there were enough reforms the violence caused may not have been necessary, or rather it could have convinced the masses it wasn't necessary to challenge the system.

 However, the inflexibility and fundamentalism of classical liberalism would seem to have actually CAUSED the majority of violent conflicts. One doesn't have to be a Marxist to see that the capitalist system did not adapt appropriately (or peacefully) to the class awareness (or if you prefer inequality awareness) that was developing. Pinker calls 'class awareness' ideology though. A more peaceful adaptation did not come until after World War 2 (with Keynesianism) IN REACTION to THE CLASS AWARENESS. But this has been progressively taken apart since around 1980. The fear of class war retribution has diminished. With the recent austerity measures only being the latest in a series of measures to increase the wealth of the rich at the expense of the middle class and poor.

 But that doesn't mean that a self-defense type of violence will not develop in the near future if the current system doesn't adapt appropriately (rising homelesseness or unemployment could escalate things). The fact that violence actually went down during the 30s Great Depresssion is almost gleefully mentioned by Pinker though. So there really isn't a guarantee that violence will increase. In fact, it would seem that the elite powers are getting impetus from implementing their austerity measures because of Pinkeresuqe ideas of how non-violent we have become.


 Anyhow, if Pinker is right and the world is better off being wankers than trouble-makers, then our intellectuals should be the best wankers. And so for that reason a wanker cannot read trouble-making literature, or leftist perspectives, one cannot at least acknowledge their intellectual validity and consider them. Pinker doesn't acknowledge these debates because he is pushing his own ideology, or rather absurdly and falsely pushing the idea of the 'end of ideology' (which is actually a thinly-veiled support for the current neoliberal utopian ideal). One that is as unsustainable and unrealistic as any utopia or ideology. Keep wanking.

 The book was long and tiresome in many parts, but also very rewarding in the sense that it is an incredibly revealing look at how corrupt and anti-intellectual academics can be. Pinker is arrogant, puffed-up, self-promoting and irresponsible in his ideologizing (ironic isn’t it?) here. In Pinker's mind, it would seem he has earned the right to step right out of his specialty of psychology and linguistics and make sweeping generalizations in anthropology, history, sociology and economics.

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 Warwick
 809 reviews 14.4k followers
 April 26, 2013
 VIOLENCE HAS DECLINED, AND I WILL KICK THE LIVING SHIT OUT OF ANYONE WHO SAYS IT HASN'T

 Disappointingly, Pinker strikes a slightly less confrontational tone than that, but the basic idea is the same. His thesis is that violence of every kind, from international warfare down to murder and corporal punishment, has been on a steady decline throughout human history, up to and including the present day – and not only does he make this case in considerable detail, but he goes on to give a very wide-ranging discussion of possible political and psychological causes for what's happened. This book is big, and it needs to be: it's built around a vast accumulation of raw evidence. Historical, statistical, sociological, neurobiological, and anecdotal – and I'm slightly confused by some of the negative reviews here, because although you might not like all of his conclusions, it's not easy to argue with the facts when they're laid out in this much detail.

 Not convinced? Wondering if village life in the 30s can really have been as bad as dodging rapists in today's inner cities? Well, prepare for approximately 8,266 graphs and charts proving you wrong in every direction. Leafing through them is at first daunting, then fascinating, then astonishing, and eventually wearying. But they keep coming!



 The decline in some forms of violence is so dramatic that the figures have had to be plotted on a logarithmic scale, so vertiginous is their descent. Hitting kids – gone from normal to unacceptable in barely a generation. Murder rates? Dropping like a knackered lift. Paedophiles and child abduction? Statistically speaking, if you wanted your child to have a better-than-average chance of being abducted and held overnight by a stranger, ‘you'd have to leave it outside unattended for 750,000 years’. Terrorism, surely? Nope; in fact ‘the number of deaths from terrorist attacks is so small that even minor measures to avoid them can increase the risk of dying’ – one study suggests that 1,500 more Americans died in the year after 9/11 because they started driving rather than flying.

 Okay then, what about WAR. ‘As of May 15, 1984, the major powers of the world had remained at peace with one another for the longest stretch of time since the Roman Empire.’ This is important, because inter-state warfare is much, much more deadly than the small-'n'-nasty invasions and civil wars that are more common today. And even they are becoming less frequent and less individually deadly.

 Don't get me wrong, this is not a happy-clappy book about mindless optimism, and he is assiduous in stressing that the situation could easily change.

 The point is not that we have entered an Age of Aquarius in which every last earthling has been pacified forever. It is that substantial reductions in violence have taken place, and it is important to understand them.


 Pinker takes a good, long look at several possibilities, and (to my mind at least) identifies three major factors behind the decline. The first is the growth of democracy, which strongly correlates with lower rates of violence across the board, and we get the figures to prove it. The second is the revolution in communications, firstly during the Enlightenment, and then more recently with the birth of the mass media age. Again, huge numbers of studies are adduced to make the point.

 The third factor is what he calls ‘feminization’: women are just less violent than men, and the more involved they are in a society the more peaceful it is. ‘We are all feminists now,’ he concludes, after a typically detailed examination of changing attitudes to, and rights of, women through history. (He is talking about the West here, but even elsewhere the trend is unmistakeable.) Studies suggest that this is not just a consequence of changing attitudes, but a cause of them, particularly given that ‘the one great universal in the study of violence is that most of it is committed by fifteen-to-thirty-year-old men.’ Pinker hones in on the obvious implications:

 Would the world be more peaceful if women were in charge? The question is just as interesting if the tense and mood are changed. Has the world become more peaceful because more women are in charge? And will the world become more peaceful when women are even more in charge? The answer to all three, I think, is a qualified yes.


 When he's finished considering social movements and political changes, he pokes inside your brain. We have pages and pages of various neuro-sociological experiments where people were strapped to an MRI machine and told to slap a puffin in the face, or something, so that various lobes and cortexes could be identified and examined. The question is whether there are anatomical, or evolutionary-psychological, causes for violence, and if so how easily they can be overcome. We get a lot of impressive-looking diagrams like this (I may have remembered some of the details wrong):



 Pinker is very interesting on the Flynn Effect , which, if you're not aware of it, is the upward trend in general intelligence observed around the world in standardised testing since such things began. Many people that have written on this subject are skeptical that folk nowadays can really be smarter than anatomically-identical humans of a few generations ago, despite what the tests say – but Pinker, after a careful examination of how thought processes are influenced by changing social norms, is not afraid to draw his conclusions, at least in the ethical sphere:

 The other half of the sanity check is to ask whether our recent ancestors can really be considered morally retarded. The answer, I am prepared to argue, is yes. Though they were surely decent people with perfectly functioning brains, the collective moral sophistication of the culture in which they lived was as primitive by modern standards as their mineral spas and patent medicines are by the medical standards of today. Many of their beliefs can be considered not just monstrous but, in a very real sense, stupid.


 Obviously we are into speculative territory here, but I actually found it very heartening and thought-provoking to see someone prepared to follow the evidence that far.

 How's it written? His style is exact without being dense, although he is not averse to the odd cliché (‘capital punishment itself was on death row’), and from time to time his desire to cloak the science in colourful imagery leads him into some awkward prose:

 The age distribution of a population changes slowly, as each demographic pig makes its way through the population python.


 Yikes. Also…and this may sound like a weird thing to pick up on, but once I noticed it I couldn't take my eyes off it…he is absolutely obsessed with telling the reader to ‘recall’ things he's already said.

 Recall the mathematical law that a variable will fall into a power-law distribution…
 Recall from chapter 3 that the number of political units in Europe shrank…
 Recall that there were two counter-Enlightenments…
 Recall that the statistics of deadly quarrels show no signature of war-weariness.
 …and recall that duelling was eventually laughed into extinction.
 Recall that the chance that two people in a room of fifty-seven will share a birthday is ninety-nine out of a hundred.
 England and the United States, recall, had prepared the ground for their democracies…
 Recall that for half a millennium the wealthy countries of Europe were constantly at each other's throats.
 Cronin, recall, showed that terrorist organizations drop like flies over time…
 And recall the global Gallup survey that showed…
 Recall that narcissism can trigger violence…
 Recall that the insula lights up when people feel they have been shortchanged…
 Patients with orbital damage, recall, are impulsive…
 Recall from chapter 3 the theory of crime…


 Just how much stuff are you expecting me to remember, Pinker?! And surely someone who wrote three books on language has a fucking thesaurus handy?

 There are a couple of minor errors, too, that an editor should have caught. The Polish city of Wrocław is printed in my edition as ‘Wroctaw’; and he also refers to some statistics gathered in the ‘town of Kent’ (there are dozens of towns in Kent, which in the dataset concerned is a county).

 However, and despite my sometimes flippant tone in this review, the truth is that I thought this was a magnificent book – convincingly argued and truly multidisciplinary, so that I felt like I was getting a synthesis of the important studies carried out in half a dozen different fields. It's a big, serious argument that deserves proper consideration, and one that'll give you some ammo to argue back next time you're feeling cynical about the relentless news headlines. I think it's a clear 4.5 – and since Goodreads won't let me do that, I'm inclined to bump it up rather than down.
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 Riku Sayuj
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 December 8, 2014

 The Skeptic’s Peace

 Pinker warns the reader upfront that the book is huge, and with more than 800 dense pages there is no question about it. It is so wide-ranging that it is fortunate it has such a memorable title - the reader might have easily lost track of where it is all supposed to be heading. Individually, any single section of the book is a throughly entertaining masterpiece, but as a whole, in terms of coherence, and on how the thesis and the direction of the arguments hold together, the book is not as much of a delight.

 But it is an ambitious book and is in some respects a new sort of history - almost a moral history of the world and Pinker deserves praise for the attempt. The next such historian to come along has been given much to work with.

 Pinker is very convincing about the fact that violence has indeed declined; he is even persuasive on why it was but bound to happen. But when it comes to explaining the phenomenon (which he spends most of the book convincing us is real) based on his strength (psychology and evolutionary biology), he comes up slightly short. Pinker says all the right things and spares no punches and doesn’t flinch from taking on the worst arguments the critics might throw at him but his arguments still seem to lack that knockout blow.

 This is not to say that the arguments are weak. Pinker does a remarkable job in his survey of history, of stats and of a multitude of ideas. The scholarship is immaculate, the intentions are noble and the conclusions are plausible but I would still wager that Pinker would fail to convince the majority of his readers.

 Why? Because he ignores the contingent nature of history and he forgets that the 'better angels' has not only made us a more moral society but has also made us a more skeptical society. I was disappointed that Pinker does not explore the preventive powers of sheer skepticism.

 My own thesis, which was evolving as I read Pinker’s, is ultimately that the skeptical mentality is what the ‘civilizing process’ (and the years of bloody wars) has ultimately given us - a conviction that there are no easy answers, no ‘final solutions’. And that is a powerful deterrent to most forms of drastic action, since now it is harder to justify them. This to me is the real cause for optimism (of the measured and skeptical sort, as is our wont now).
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 David
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 February 15, 2012
 This seems like a stunning misstep by the normally brilliant Steven Pinker. His ability to write with extraordinary force and clarity has been demonstrated repeatedly in two separate areas of expertise -- linguistics and cognitive science. Unfortunately, the brilliance of his earlier books in those areas is nowhere in evidence in this regrettable dog's breakfast of a book.

 I found it almost unreadable - poorly argued, undisciplined, self-indulgent, and - despite its grotesquely bloated length (800 pages) - support for its main thesis is woefully inadequate, dependent on a highly selective interpretation of existing data and completely unconvincing. Pinker can sling the statistical jargon (Poisson processes, power laws, the gambler's fallacy, the Gini coefficient) like a pro, but all the jargon in the world cannot make up for his recurrent habit of over- or mis-interpreting data whose limitations he consistently glosses over.

 The jacket cover breathlessly promises "more than a hundred graphs and maps". Any graph is open to misinterpretation. Three of the most common ways of doing so are (i) selective interpretation (ignoring or explaining away the data that don't fit one's preconceived ideas) (ii) inappropriate extrapolation beyond the range of available data and (iii) failure to acknowledge the data's limitations, such as likely sources of bias, or extreme sparsity of information.

 Pinker commits each of these errors, with such numbing frequency that one loses all respect. We are seriously asked to draw conclusions from a graph of the "rate of battle deaths in state-based armed conflicts between 1900 and 2005" (Figure 6-1) while being instructed to ignore the figures for the first and second world wars . After all, "the world has seen nothing close to that level since". This kind of rubbish insults the intelligence. Or you could look at Figure 7-28. Lest you be distracted by the actual data, Pinker has helpfully superimposed some very impressive looking solid lines documenting his cheerful belief in the rise of vegetarianism. These are much darker than the actual data points, presumably in the hope that the reader might be distracted from noting their complete lack of fit to the data. Worried about racially motivated killing of black people? Here are the yearly data (number of such killings) from 1996 to 2008:

 5,3,3,4,3,3,3,4,1,2,1,1,1

 Pinker's gleeful trumpeting of a five-fold reduction seems to rest on a pretty flimsy foundation to me. Not to mention being a little premature.

 But nothing as inconvenient as facts, or their absence, can stand in the way of a man who has already decided he knows the answer. The threat of nuclear holocaust? Exaggerated, because - as any fool can see - nuclear weapons have never been used in wartime since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One imagines this argument must be of great comfort to those who survived those particular "anomalies". Just as Pinker's breezy insistence that the only meaningful way to interpret the number of people killed in a given conflict is relative to the world's population at the time is surely meaningless to anyone who has lost a family member in battle. It's at best breathtakingly insensitive; some would find it deeply offensive.

 To anyone who respects the scientific method, this is a horrifyingly bad book, one which completely obliterates Pinker's credibility. Don't waste your time.
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 Nebuchadnezzar
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 March 18, 2012
 When an academic steps outside his or her field of expertise, it's best to brace yourself for a torrent of nonsense. Steven Pinker, whose work in linguistics and psychology I greatly enjoy, has made a habit of using that work as a springboard to foist his pet political theories on the public. Whereas his previous attempt in The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature was a vehicle for his ideological ramblings, it was at least not based on a gaping statistical flaw and had some value in refuting common misconceptions, even if it did so in a fundamentally dishonest way.

 Whatever redeeming qualities to be found in Better Angels are far outweighed by the failure of Pinker's thesis. Has violence actually declined? If not, the rest is window dressing. Pinker quickly notes that the reader will be skeptical of his thesis off the bat -- we are inclined to believe the world is getting more violent due to our constant exposure to it in the media, which is biased toward reporting bad news, criminality, etc. No doubt he is correct in this. It is well known that crime rates in the United States have been in decline for the past 20-30 years yet many continue to believe that crime is on the rise. This likely comes from a bit of selective reporting mixed with confirmation bias; the proverbial man searching for his keys under the streetlight.

 The main reason I was immediately skeptical about this thesis was that I had seen it before! The general thrust of Pinker's argument appears in a brief section in The Blank Slate and a TED talk he adapted that into a few years back. ( http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinke... ) Here he totally mangles basic anthropology and archaeology. The chart he presents is a misinterpretation of data from Lawrence Keeley's War Before Civilization -- anyone familiar with the societies he presents knows that most of them are not nomadic hunter-gatherer bands but partly or fully sedentary and horticulturalist, e.g., the Gebusi and Yanomamo. (As an aside, I find the use of Keeley ironic as he argues against a biological view of warfare in the book while Pinker is an ardent supporter of this view.) Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha devote an entire section to deconstructing this Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality (a book not without its own problems, as Ryan and Jetha play Rousseau to Pinker's Hobbes). (An adapted excerpt can be found here: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/s... )

 Using modern hunter-gatherer societies (or at least what Pinker thinks are hunter-gatherer societies) as stand-ins for pre-historic societies is a rookie mistake. The degree to which modern hunter-gatherers have been displaced and influenced by industrial societies and nation-states has been one of the big debates over the last half-century in anthropology. Thus, whether they are representative of some "state of nature" at all is highly questionable. (See this brief summary of the "hunter-gatherer revisionist debate" by Thomas N. Headland for an overview and references: http://www.sil.org/~headlandt/huntgat... ) Pinker notes this at one point but then completely forgets about it in taking his own cooked numbers at face value.

 Even if we accept Pinker's definition of violence, the whole undertaking itself is an exercise in guesswork and absurdity. There were no census programs or bureaus of statistics throughout much of history. Written records of war often inflate or deflate the body count depending on whose side you're reading from (and as we know, winners write the history books) and the archaeological record is spotty in a large number of places. Perhaps we can get fairly accurate body counts here and there, but there are large swaths of history that we essentially have to just guess at. Fortunately, the good folks at Quodlibeta, actual historians, have broken down a good deal of the historical and statistical flaws in the book (starting here): http://bedejournal.blogspot.com/2011/...

 Considering he has been "refining" this argument since The Blank Slate (read: futilely polishing a turd), Pinker seems unlikely to back down. His FAQ released to "respond" to criticism completely dodges the fact that he's pulled a good deal of his numbers straight from his nether region. (See Quodlibeta again for an appropriately snarky take-down: http://bedejournal.blogspot.com/2011/... ) At some point, it begins to stretch credulity that he doesn't realize there's a hole big enough to drive an eighteen-wheeler through in this argument. (This does, however, make the book a useful litmus test to see which critics will gush how "thoroughly researched, amply documented, and strongly argued" something is as long as you flash a few fancy charts 'n graphs and pseudo-intellectual smoke and mirrors their way. Unfortunately, it seems that the answer is "A whole lot of them.")

 Once you realize the entire book is a house of cards that's more or less already collapsed, the rest of it becomes an incredible grind. As above, the rest is just window dressing, a game of make believe. Sure, there's some interesting parts about, say, the psychology of aggression and a few delicious nuggets and tidbits of trivia along the way. Digging through the rough for them seems a rather pointless exercise, though, especially where it's already been done better. Large chunks of his argument are recycled from other authors such as Peter Singer and Lynn Hunt .

 The end result is a whiggish history where sense and nonsense blend together seamlessly, thus negating any use the layperson might find in it. The presentation of history too often crosses into the cartoonish, being loaded down with ad hoc theorizing deployed to save the book's overarching narrative. Pinker's goal is, at base, to push his ideology, his own brand of secular humanism he claims to be based in "Enlightenment values." It is an ideology whose values I happen to largely share, but history demonstrates that anything can be taken too far. This is why Pinker is forced to downplay or omit the excesses of the Enlightenment such as the French Revolution with its Jacobins and Cult of Reason.

 The irony here is that Pinker reveals himself to be as much of a romantic as his ideological opponents. The doomsayers appeal to a mythical past to buttress their claims (Arthur Herman has written an amusing account of this phenomenon in The Idea of Decline in Western History ), but the optimists of modernity similarly appeal to a mythical future. While the notion that the kids these days are just rotten and the world is going to hell in a hand-basket has been with us for millennia, one of the central narratives of modernity has been a belief in a steady incline. With an increasingly global economy and the inevitable advance of science and technology, the high priests of modernity preach time and again, we are surely on our way to the best of all worlds. Predicting the future direction of humanity, though, has proven to be a fool's game, a bit of off-track betting for the intellectual class.

 While Pinker never commits to this teleological narrative wholesale, he does bang the drum for the steady march of progress quite a bit throughout the book. Obviously, while I don't pine for the days of King Cotton or colonial Africa, I don't find much comfort in the fact that while the number of debt and sex slaves has exploded in absolute numbers, their proportion of the total population has decreased. Oh, how marvelous!

 What Bjorn Lomborg did for environmental issues, Pinker has done for the history of violence.
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 Kate Savage
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 January 22, 2014
 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.”
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 Tom LA
 585 reviews 217 followers
 November 23, 2022
 I love optimistic books, and there is a lot of optimism in the almost 800 pages of "The better angels of our nature". At the same time, I find it impossible to give a single opinion about this behemoth of a book, because I found some of its elements truly excellent, some ok, and some absolutely scream-out-loud dreadful, so I'll try to explain.

 In brief:

 - the great: the quality of the writing is superb. This is one of the best books I've ever read in terms of clarity of exposition and effectiveness of the writing. Also, at the very beginning the author outlines the structure of the book, which gives you a clear mental map of what you're getting into. As a plus, Pinker peppers his prose with anecdotes, jokes and references to pop culture (a bit like Malcolm Gladwell) that enliven the experience. I know some may not enjoy that. I do.

 - the good: the analysis of the decrease in violent behavior throughout history is deep and overall fairly convincing. Pinker acknowledges the fact that we are missing a lot of crucial data (about deaths and violence in the past), and he's received a lot of criticism for presenting a thesis that's partially based on guesswork, but I think there is a lot of value in making the layman (like me) think about these topics, and at least in trying to find some general patterns. Some reviewers hated his methodology, or the way he handles some piece of data - all fair. I think it all makes for a healthy discussion.

 - the not so good: is that Pinker didn't make much of an attempt to present a truly global perspective on the subject: in this book, Western world = The World. China, India, Africa, South America... marginal "who knows?" footnotes. "Religion" = Christianity. He explains that European history has the most available data, but I'm not the only one to think that he could have made a much better effort in this regard.

 - the dreadful is where Pinker lets his underlying personal New Atheist agenda seep through without any restraint. Sadly, this lowers the level of the book in many parts to pure tripe, in particular when it comes to the very subjective reasons behind the apparent decrease in violence throughout history.

 On page 642 Pinker spells out exactly what the main problem with his own book is: " Even the scientists are piling on. Human beings are led by their passions, say many psychologists, and deploy their puny powers of reason only to rationalize their gut feelings after the fact ". Ironically, that is precisely what he ended up doing with this book.

 To be clear, this has nothing to do with Pinker's titular argument in favor the decline of violence, which as I said I found fairly convincing and rational. No, Pinker's emotional, irrational underlying argument is the following:

 1) Enlightenment humanism, secularism and atheism are the only cultural forces for good in the world.
 2) Religions have been purely a destructive, negative force throughout history, therefore our planet will be a much better place when religions have completely disappeared.

 THAT is where the author's heart is.

 " As if biology didn't make things bad enough, the Abrahamic religions ratified some of our worst instincts with laws and beliefs that have encouraged violence for millennia ".

 Incidentally, I just found out that Pinker and Richard Dawkins are buddies and share the same New Atheist credo. That gave me a sudden bout of nausea... Dawkins, the Grand Master of Missing The Point himself!

 Watching Pinker zig-zag his way through his own version of world history where religion has caused only mayhem and suffering is like watching a professional skier slalom down through the obstacles. You have to admire his incredible ability to make it through without tripping over every few seconds.



 For example: in Pinker's world, the " Rights Revolutions show that a moral way of life requires a decisive rejection of instinct, culture, religion, and standard practice. In their place is an ethics that is inspired by empathy and reason and stated in the language of rights. [ ] This conclusion, of course [but OF COURSE!], is the moral vision of the Enlightenment and the strands of humanism and liberalism that have grown out of it. The Rights Revolutions are liberal revolutions ".

 Under this light, it becomes hard to reconcile and explain how Martin Luther King, perhaps the greatest protagonist in the "Rights Revolutions", was a Baptist preacher who dedicated his life to worship, prayer and to following Jesus Christ as a role model. But no worries! Slalomist Pinker turns his skis swiftly and manages to dismiss MLK's adherence to Christianity almost completely!

 What a feat, ladies and gentlemen!! Here he goes:

 " MLK, as a graduate student in theology, was, of course, conversant with the Bible and orthodox theology. But he also read renegade theologians such as Walter Rauschenbusch, who criticized the historical accuracy of the Bible and the dogma that Jesus died for people's sins. King then embarked on a serious study of the social and ethical theories of the great philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle down to ... [etc. etc.].". "King was profoundly inspired by Gandhi's theory of nonviolent resistance not as a moralistic affirmation of love, as nonviolence had been in the teaching of Jesus ".

 And now - pay very close attention. After this microscopic cherry-picking, later on, on page 677 comes the master stroke. Here’s how Pinker references his ridiculously insufficient excursus through MLK's cultural influences:

 " As we saw, Martin Luther King rejected mainstream Christian theology and drew his inspiration from Gandhi, secular Western philosophy, and renegade humanistic theologians ".

 Wait wait wait ..... we "saw" what??? The only thing you said was that he read some books, that is all we "saw". We never "saw" that MLK "rejected mainstream Christian theology"! Oh, what a number he just pulled there. Of course, an anti-christian MLK would fit perfectly in Pinker's nice little box. If only it wasn't a complete fabrication! Maybe, if we stretch it a bit, King was a "liberal Christian", but still very deeply and fully embracing Christian theology. www.sfgate.com/news/article/Writings-...

 For King, his Christian faith was far more than a source of soaring rethoric. It was the boundless reservoir of the colossal courage he would need to risk his life day after day. Frankly, I find Pinker's statements about MLK's faith quite offensive.

 So it is with unbelievably misguided violence (pun intended) that Pinker strips our history of any trace whatsoever of the positive influence of religion and religious people on the world, while focusing only on the stereotypical negative stories (of course, confusing "religion" with "corrupted clergy").

 As I said above, what Pinker really means with Religion is Christianity, because it's the only one he keeps referring to, and he doesn't seem to know much at all about Hinduism or Buddhism.

 " Very little good has come from these ancient tribal dogmas. [List of stereotypical pub-banter-level bad things that the Church did] Defenders of religion claim that the two genocidal ideologies of the 20th century, fascism and communism, were atheistic. But the first claim is mistaken and the second irrelevant ".

 Pinker is often leaving rationality aside to go FANTASTICALLY off the rails like this. Aside from the fact that he is wrong, what is even the point of this argument? What value does a defense of atheism bring to this book?

 Pinker then constructs a couple of sentences aimed at resolving and clarifying why he has chosen to completely ignore religion in the 800 pages of "The better angels of our nature":

 " Religion plays no single role in the history of violence because religion has not been a single force in the history of anything. [Says the erudite expert on religion, as we have just seen] The vast set of movements that we call religions have little in common but their distinctness from the secular institutions that are recent appearances on the human stage ".

 Ok. So, let me get it straight: you find it reasonable to metaphorically pee on 100% of what goes under "religion" because you say it's always been so diverse and multifaceted that its overall impact on history is, in the end, completely irrelevant? There is no fundamental golden rule, no consolidated drive for empathy and compassion, no focus on respect for human life across the main religions? The declaration of Human Rights has been inspired exclusively by Enlightenment humanism, and not at all by Christian values? You are actually using the horrors committed by a small part of the clergy to invalidate all the positive messages of religion and, more importantly, the useful and positive initiatives that most religious institutions pursue throughout the world (and very rarely make it to the news - like these www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/17/100... ) ?

 After these statements, it's not surprising that the author forgets to articulate how "secular ideas" possess this ideal quality of being "a single force in the history of something" that religions do not have. As if everyone who was ever inspired by secular ideas behaved in the same way and went exactly in the same direction - the BEST direction, of course.

 Here Pinker goes on to perform some more professional skiing to get around other obstacles, like the excesses of the French Revolution, Cult of Reason etc., at the risk of losing his pants:



 I thought people who kill, or in general use violence, do it in the name of anything at all: good, bad, old, new, religious beliefs, political beliefs, and science- or reason-based beliefs (a small example: the interpretation of Darwinism by the Columbine killers).

 More in general, I wonder: was it really that difficult for Pinker to admit that all types of cultural movements, religious and non-religious, have been influencing each other and impacting the history of violence in many different ways? Why did he need to defend secular ideologies as if they'd never been the inspiration for violence or violent acts? And why did he pinpoint all these cultural movements as a cause "in themselves" for violence and war? How would communism IN ITSELF or atheism IN ITSELF or Christianity IN ITSELF cause atrocities and wars? They are ideas: words on paper. None of these ideas was ever a specific order to commit atrocities. I've always thought that, in reality, bad or deranged people are the ones who read those words and bend them to their basic, animal desires.

 But again, Pinker is a human being himself, and each human being needs to worship something - we are powered by emotions, not by reason. As much as he tries to tackle this immense subject with pure rationality, his personal opinions come through loud and clear and crash to a pulp any of his efforts to sound objective and fully rational.

 So, in the end, to go back to the main official thesis of this book: violence has probably decreased, overall. We can talk forever about the type of statistics used by Pinker in this book, but it seems he could be right, and I hope he is.

 As for the reasons behind the decrease, as discussed, Pinker gets irrational about it, for understandable reasons (his wife). Here is his own explanation from his website: " It was only through the intellectual influence of my wife, the philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, that I understood the logic connecting them. She explained to me how morality can be grounded in rationality, and how secular humanism is just a modern term for the world view that grew out of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment (in particular, she argues, from the ideas of Spinoza). To the extent that the decline of violence has been driven by ideas, it’s this set of ideas, which I call Enlightenment humanism, which has driven it, and it offers the closest thing we have to a unified theory of the decline of violence ".

 A crucial passage here is "To the extent that the decline of violence has been driven by ideas". No one knows how much this is! It could be 0.2%! But Pinker certainly thinks the history of ideas has been much more impactful on reality than what it actually has been.

 This is a common misjudgement of academics: many of them tend to give far too much practical importance to ideas, books and cultural movements, and too little to money and power.

 If violence has decreased, I see no evidence that the decrease has been directly and mainly caused by the advent of the Enlightenment ideas, as Pinker is trying to convince us with this book. Those ideas were certainly a big piece of the puzzle, a great inspiration, just like many other ideas have been a positive inspiration. But fundamentally, I think what needs to be credited most of all is: military technology, increased wealth and global commerce, a change in the cost / profit scenarios of violence, the increased spread of information, and therefore better risk assessment tools. Maybe, but only maybe, we could also add to this list some steps forward on the path of evolution of our collective consciousness.


 --------------------------

 Here is a good book that quietly destroys the myth of Enlightenment perfection: "In defense of Faith", by David Brog

 Here are some interesting articles that talk about Pinker's world view:

 On his view of scientism:
 http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013...

 On his New Atheist credo:
 http://www.patheos.com/blogs/scienceo...

 On his (mis)understanding of religion:
 http://bedejournal.blogspot.com/2008/...
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 David Rubenstein
 801 reviews 2,502 followers
 January 9, 2014
 In this book, Steven Pinker explores a very controversial thesis, that is, violence is declining. Different types of violence are declining on multiple time scales. It would seem like the twentieth century had some major wars and plenty of genocide to make his thesis sound rather foolish. But in the first seven chapters he shows lots and lots of statistics to back up his thesis. In the eighth and ninth chapters he also explores the scientific reasons for violence and the reasons for increasingly non-violent behavior.

 The book is very comprehensive--it is quite long and detailed. The first chapters are not particularly "heavy" reading, but towards the end of the book, it can be tough-going--but fascinating throughout.

 Pinker tackles the main objection to his thesis--the three worst dictators of the twentieth century (Hitler, Stalin, Mao) were responsible for an immense amount of violence, deaths and misery. Some of the reviewers here at Goodreads have remarked that Pinker underestimates the number of deaths that are attributable to Mao. Perhaps he did grossly underestimate the numbers--I really don't know.

 Pinker makes an interesting point about the recent theory, raised in the book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything , that crime in the United States declined in the past few decades, because of the legalization of abortion in 1973. The idea is that the reduction in unwanted children led to fewer violence-inclined youths. Pinker argues that after 1973, the proportion of children born to vulnerable women actually increased, rather than decreased.

 One of the reasons for the decline in violence is the increase in literacy and reading. Pinker argues that the transmission of new ideas in books has acted as a liberal force in society. He shows that during the Middle Ages, most people were religious and believed in the literal truth of the bible. Heretics were everywhere, and were persecuted in wars, massacres, pogroms, executions and torture. Nowadays, while religious people "believe" in the bible, most do not take such a literal interpretation. They don't think that it is moral to invade a city and kill--or take as slaves--every single person. A higher value is placed on human life, because of the "shift from valuing souls to valuing lives ." Pinker writes,
 The theory that religion is a force for peace, often heard among the religious right and its allies today, does not fit the facts of history.
 Later, he writes,
 The world has far too much morality.
 Very true indeed.

 Pinker shows how game theory plays a big role in the evolution of morality. In fact, he defines morality as the opportunity for positive-sum games. In so much of history, people played in zero-sum or even in negative-sum games. For example, war is usually a negative-sum game, in the sense that so many people die and suffer, that the gains to the victor are completely overwhelmed by the losses to both sides.

 Nowadays, the language of violence is often cloaked in "bureaucratese", in words like purges, deportations, bombardments, pacification, rectification, ethnic cleansing, collateral damage, and rendition. These euphemisms help to self-exculpate the perpetrators of violence, and make violence seem to be justified or involuntary.

 Pinker discusses in some detail the factors that he believes have led to decreased violence in recent times. He talks a lot about the concept of Leviathan from the book by this name by Thomas Hobbes. According to Pinker, the presence of a legitimate, strong central government helps to reduce violence, at least on a personal basis. People are less inclined to violence when they think that punishment is likely. (Not always true, but usually.)

 He describes how "gentle commerce" helps to "turn zero-sum warfare into positive-sum mutual profit ... sweetening the outcome of mutual pacifism with the mutual gains of exchange." Pinker also shows how "feminization" has helped to move society "... away from a culture of manly honor, with its approval of violent retaliation for insults, toughening of boys through physical punishment, and veneration of martial glory."

 One of the most interesting--and potentially useful--parts of the book is his analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The root of the problem is that there are so many sacred concepts on both sides. A sacred concept is one that is not subject to negotiation--it is completely off the table . People will not compromise on their sacred values, but they might compromise on so-called "pseudo-sacred" values. Pinker describes evidence that both sides might be willing to declare compromises through symbolic concessions, even though they are not actually willing to perform on their compromises. Pinker writes,
 To find anything that softens the opposition of Israeli and Palestinian fanatics to what the rest of the world recognizes as the only viable solution to their conflict is something close to a miracle.
 It all has to do with the symbolic framing of a peace agreement.

 There are certain parts of the book that might make a squeamish reader cringe--there are some short descriptions of barbaric tortures. If you can get through (or skip) those parts, then you will find a fascinating theory developed from the point of view of scientific scholarship--sociology, psychology, and evolutionary biology. As with all of Steven Pinker's writings, this book is fascinating, comprehensive, and sure to be controversial. He has (most of) the facts behind him, and it is difficult to argue against his major points.
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 Kevin
 269 reviews 564 followers
 November 17, 2022
 This book asserts that violence has decreased. I can set this aside as a worthy discussion. However, that is just the hook to catch readers. The purpose here is spreading ideologies to explain why violence has decreased.

 The Bad :
 Well, it turns out Pinker puts much of his faith in the status quo (i.e. power) as directly responsible, i.e. the State ("Leviathan") and Capitalism ("Gentle Commerce").

 Let us consider status quo bias:
 1) One can argue that it is resistance to power that has brought much of the decrease in violence we see today! After all, slavery and colonialism were the most profitable Capitalist ventures, backed and enabled by the growth of States. Elites sure are innovative at co-opting grassroots demands (and then smugly taking credit for it!), like the liberal elite property-holders who did all they could to thwart democracy ("mob rule") until it became advantageous to run as "democrats" (while power migrated from the political sphere to the private economic sphere of one-dollar-one-vote).

 2) Even if such violent power structures were capable of forcing an increase in material production, must we assume they are the only options? Have we really reached " The End of History " in finding the optimal social system, as another status quo shill put it? (Indeed, we might soon reach the end of history given climate change and other destruction of crucial Earth systems, but never mind that; Pinker just picks out the "science" that conforms to status quo triumphalism)
 ...Euro/Americentric Liberal elitists and their useful idiots (Pinker?) place their faith in "the Enlightenment" (similarly, the "Founding Fathers") as the foundational social movement in human history, but we should look beyond Orwellian history, towards accounts that do not just assume whatever is written by the victors is the totality of reality. The autonomous communities not requiring and openly resisting the violent shepherding by authority are indeed written out of history...

 I tried to re-read these 800+ pages to give a thorough unpacking, but frankly there are better uses of one's time. I am thankful for The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions which brings an accessible dose of decolonization ideologies to expose just how atrocious Pinker's ideologies are.

 ...and these beautiful (negative) reviews, enjoy!
 Brilliant review #1
 Brilliant review #2
 Inception of spicy reviews
 ...and one more
 ...in fact, there's an entire book ( Reality Denial: Steven Pinker’s Apologetics for Western-Imperial Violence ), co-written by Edward S. Herman (who also lead the co-writing of that famous Chomsky book on foreign policy media: Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media )

 The Missing :
 I used to first recommend the following critiques on power and appraisal of popular resistance and decision-making for Western audiences given their accessibility. They are still useful:
 - Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky
 - The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement

 However, to appreciate why socialism in 20th century revolutions took place in the Global South/periphery is to build the historical context of the violence of global capitalism . This is crucial to avoid becoming the smug Western armchair critic that sees everyone else as primitive/violent/"totalitarian"/"anti-democratic"/"not real socialism", while at the same time failing to prevent the exportation of bombs and embargoes, or achieving economic democracy at home. Where to start?

 1) I'm accumulating a playlist on Global South Socialism, featuring Vijay Prashad , Michael Parenti , Utsa Patnaik , Max Blumenthal , etc.: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...
 --Highlights include:
 i) Michael Parenti :
 -on Cuban Revolution: https://youtu.be/npkeecCErQc
 -full: https://youtu.be/O8k0yO-deoA?t=27
 ii) Vijay Prashad
 -on ideological censorship : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jKcs...
 -"The Many Lives of Communism in the Third World": https://youtu.be/NZXh2Guebhg?t=104
 - Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations
 - The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World
 - The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South

 2) Books on the history of global capitalism not glossing over its violence and contradictions:
 -accessible intros:
 - Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (has reformist blind-spots towards empire, but very accessible intro to the history of economic development where long-term productivity gains require nurturing/protection from ruthless short-term market competition)
 - The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry
 - Capitalism: A Ghost Story
 - A People's History of the United States (history from below instead of by the winners)
 - A People's History of the World
 ...deeper dives:
 - Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present
 - Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
 -- Debt: The First 5,000 Years
 - Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital

 3) Capitalism as the end of history?
 -Intro on capitalism's dynamism being at the same time its volatility: Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails
 -Structural alternatives? Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present
 -Capitalist growth on a finite planet:
 - Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
 - Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System
 -Capitalist State as a tool to manage class conflict:
 - A Brief History of Neoliberalism
 - The State and Revolution
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 Jan Rice
 509 reviews 427 followers
 September 29, 2016
 Steven Pinker has written a monster of a book. He has used his intelligence to crunch a huge volume of material. He has made a number of great points to which I'm sure to be referring often.

 Yet despite all the insights and accompanying drum rolls, I am suspicious of the dramatic hypothesis, the grand prediction that humankind has learned in any permanent sense to be kinder and gentler. That hypothesis is a welcome change from all the dystopian predictions, and I do think I, and western civilization in general, has it pretty good right here and now in terms of space to survive and thrive. I just don't think it's necessarily a permanent pinnacle. And when people are thumping their chests and seeing themselves as representing that pinnacle, well, that's concerning--even though he insists his views are scientific and not in the least messianic. So, if Steven Pinker had been a little more humble and had spoken of current times as pretty nice for some without necessarily approaching the best of all possible worlds, I could better countenance him. But Steven Pinker can be hard to take and he doesn't do humble.

 Here's a cartoon making fun of Obama from the right--and of the notion that violence has declined. But, as when we see ten feet of snow and sneer at "global warming," everything is not always as it appears!


 --Ramirez, 06-17-2014

 On the other hand, given all the predictions of doom for the world that are in circulation, it's good to hear thinking from the other angle for a change. We need it. Having leaned too far one way, maybe the only way to get back in form is to lean the other way. And that's why, when I finish complaining, I'll be touching on some of Pinker's many surprising assertions, despite not being a Pinkerite.

 But, first, here are some more of my objections.

 Steven Pinker has thrown so many ideas and hypotheses into this book, and he's such a fast talking, smooth intellect that it's hard to evaluate all of it--as though he were some rogue trader wheeling and dealing beyond the capacity of his would-be supervisors. You can't help but be impressed by his moves even when they're too fast to follow and you know he's sometimes pulling a fast one.

 Steven Pinker doesn't do justice by his opponents. I remember the Platonic principle I learned in Plato at the Googleplex --that you haven't refuted an argument unless you have it in its best articulation. Straw men won't do. We hear references to opposing ideas and their proponents but in this book it's assumed that Pinker's views represent the "normal" and "best" views. I mean his views that the current commercial economy and individualism do represent the best of all possible worlds. I may even agree with him, but my point is that not everyone does.

 One of Pinker's main arguments for the decline of violence is that a lower percentage of humans suffer violence now than in the early modern period, medieval times, the Renaissance, or in antiquity or prehistory. Yes, a lot of people suffered violence in the 20th century, but, according to him, a lower percentage. But, if more people suffer now but are a lower percent of the total population, is that really less violence? Did anybody ask the particular sufferers? If each human is an end in him- or herself, and a greater number are suffering, can that really be considered evidence for the decline of violence?

 Actually, I took that line of argument--asking what the individuals themselves would have had to say--straight from Pinker's mouth:

 Ho Chi Minh was correct when he prophesied, "Kill ten of our men and we will kill one of yours. In the end, it is you who will tire." 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 proverbial ten men how they felt about this), and the United States eventually conceded the war of attrition despite having every other advantage. (p. 309)(my italics)


 Something similar happens--the author's doing what he himself reprimands others for--in the area of religion. Over and over, Pinker comes down hard on religion, blaming it for the violence and excesses of earlier eras. Yet he has to employ the most fundamentalist interpretations and he has to ignore aspects that run counter to that thesis, and all in a field that is outside his area of expertise. He has to take things literally and his interpretations as the one-and-only interpretations, laid down once and for all, for example, to take a common and conventionally-made criticism:

 The overriding principle was that animals exist for the benefit of humans. In the Hebrew Bible, God's first words to Adam and Eve in Genesis 1:28 are "Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." (p. 458)


 And he has to pick out only the aspects of scripture that he finds distasteful. And use whatever "God said" in some Bible verse as if an actual historical event to compare to "other" historical events. Apparently he must even keep the King James flavor ( moveth ).

 Expounding on the meaning of seemingly arbitrary and bizarre but nevertheless rigidly required manners and rules of etiquette, Pinker studies their history. But studying the history of religion that way wouldn't advance Pinker's argument, while blindness to any such thing does, so he leaves it in the dark. " What you see is all there is ," as Daniel Kahneman , another cognitive psychologist, says. My early impression from the quotes that were up when I started out was that most casual readers were reading The Better Angels of Our Nature primarily to hear Steven Pinker diss religion and reinforce their own views.

 In an apparent spirit of fairness, Pinker disses the New Testament, too, but he reserves most of his ire for the Hebrew Bible. Let that be a lesson for you, Christians who disrespect your Old Testament. You are doing the work of atheists for them.

 Speaking of cognitive psychology, Pinker pretty much worships at the alter of reason. Doing otherwise wasn't something that was going to advance his thesis; the reader will have to look elsewhere for the limits of reason and for the understanding of consciousness as a system of attention rather than as some pristine space for free choice.

 One more criticism: I was surprised by a clear inconsistency on Pinker's part. This author loves local authority, and, on the national level, Leviathan --a central government large and powerful enough to reserve violence to itself and wield it in an increasingly disinterested and just manner--as an alternative to a wild, wild west scenario of every man for himself. Yet when it came to the international level he argues correlationally for a "Democratic Peace" theory, calling the "empire" theory of peace "cynical." (p. 281) Huh?

 And going back to religion for a minute, what about God and religion as a means to call up a symbolic "Leviathan," long before there could be an actual central government in that role. He hints as much on p. 539, quoting from Martin Daly and Margo Wilson's 1988 book Homicide on the subject of our retention of a "just deserts" approach to justice as opposed to adopting a purely utilitarian "deterrence" approach:

 From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, this almost mystical and seemingly irreducible moral imperative is the output of a mental mechanism with a straightforward adaptive function: to reckon justice and administer punishment by a calculus which ensures that violators reap no advantage from their misdeeds. The enormous volume of mystico-religious bafflegab about atonement and penance and divine justice and the like is the attribution to higher detached authority of what is actually a mundane, pragmatic matter: discouraging self-interested competitive acts by reducing their profitability to nil.


 Pinker himself goes on to argue that just deserts itself may serve a deterrent function, and that if we were to get rid entirely of the just deserts, "retributive" aspect, making the justice system "too narrowly utilitarian," then "malefactors would learn to game it. Just deserts can close off that option."

 I think it is here, in those words, and in waffling sprinkled throughout the book on the subject of religion, that Pinker concedes the value of of the very phenomenon against which he becomes so exercised. But he doesn't get that he has done so.

 I got the impression that Steven Pinker really, really wants his theory that our better angels have won to be true. More on that at the end...

 Now to some of his thought-provoking assertions and conclusions:

 Prehistorical hunter-gatherer times were not some idyllic period during which the world was populated by noble savages free from the corrupting influence of civilization. On the contrary, life was nasty, brutish and short; those times were dominated by sneaky, murderous, rapacious raiding parties. Things had to settle down considerably before anybody could write or read any books, people! Yes, it was two steps forward, one step backward for eons; people lost health and strength when they traded in hunting and gathering for agriculture--but still!

 Nor were medieval times some idyllic period over which to nostalgically yearn. That would be "cutting off your nose to spite your face," nose-snipping being one common response to a slight. Honor was priceless but life was cheap. The way we feel now--that our bodies belong to us and are ours to care for--a perception that seems to reflect "reality" but is of recent, modern derivation. It is an attitude we anachronistically think always existed. Instead, individualism developed gradually. With modern times we no longer belonged to some warlord or king; and with the spread of trade we had to get inside the head of the prospective trading partner and see others as we see ourselves..as we see others....

 The biggest problems for a society come with an overload of young males. And, yet, the confounding preference for male babies that drives female infanticide in many cultures!

 Infanticide itself is far from being some aberration attributable to the impact of modern stress and alienation. Infanticide was the norm from time immemorial--if it helped the survival of current young whose viability was already established, circumstances being such that a mother could care for only so many.

 This kind of thinking--some people don't want to hear it! It's enough to garner threatening letters for poor scientists.

 Genocide is not a disease of modernity either. We've just learned to recognize it, that's all. Life used to be a permanent holocaust for nameless multitudes, in slavery and through the impact of war and violence. No one thought anything was wrong with it unless it happened to you, says Pinker. Murderous death was supposed to represent the verdict of history, of God, in accordance with a way of thinking only lately subject to question.

 In this day of competition for victimhood (at best a two-edged sword!), silence in the aftermath of genocide seems inconceivable, but if genocide was a just verdict , no wonder that, at first, Holocaust survivors couldn't talk about it. I am told that changed for American Jews in consequence of the 1967 Six Day War. Did that raise the possibility of an alternative verdict?

 I want to digress here on how views on the suffering of violence are shifted around in religious narratives. Some ideas have begun to consolidate themselves while I've been working on this review but since they are off the beaten path of the review I'll hide them. For a long time I've been aware that religion takes the suffering of violence and turns it upside down. Egypt deported you? Then it's God hearing you and redeeming you! You're crucified? Look again and it's the salvation of the world! Can't we say that, generally speaking, people do look at suffering (or failure) as a verdict?--and it takes a twist to turn that around.

 In particular I came back to Galatians 3:13 in which Paul turns around the crucifixion of Christ from the "curse of the law" to a blessing. That has always bothered me because Deuteronomy 21:22-23 doesn't say being hanged (or crucified) is a curse. (The Jewish Study Bible and the NRSV share an editor; the translations and footnotes are very similar.) It says that leaving the body out and unburied is the curse (affront to God)--basically the same as for Sophocles' Antigone and her brother whom Cleon considered a traitor and wouldn't let her bury, to the misfortune of all. In biblical times--meaning Hebrew biblical times--stoning was the method. The final redaction was around the time of the Exile, when crucifixion didn't yet loom large. The Hebrew bible--"the law" in Paul's terms--recognized that, atypically, some traitor-types might be hanged or impaled; in that case, leaving the body exposed might well be part of the punishment. So the bible, to circumscribe such practices, said the body must not be exposed and left overnight to become carrion. The bible, in other words, sided with the morals of Sophocles' Antigone. That is what Deuteronomy is saying.

 But, by post-testamental--make that intertestamental times, if you're from a Christian tradition--that had changed. The sadistic execution method of crucifixion had become unfortunately well-known, and, by then, that's what people thought of when they read those Deuteronomy verses. Here's an article I came across--the first few pages, anyway: http://www.tsm.edu/sites/default/file... So, I think Paul thought what he thought and wrote what he wrote--and isn't the part about suffering a bad end as a curse typical? Isn't turning that upside down what religions do? But, "the Law" didn't say that being crucified is a curse.

 No gas chambers? We may think genocide requires modern technology, but it doesn't. Just lock a town's population in a building and come back in two weeks. Think of the sieges of the ancient world, or of chariots, the advanced weapons of a long-ago day.

 And, now--political correctness. For Pinker, PC is the residue of changes that have occurred and that we've therefore forgotten about.

 During the transition to modernity, people did not fully appreciate that they were undergoing changes aimed at reducing violence, and once the changes were entrenched, the process was forgotten. When Europeans were mastering norms of self-control, they felt like they were becoming more civilized and courteous, not that they were part of a campaign to drive the homicide statistics downward. Today we give little thought to the rationale behind the customs left behind by that change.... ...(A) civilizing offensive can leave a culture with a legacy of puzzling customs, peccadilloes, and taboos. ... The code of etiquette bequeathed by this and other Rights Revolutions is pervasive enough to have acquired a name. We call it political correctness.


 He also thinks we become amnesiac about the degree of change. We forget what the past was really like. We say little has changed. That is related to PC, enabling us to keep our guard up against the return of "the bad old days," and it also enables activists to exhort us to do more. In other words, exaggeration. If we had to acknowledge how much better things are, could we get away with it? People say racism is just as bad as it always was, but it isn't. Same for antisemitism. Not so far.

 My husband was taking a Greek course last fall. In Georgia, people over 65 can take college courses for free within the state university system if there is space--isn't that nice? In connection with his course we could attend some lectures on antiquity, and at one the doctoral candidate made reference to the Greek "dark ages" (from about 1200-800 BCE). There was an African-American woman of uncertain age--meaning not young (but younger than I, as nearly everyone is getting to be) in the audience. I mention her ethnicity for any light that may shed on her reply, and what she did, during the question-and-answer period, is take issue with the "dark ages" designation, for, she said, we shouldn't make such a designation given that this is such a dark age.

 That exemplifies the point Pinker was making re forgetting what the past was really like and exaggerating the problems of the present, even as we all sat safe, secure, comfortable and diverse, discussing our esoteric subject.

 That segues to the Moralization Gap.

 Say I've done something to you. From your point of view, you were my victim. Our perspectives are going to be very different. Mine will be that whatever I did wasn't all that serious. At any rate it was a long time ago. Did I really have a choice? What can one expect, anyway? My stance is going to tend toward you should get over it already, and, while you're at it, stop being so over-sensitive. Meanwhile, you don't see it that way, not by a long shot. Whatever it is lives on in your memory and your heart. For you, not forgetting is more than common sense; it's a sacred trust.

 In short, the Moralization Gap is about the impact of self-interest on our views and dealings with each other, a potentially fruitful method of analysis for understanding the dynamics of a situation and why it's so hard to get along.

 According to Pinker the scientist is usually going to side against the past as a living cause and with what's over being over. So, in other words, he's assuming whatever it is is over.

 One can envisage still more angry letters and protests against that poor scientist.


 Why does Pinker need to believe at all costs in his Enlightenment values? It occurs to me that for a philosophe who is not from the religious majority it's distinctly unpalatable to consider what it would be like if the hands of the majority tradition were to be untied. What would happen to his vaunted authority then?

 And yet when he goes on and on with his criticism of the Hebrew bible, it sounds like sucking up to that majority, as if to say "Listen to me: I'm putting them down; I'm not like them." And, in that way, he's reminiscent of Marx.


 Here's a 2008 article by Jerry Muller asserting the triumph of ethnonationalism. If Muller's assertions are correct, they undermine Pinker's general hypothesis. ( Foreign Affairs allows non-subscribers one article a month and two if you register.) http://www.foreignaffairs.com/article...
 Here, critics try to refute Muller but don't succeed: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/article...

 Finally, don't think that all that's here is all there is. This review isn't very systematic. Or comprehensive; for example, there's game theory and the Prisoner's Dilemma in the evolution of cooperation. Or the concept "self-determination of peoples" as instigator of blood baths....["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>
 audio history morality-justice
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 Faruk Ahmet
 5 reviews 32 followers
 July 22, 2016
 Loathing is the word. It infuriated me. You'd think that after all these years one would stop being surprised by this style of typical new-atheist/liberal argumentation but when I see this much cherrypicking, oversimplification, handwaving and western supremacism shoved into a single book, I still get all worked up. And of course, it doesn't help that they call themselves "The Brights" and "The Enlightened" etc. I mean, who does that? Even if I was intellectually convinced by their arguments, I still wouldn't wanna hang around these jerks.

 His main thesis is simple and for anyone brought up after the 19th century, overly familiar: We were savages, then we were saved by Science and Reason. Not all of us, of course, only Europeans and Americans at first, but thanks to Capitalism (or as he labels it, the gentle commerce ), everywhere else is catching up slowly, too. One time this evil thing called Communism had suddenly sprung up out of nowhere and caused many deaths and suffering but it was ultimately defeated by the Allies of Light. Etc.

 "If you'd suggest occupying another country today, everyone would laugh at you and they'd think you were crazy; it is a thing of the past", he says (paraphrasing). So what about Iraq or Afghanistan? Panama, Bolivia, Vietnam, Libya and countless other bloody conflicts and interjections by the Western forces, mainly USA? Oh, they are not "wars", he says, but merely unfortunate but "defensive" actions taken by civilized nations to protect their democratic ways. Isn't it incredibly telling that in an EIGHT-HUNDRED-page book about the history of world politics and violence, the word "imperialism" is not uttered at all. Not even once.

 There are a myriad of graphs and numbers stuffed inside. But the way he handles them and the way he chooses the sources he gets them from is so blatantly manipulative that it's cringe-inducing. A source repudiates his claims about "The Long Peace" and "the waning of war", and draws a bleak picture of the condition the world is in outside TheCivilizedNations? Well they are extremist, communist, leftist fanatics, you can't trust their data. Here, we have a government-funded organization that prints out numbers that fit my theory beautifully; surely they're the trustworthy ones. In one of the most embarrasing moments of the book, « we are seriously asked to draw conclusions from a graph of the "rate of battle deaths in state-based armed conflicts between 1900 and 2005" (Figure 6-1) while being instructed to ignore the figures for the first and second world wars »**. Why should we ignore two world wars, while looking at the history of wars, you ask? Because "after all, the world has seen nothing close to that level since". It was a fluke. This is kinda like saying "please don't call it murder just because there's a body lying on the floor with a knife in the back, since it's not like we see something like that everyday". Forgive me for the vulgar language, but this reminds me of a lovely Turkish idiom: "If my aunt had balls, she would be my uncle".

 Well, I could go on and on (like this occasionally biased and contrived -leftists!- but very detailed and informative review does ) but you get the gist. In the end, it's not that I find the claim that violence in general is getting comparatively subsided (and it's at least partially thanks to Western Civilization) completely worthless. It doesn't even have to be a glorious, total, irreversible change of paradigm to be worth praising. If we are living in a marginally better, more peaceful world, we should know about it, and understand the why and the how so we can push it further. If it really turns out that the Westerners are morally superior and more evolved or something, so be it; it's not the premise that bugs me at all, but if it takes this much deceptive and manipulative "scholarship" to prove a point, maybe we should at least raise an eyebrow in mild suspicion before patting our world of gentle commerce in the back, you know.

 **Quote from David's review , because I'm too lazy to look it up myself.
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 fourtriplezed
 443 reviews 90 followers
 December 14, 2018
 What an interesting read! If the idea is to give the reader food for thought this book more than nourishes.

 My approach to this book was a bit different than is usual. I have tended to write a review and then read others. Not in this case. I read many good reviews and few that were critical so was very open to being a critic. I am of the opinion that a few did not take note of what Pinker wrote. He got some numbers wrong was a fairly common complaint. He may have and admits as much. A few times he made it clear that his numbers were estimates based on researchers who are respected in the field. “…. so there is no single correct estimate” he writes on page 60 of my copy. Page 168 “….. no one knows exactly how many were killed…..” when discussing holy slaughters. In fact Pinker supports scepticism as he suggested on page 217 when discussing the Enlightenment.

 As a westerner living a very comfortable life in Australia I was intrigued to read a comment by US politician John Kerry on page 417. “We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorist are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance. As a former law-enforcement person, I know we’re never going to end prostitution. We’re never going to end illegal gambling. But we’re going to reduce it, organised crime, to a level where it isn’t on the rise. It isn’t threatening people’s lives every day, and fundamentally it’s something that you continue to fight, but it’s not threatening the fabric of your life” He was right of course but he became “unfit to lead” and had to back pedal as the reality is that the authorities may well have reduced and contained crime, by cripes don’t tell the people that because the media will not be happy unless they are able to make you feel bad about just about every part of your life. Less violence? How dare that be considered when there is news to sell. And take it in your stride as you are not going to get hit by the Mafia? Bah!

 This book covered a variety of female issues and after conversation elsewhere I even read On Rape by Germaine Greer. Hardly an area I knew much about. Glad I did. Perhaps blokes my age, 60ish, need to get of their fat arses and not think they rule the world as Pinker has given a very good case that the rise of feminist thought has been good for our collective health. While reading this I came across this item on the repulsive practise of female circumcision. Yes the item says caution is required but it is good to read that progress is taking place.

 https://www.theguardian.com/global-de...

 This book has some fascinating sub chapters and one on page 572 called Whence The Rights Revolution? should thrill the hearts of all book readers. Among other things is a fivefold increase in books published from 1960 to 2000. The information we are getting seems to just make us collectively smarter when it comes to treating each other with a little bit of respect and not get on our high horse and want to smash the face in of our neighbours be they next door or in the nation next door.

 So does Pinker say we are in for even less violence in the future? No! In fact he makes it abundantly clear that one bit of lunacy can change everything. I personally am very unsure we have rosy future. I am like the next father of children and worry about the environment, that a loony with a nuke will go mad but the book itself is in fact not really about that. It is about the data that shows violence has dropped and gives several reasons why. Disagree with the reasons by all means but also enjoy the fact you have more chance of dying in a car crash than by a terrorist attack no matter what the newspapers tells you.
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 knig
 223 reviews 195 followers
 September 24, 2012
 I have a peripheral awareness that Pinker awakens red penitus in a goodly proportion of his stalwart readers: but I don’t know why. I shan’t delve into this before I write up ‘better angels’: don’t want to be distracted by ‘noise’.

 800 pages of socio-economic postulating: always an inexact science, is going to rub someone the wrong way hither or thither. We see what we want to see, and 800 pages of the ‘humanities’ is like waving a red flag to a bull: plenty of scope to flare up, statistically speaking, and isn’t that just what we love to do best: exploit the ‘Moralizing Gap’ to justify our own world view:we’re brushed up dammit: well, OK, we may not be able to prove a point statistically, mathematically, economically, biologically or physically, but give me the humanities, I say: and see if I know my oochie from my achie.

 The subject centre stage here is violence, (mainly in the westen hemisphere, where data is more readily available)and the overarching conclusion is that it has decreased over time: in terms of war, rape, homicide and any other conceivable physical violation against the person.

 No one, as far as I am aware, has disagreed with this overall premise, although certain definitions of violence are under debate : e.g. the high prevaleence of infanticide has been supplanted with high levels of abortion, so in this particular area Pinker’s hypothesis does not hold up: but this is and other instances are outliers in the more general scenario of violence reduction.

 Pinker’s starting premise is the biological impulse, the Darwinian hegemony for survival . This type of thinking will either resonate or repel. But it is an important point because if you’re going to go down the route of biological justification, then its inadmissible to switch and bait halfway through as Pinker does. And he does so by positing the issue of excessive violence in terms of biological necessity, but resolves its decrease through ambiguous channels such as self control, empathy, reverse morality and, incongruously, and ultimately, the Flynn effect.

 Hence the incompatibility? How can something which starts off as nature be dampened by nurture? Huh? Huh?

 On the surface, all of the theories Pinker posits withstands microscopic examination: the Civilizing Process (e.g. the contract between man and state) does indeed explain the decline in violence: prior to Henry II introducing the state vs Jane Doe as opposed to Joe Bloggs vs Jane Doe, violence was the only way out: you smacked your feudal neighbours about, or you lost out. The aristocracy were just as likely as the hoi polloi to ‘engage’ in a good brawl. After the change in law, it wasn’t so beneficial. The upper and middle classes modified their behaviour. The lower classes persisted (and persist), because they have never fully bought into the state-citizen contract (and to be fair, neither has the state, on their behalf). Other influencing factors intervene: commerce, the integration of minorities in spheres of influence which engender the ‘rights revolution’, the pacifying influence of women, the clear demarcation of national borders, the influx of democracy, the redefinition of moral values.

 And you know what: its all true. All of it. All of these trends decreased violence. And not one person can nary say it didn’t. But how exactly:well, Pinker’s final analysis is: mainly, Reason. Now, I’ve cut and pasted this next section from Peter Singer in the New York Times book review, because he rightly summarises Pinker’s position and I am too lazy to. I’m saving my fire for the constructive anlaysis after:

 ‘Pinker’s claim that reason is an important factor in the trends he has described relies in part on the “Flynn effect” — the remarkable finding by the philosopher James Flynn that ever since I.Q. tests were first administered, the scores achieved by those taking the test have been rising. The average I.Q. is, by definition, 100; but to achieve that result, raw test scores have to be standardized. If the average teenager today could go back in time and take an I.Q. test from 1910, he or she would have an I.Q. of 130, which would be better than 98 percent of those taking the test then. Nor is it easy to attribute this rise to improved education, because the aspects of the tests on which scores have risen most do not require a good vocabulary or even mathematical ability, but instead test powers of abstract reasoning. ......

 Pinker argues that enhanced powers of reasoning give us the ability to detach ourselves from our immediate experience and from our personal or parochial perspective, and frame our ideas in more abstract, universal terms. This in turn leads to better moral commitments, including avoiding violence. It is just this kind of reasoning ability that has improved during the 20th century. He therefore suggests that the 20th century has seen a “moral Flynn effect, in which an accelerating escalator of reason carried us away from impulses that lead to violence” and that this lies behind the long peace, the new peace, and the rights revolution. Among the wide range of evidence he produces in support of that argument is the tidbit that since 1946, there has been a negative correlation between an American president’s I.Q. and the number of battle deaths in wars involving the United States. ‘

 Here is where I wade in now: First of all, surely the Flynn effect is fallacious? There has been much debate about the accuracy of IQ tests in general, and how they are loaded with prescribed sense-data which automatically ‘disqualifies’ intelligent people who have not been immersed in the culture of this sense data. Second, the mode in which abstract reasoning is included in standardised tests is very easily a ‘learnable’ rather than an ‘applicable’ commodity, whose sequences have been incorporated in thousands of ephemeral ways in the educational system to begin with, and routinely tested over time. To use the Flynn effect as some overarching proof that we are ‘smarter’ than our predecessors is a travesty. But no more so than Pinker’s next theory, that ‘Reason’ has finally got the upper hand and carried us away ‘from impulse led violence’. This must be intuitively wrong, even to a philosophical novice. How can Reason deal with a biological impulse? In fact, when has Reason ever successfully ‘eliminated’ a biological impulse? Need I remind Pinker about the painful, unnecessary and degrading experiments in say trying to ‘reason with homosexuals’ that they have other choices? Conversely, I’m pretty certain no amount of reasoning will sway my biological sexual impulses either. Obviously countless other examples pertain. Pinker!!!
 And yet violence has gone down. How to explain this, then? Given I don’t buy Pinker’s theory, I’m going to have to have a go at this myself. Why not?

 First, Pinker concedes the impulse to violence is biologically driven. Then, buried deep within the 800 page text is a study by Preston and de Waal in 2002 ‘aversiveness of conspecifics in pain’, which basically translates into primates (and humans) having a natural inbred revulsion to inflicting violence on other primates/humans (backed up by Stanley Milgram’s shock experiment and the Trolley Problem). On a separate note, there is also the well known concept of ‘crowd mechanics’: or how we all fall into rank when the mob rules. My personal theory here is that, based on the studies above, it is possibility that violence was ‘overexaggerated’ in early history to begin with, due to lack of behaviour limiting controls. Perhaps in the wild these might be say greater geographical distances between competing primate groups. In human history, perhaps it was the state contract which modified an unnaturally rampant exhibition of violence between competitors in close proximity.(picture two pitbulls in a ring: excessiveness, eh?) Effectively then, an ‘overly violent’ population was stabilised to its natural levels. But this is not the whole story. ‘Better Angels’ shows we have gone one further, and overt violence is now perhaps below what might be considered the natural equilibrium. How did this happen?

 Well, it didn’t. The first thing that I must concede if I am to accept that violence is a biologically driven impulse, is that it simply can NOT have been dissipated, and certainly not by Reason. The question then is, where did the violence go? Its not easily seen as a subject-object agreement, so what happened? Its been redirected, I think. We’re not rid of it, we’re simply rechanneling in a ‘non statistical’ way. Its not with a little trepidation I’m going to mention the xBox and film now. I realise I might be relegated to cuckoo territory (my only consolation is I’ll be sharing it with Pinker though!).

 In the first half of the last century we had two world wars to keep us busy (and I think anybody would agree a combined total of over 40 million casualties is enough to keep anyone’s bloodthirsty instinct at bay), in the 60s there was the Vietnam war and the most intense cold war stand off ever (Bay of Pigs), and from the eighties onwards, we have: well, video games. The xBox (and read here all its technical predecessors and contemporaries) cuts across class, race, age divide and unite men (yes, men) in an indiscriminate guts and glory campaign. Usage is phenomenal., and all inclusive. If you’re old enough to hold the controller: you’re in. Its the new passage of initiation: four year olds sat next to fourteen year olds next to forty year olds: killing, massacring, rampaging, destroying and eviscerating (apparently the only taboo is raping: there is no button for it. Says Pinker). If its not the xBox its organised sport in a way well, in a way sport hasn’t been organised ever before. Not for nothing do we have the football hooligans and the mandatory Saturday matches. And finally. Film. This is something I’ve been ‘doing’ for the last month and a half: I’ve traversed the chronological gamut of film, and I find that the level of violence in film ‘now’ is phenomenal compared to anything found before the 1960s, with ever escalating etudes since. Its gotten so bad, that at the moment we are in a new era of image making: and I call it gender segregation. The majority of current offerings seem to run across gender biased lines: mindless violent action for the men, where the directors don’t even pretend to be aiming for all round inclusivity, tempered with a backlash for women: just as silly a regression in stereotypical ‘romcom’ where no allowances are made for the non chicklit minded. Cinema is divided, in a way it never was prior to the 1960s onwards. Which serves no one well. But apropos of violence: this is where its all happening. Behind the scenes, where the victims are not ‘real’ people, and the statistics don’t register. Which means, of course, that the problem of violence hasn’t gone away.

 It will resurface in all its glory. Just give it the right time and place.

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 Richard
 1,131 reviews 1,007 followers
 February 10, 2017
 Steven Pinker certain ranges widely in intellectual circles. Although he is nominally a professor of psychology at Harvard, but even with specialties (per Wikipedia) in experimental psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, he somehow dove into history to present one of the best TED Talks, back in 2007: Steven Pinker on the myth of violence (watch those nineteen minutes, if you haven't already).

 Wonderfully, he has now followed that presentation up with an entire volume.

 Peter Singer wrote the glowing review of this book for the New York Times, and that somewhat lengthy essay is itself well worth reading: Is Violence History? .

 Update — the Autumn 2011 issue of the excellent pop sociology quarterly The Wilson Quarterly also enthusiastically recommends the book (with minor caveats) in Peace on Earth .

 Update — Just got this from the library; must read within three weeks since the number of holds will prevent me from renewing. Curiously, the podcast I was listening to on the way to the library was on a related topic. The U.C. Berkeley School of Law professor (and socioologist) Franklin Zimring wrote an article back in August on the precipitous decline in crime in New York City, and was interviewed by the charming SciAm editor Steve Mirsky, The City That Became Safe: What New York Teaches about Urban Crime and Its Control . Check it out!

 Update — just stumbled on a brief Q&A with the Economist here . Poked around and found a review, also covering A History of Violence: From the End of the Middle Ages to the Present , titled Punchline ; and a summation by the Economist blogger Buttonwood at A Cause for Celebration .

 Yet another update — since I bought the book, I'm hoping to read it again after I finish a few others. Meanwhile, I've found a few other reviews and interviews.

 The philosopher Nigel Warburton interviews Steven Pinker on the Social Science Bites podcast. A transcript of the interview is here , along with a downloadable PDF or audio MP3.

 Pinker was interviewed on the Charlie Rose Show .

 A review of the book on the GuardianUK Observer column by John Naughton, Steven Pinker: fighting talk from the prophet of peace .

 An audio interview from the GuardianUK's Science Weekly podcast.

 A text interview with author Sam Harris (who is Pinker's friend and wrote the introduction to Pinker's book), Twilight of Violence .

 A vigorously negative review (albeit simplistic and misguided, in my quick, and as-yet contingent appraisal) by the philosopher John Gray in Prospect Magazine, Delusions of peace .

 Finally, the book's Wikipedia page has additional citations in the praise and criticism sections.
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 Scott
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 September 10, 2017
 Are you afraid of being of being attacked or murdered? Do you think our society is becoming more violent and less safe? If you watch the news, read the papers and listen to politicians it would be logical to be afraid of the seemingly rising tide of violence and criminality in the world. However, Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature will show you your feelings are misguided- crime and violence in society is lower than it has ever been, and our often idealized past (even the recent past) was a very violent and scary place.

 Before you read this book (and you should read it) be aware that it is Looooong. Weighing in at 832 pages The Better Angels of our Nature is no reading Everest, no Tolstoy, but each of those pages is a heavy bit of paper, drowning in a kudzu of fascinating facts and info that has spread to near every sentence. It was a long march to the final page, but trust me, it was worth it.

 This is a fascinating and constantly surprising read. Pinker presents the perfect antidote for the doom, gloom and bolt-your-doors crime hysteria present in the media. I already knew that we live in a comparatively safe era of history- the lack of recent Viking raids on my apartment block is noticeable - but Pinker makes it clear that this is by far the safest period of human history that there has ever been. Present-day developed nations make even the 1970s and 80s look like a time when to step outside was to enter a gritty urban version of the hunger games, complete with roving packs of armed rapists (the sexual violence stats for those decades are genuinely horrifying).

 The United States, sadly, is still more violent than Europe or Australasia, but even with all the shootings and killings of recent years the cold hard statistics show that Americans are still safer than ever. This completely flips the established narrative in politics and the media, and the hard data shows that suicide is a greater threat than murder, or even from war and natural disasters combined. The average person in twenty-first century society is more likely to die by their own hand than they are by the hands of others.

 The reality of contemporary crime and violence is completely contrary to the apocalyptic vision presented by fearmongering politicians and news outlets and The Better Angels of our Nature , or at least a summary of Pinker’s findings, should be compulsory reading for anyone standing for public office. Pinker's book stands as an engaging testament to how much progress we have made in making our broader human society far less violent.
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 Daniel Clausen
 Author 9 books 455 followers
 November 2, 2017
 Steven Pinker’s "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined" is a big ambitious book. Perhaps too big, perhaps too ambitious. And perhaps, too sprawling for its own good. One could opt for a Peace Studies reader and get a more eclectic taste of what research is out there. Would it be as comprehensive as this book? Maybe, maybe not, but you would get the benefit of tasting the many kinds of literature through many different voices.

 Here, we get a great deal of peace science, behavioral science, religious literature and more, all sifted through one scientific (and often brilliant) voice. Much research is included in this volume, and the many references often drown out the voice, but the voice is also in control of how we receive the literature.

 So, what is the book -- polemical argument, scientific memoir, or reference volume? I doubt it knows the answer.

 The point of the book is simple: to outline how violence has decreased, and to answer why so that we may learn from our successes and continue to replicate them.

 The book might strike some as counter-intuitive -- in the time of Rwanda, Darfur, Iraq, mass-casualty terrorism, runaway gun violence in the US, and much, much more, it would seem like our times are just "another bloody century". Surely, if we subtract the effects of nuclear weapons in deterring warfare between major powers, and on top of that, if we discount the way modern battlefield medicine has led to a decrease in fatalities from warfare (many are still wounded and crippled), then our century can't be that much more peaceful than others. And there is also the other issue, the possible historical contingency of our own "long peace" (much like the long relative peacefulness between the Napoleonic wars and the first World War). One really bloody hegemonic war between nuclear powers might be all that's needed to eliminate our current gains.

 And yet there is a surprising body of evidence that suggests that violence has decreased that spans across multiple disciplines. Pinker makes the case that this trend is deep, enduring, and possibly sustainable. Ancient and medieval societies took genocide, rape, mutilation and other types of violence as given. All of these forms of violence were permissible as long as customs and traditions were adhered to.

 For me, the most interesting aspects of the book are the tracking of the rights movements and the civilizing processes. These are truly fascinating aspects of the evolving peace that I was not fully aware of. I think for many of the scholars coming to this book with some background in peace studies or studies of violence, they will have a similar reaction to mine. I know that...and I know that...and I know that...but ah!, I didn't know that!

 This speaks to the benefit of having such a comprehensive volume. Peace researchers who are aware of one of type of literature might be bored by some chapters of the book, and yet, find themselves enthralled by others.

 Overall, a fantastic read and one that I would readily recommend to others.
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 Max
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 January 12, 2018
 Pinker goes into voluminous detail to show us that violence has steadily declined in human society since prehistoric times. In this well-structured work rich with statistics, charts, and the ideas of influential scholars he identifies six prevailing trends: The Pacification Process, the Civilizing Process, the Humanitarian Revolution, the Long Peace, the New Peace, and the Rights Revolutions. Turning from history to psychology he identifies five inner demons that lead us to violence: Predation, dominance, revenge, sadism, and ideology. Then he identifies four better angels: Empathy, self-control, morality and reason. He gives us a brief review of violence in human history before explaining each trend and the underlying psychology. Below is my recap.

 The first trend, the Pacification Process , explains the decline of violent deaths as a percentage of the population from the time of prehistoric tribes to today’s modern nation states. Incessant feuding and raiding between tribes gave way to organized societies that enforced laws and weighed more carefully the consequences of war. The decline has been steady but not smooth with large conflicts and exterminations causing big blips in the trend line but not breaking it.

 The second trend, the Civilizing Process , explains how people acquired manners and standards of behavior that were less prone to violence. Pinker attributes much of both processes to Hobbes Leviathan, the state. From 5000 fiefdoms in 15th century Europe came 30 nations in 20th century Europe. As these states grew in size, so did strong central authority. Laws, rules and norms on behavior were imposed to ensure loyalty and stability decreasing internal violence. Increased commerce created interdependence between states also engendering stability and reducing the benefits of interstate conflict. The degree of violence in a country or even a region in the US is best explained by acceptance of the rule of law. The rule of law is not accepted where governments are weak or by people in remote regions or by people who feel discriminated against. In these situations street law replaces government laws, honor systems prevail and personal disputes are much more likely to end in violence.

 The third trend, the Humanitarian Revolution , developed from the Enlightenment which began in the seventeenth century led by philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. The Humanitarian Revolution challenged sadism, despotism and cruel punishments for people and animals. The invention of the printing press had resulted in an explosion of books and rapid increase in literacy. Reading, particularly popular novels which induced vicarious emotion, led to shared ideas, values and perspective crossing traditional community lines. People from different backgrounds congregating in cities and increased international trade contributed to the Humanitarian Revolution as did the Civilizing Process. Prior to the Humanitarian Revolution the world was brutish and cruel. Pinker goes into great detail about many popular tortures that were widely enjoyed such as burning witches and dangling cats over fires for evening fun. Communities even purchased prisoners from other jurisdictions so they could hold executions for public entertainment. Reading this section is like reading about a completely different world. Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror provides good background.

 The fourth trend Pinker calls the Long Peace . He is referring to the relatively peaceful period since WWII. He also points to the long period of relative European peace between the Napoleonic Wars and WWI. Pinker goes back further amassing a plethora of statistical measures to posit that the trend of the world since at least the fifteenth century is towards fewer wars and fewer war deaths as a percentage of world population. This holds true even considering the huge casualties of WWI and WWII and other deadly calamities. Pinker believes nationalism and territorial conquest are on the decline as Enlightenment values such as human rights take hold. The humanitarian influence is strongly reinforced by the now readily available real-time graphic pictures of war. He sees hope in the number of countries that have stopped conscription and the slower than expected rate of nuclear proliferation. He goes back 200 years to Kant who pointed out three forces that promoted peace – democracy, international trade, and international organizations. All three have experienced recent dramatic growth supporting Pinker’s trends of pacification, civilizing, and humanitarianism to support peace.

 The fifth trend is the New Peace . This encompasses the period following the end of the Cold War in 1989 up to the time Pinker wrote the book, published in 2011. Pinker analyses different types of wars (interstate, non-state, and civil), mass exterminations (racial and political) and terrorism to show the world has continued to become more peaceful. He points out how our perceptions have changed. Compare the 5,000 Americans and 100,000 Iraqis that have died during this period in Middle Eastern conflicts to the 58,000 Americans and 1,000,000 or more Vietnamese who died in that conflict. What shocks today would have seemed far less significant just decades prior. Once, even genocide didn’t raise the eyebrows of those not affected. Pinker discusses modern exterminations including the Armenian genocide, Soviet collectivization, the Holocaust, Chinese land reform, and Rwandan genocide. Political instability, ethnic divisions and ideology all play roles leading to authoritarianism and genocide. Terrorism has always afflicted the world. But reliable statistics are available only going back to the 1970’s. Western Europe has seen a steady decline of terrorism as has the US with major exceptions: 9-11 in 2001 and to a lesser extent the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Pinker points out with the exception of 2001 and 1995 “more Americans were killed each year from lightening, deer, peanut allergies, bee stings, and ‘ignition or melting nightwear’ than by terrorist attacks.” So the recent trend, despite all the histrionics, is toward less violence, but it only takes one megalomaniac with nuclear weapons to undo all the trend lines.

 The sixth trend Pinker calls the Rights Revolutions , which were primarily due to the increase in access to information exposing people to new ideas and different viewpoints. Contributing are democracies which promote access and prosperity which allows people to focus beyond necessity. Pinker describes five Rights Revolutions:
 Civil Rights : From the lynchings of the American South to the pogroms of Russia, racial and religious violence has persisted throughout history. In America only since Truman integrated the armed forces in 1948 and Johnson signed the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 did change begin to take hold. Today most Americans accept diversity and respect differences.
 Woman’s Rights : Rape and wife beating have been endemic in every society. Women were regarded as property. Rape was considered a crime against the husband or father. Not until the late middle ages did Western views begin to change and so.me cultures still haven’t. It wasn’t until the 1970’s that states in the U.S. began to pass laws against husbands raping their wives. As late as the 1970’s women were denied credit unless their husbands signed. A 1974 law made that illegal. Change has been dramatic in the last fifty years with the “me too” movement the latest iteration of progress.
 Children’s Rights : Until recently 10-15% of all children were killed shortly after birth. Infanticide has been regularly practiced by all types of societies. Mothers did it to ensure the survival of other children. Men did it because they did not believe the child was theirs. Both men and women did it because the child was a girl. For children that survived, beating or at least spanking them was considered good parenting until the last half of the twentieth century. Today the danger may be that parents are obsessively controlling their children’s lives and taking “safety” precautions that are counterproductive. Children should be allowed to learn how to play without adults around. Parental influence has its limits. Children take on the values and vernacular of their peers.
 Gay Rights : As late as 1969 homosexuality was illegal in every U.S state except Illinois. That gay and lesbian marriage is now legal and widely accepted in the U.S. is to me the most unanticipated of all the gains in human rights in my lifetime.
 Animal Rights : Abuse of animals like abuse of humans has a long history and only in the last decades has the issue come to the forefront. Rising concern over the humane treatment of pets, farm animals, and laboratory animals has spawned action groups and regulations to protect animals. Cock fighting and dog fighting are outlawed many places and even bullfighting is on the decline. This is a far cry from primitive, ancient and medieval societies where torturing animals for fun was widely practiced.

 Next Pinker describes the psychology that predisposes us to violence. He describes the Moralization Gap, self-serving biases used to justify our actions and feelings. This gap enables perpetrators and victims to create widely different narratives of the same event. He even digs into brain structure to explain how violent and anti-social impulses are generated and to further discredit the concept of pure evil. The ingredients for evil lurk inside all of us. One is reminded of Solzhenitsyn’s observations that, “…the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” and “To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good...” Pinker identifies what he terms the five demons that drive violent behavior:
 Predation is exploitive, practical violence done for personal gain.
 Dominance is characterized by actions that tell others - Don’t mess with me, I’m in charge. Narcissistic (grandiose, needs admiration, lacks empathy) political leaders are particularly violence prone. Thwarted narcissists feel humiliated leading to envy and rage. Virulent nationalism and tribalism can form in the presence of group narcissism.
 Revenge is a common urge and major cause of violence. Empathy, dependence and close connections can modulate revenge.
 Sadism , inflicting pain for pleasure, is hard for most of us to understand. It can grow out of predation and punishment. It is largely an acquired taste. People in control of others can slide into sadism.
 Ideology justifies violence as a means to an end for the greater good. People in tightly knit groups feed off each other making violence seem reasonable. When the group is dominant others behave like sheep and pretend to believe. Euphemisms, gradualism, diffusing responsibility, distancing from and denigrating victims are common techniques that lead to moral disengagement.

 Lastly Pinker reviews four “Better Angels”, those traits that mitigate violence:
 Empathy , often used in the sense of sympathy or compassion, has several meanings. One is perspective taking which refers to seeing things from someone else’s point of view. Another is theory of mind, trying to figure out someone else’s thoughts and emotions. Empathy is typically applied disproportionately to individuals in the same community, or who share our values, or are cute. Thus empathy does not embody fairness. Expanding our perception of interconnectedness with others can expand our circle of empathy and altruistic behavior.
 Self-Control often means delaying gratification. It’s fair to discount future benefits but many of us discount them far too much. Individual self-control is rooted in brain structure and function including the workings of hormones and neurotransmitters. But it can be cultivated. The Civilizing Process by setting behavioral norms has helped us make substantial improvements over the centuries.
 Recent Biological Evolution (not a better angel) has been proposed based on varying demographics in birth and death rates, but there is not adequate proof for this. The Humanitarian Revolution, The Rights Revolution and significant recent declines in crime have happened too rapidly for biological evolution to be a factor.
 Morality and Taboo have shifted. Pinker reviews several models. The shift has been from morals based on purity, community and authority which appeal to social conservatives to those based on fairness, individual autonomy and rationality which are values embraced by social liberals. The shift is reflected in recent changes in minority, women’s and gay rights.
 Reason despite newsworthy examples to the contrary is on the rise. It reduces violence by identifying the absurd, promoting self-control and even morality. It introduces the concept of proportionality which is essential to fairness. For whatever purpose reason originally developed, its continued expansion to other areas is only natural. IQ test do show people are getting smarter, at least in the area of abstract reasoning, a skill that is developed as educational levels, science, technology and a symbol rich environment have increased. This does not mean underlying general intelligence has increased only the way it is applied has changed. The development of abstract reasoning promotes cooperation, liberalism, economic literacy and democracy; all of which help reduce violence.

 To put this all together Pinker looks, “for common threads in the Pacification Process, the Civilizing Process, the Humanitarian Revolution, The Long Peace, the New Peace and the Rights Revolutions. Each should represent a way in which predation, dominance, revenge, sadism, or ideology has been overpowered by self-control, empathy, morality, or reason.” He identifies forces that turned out not to be important to the six trends: Weaponry and disarmament, resources and power, affluence, and religion and ones that did matter: The Leviathan, gentle commerce, feminization, the expanding circle of sympathy and the escalator of reason. It is popular to opine nostalgically on the good old days and extol the simpler more natural life of past centuries and eons, but as Pinker points out those past times for most people were harsh, bitter and much more violent.

 Pinker makes a convincing and well documented case that we have gone from a society where violence is the accepted and expected norm to one where violence has diminished to the point that we look on it as an aberration. He takes pains to not predict the future even though the many statistical trend lines Pinker presents imply that we might expect more of the same in the future. I’m not swayed by statistical implications for the future but his analysis of the forces at play give me hope. Pinker’s thesis is not uncontroversial. However, despite its detractors, it has won many awards and significant endorsements. But even if you don’t buy in to Pinker’s conclusions, there is much food for thought. This book is for readers with a serious interest. It is well written and clear but there is a lot to digest and I think most readers will be best served by patience and allotting the time necessary to take it all in. It is, as widely claimed, a very important book that can change the way you look at the world and the human animal that is dictating its future.
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 Lois Bujold
 Author 154 books 37.5k followers
 June 27, 2013
 After a steady recent diet of short-attention-span theater internet surfing, it was very interesting to dive into a dense read that took me a week to chew through. (I am not a very fast reader, but I'm usually faster than that.) The exercise of following a really long, complex, sustained argument was probably good for me.

 Seven chapters of convincing examination of historical evidence to the best approximation that could be managed, all of which jibes well with what I know or have experienced of history, followed by three chapters of attempts to figure out the why of the what. Pinker was pretty good about fencing off his facts from his hypotheses with suitable disclaimers. Several times he more-or-less interrupts his narrative to give the reader tutorials on basic statistics, in a desperate bid to bring his audience up to speed so that they can understand his data and how he massages it to get it to yield up more understanding. I was very interested in the brief survey of recent formulations in neurology and cognitive psychology that he used to underpin his arguments.

 I was also reminded of a classic little book from the 50s, How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff, which should really be required reading for every voter and consumer. (It has been reprinted in paperback and is now available on Kindle, I'm pleased to note.) Pinker, I think, is trying very hard to tell the truth with statistics; that little book would help ground one's evaluation either way.

 I was charmed by how many of my own humanist beliefs about history and human nature were supported variously, not to mention how many of the jokes and cultural references I got, but naturally, I would be; Pinker and I are of the same generation and share a certain amount of world-view, after all. I am pretty fond of the modernity that cocoons me and has repeatedly saved my life, and he does not underrate it, either. Not everything worked for me in his arguments, but enough did for going on with. He footnotes the hell out of everything, which I appreciate. Along the way he dropped recs for what sounds like a lot of potentially interesting further reading, should I find energy for it. (31 pages in very small print of sources one could go check up, ditto.)

 Highly recommended.
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 Blaine Snow
 137 reviews 84 followers
 July 8, 2016
 This book is sure to anger or confuse just about everyone who cares about the world today, but particularly those who love to hate the idea of cultural progress: "What? You gotta be kidding - violence has declined over time? No frikin' way - just look at the news." But be assured - after you read only a few pages of this book, you'll be reminded of what life used be like in the foreign country called The Past and you just might change your tune and recognize how, for large sectors of the world's population, life today is less violent, less brutal, and less cruel.

 Pinker's basic thesis is that, no matter how you look at the data, no matter what time frame, no matter what part of the world or what era, and no matter what form it takes, violence, cruelty, and brutality in human society has declined over time. With over 700 pages of detailed charts, data, and references to other such studies (such as the books "Homicide" by Daly/Wilson and Keeley's "War Before Civilization"), Pinker demonstrates the astonishing fact that, despite the continued violence everywhere in the world today, much of today's world lives in a time of relative peace and safety unknown to past generations. It's not an argument that violence has been eliminated but that there is a pacification and civilizing process at work in history in which violence in its many forms has been decreasing over time. It is especially an argument for the success of secularism, modernity, liberalism, the democratic state, and societies based in law and order, an argument many just don't want to hear. Many of my friends simply refuse to read it because they're unwilling to challenge their adherence to some version of the narrative that "the world is going down the toilet" and that some version of modern western culture is the reason why. They may be right in some sense but they're not in terms of what Pinker is talking about.

 When you are able (willing?) to separate out just how Pinker is framing "violence" from your overall view of violence in today's world, his argument becomes crystal clear. He is quite aware that there still exists cruelty, slavery, and horrific brutality in today's world but, like the difference between the institutionalized, culturally-sanctioned slavery of the past and the clandestine forms of human trafficking of today (not to mention the sheer numbers difference), there really has been progress here as there has in so many other areas.

 Pinker's book deals mostly with human-on-human violence and to a lesser extent, human-on-animal violence. While the evidence he presents points to an ongoing decline in the former, it could be argued that human>animal and human>natural world violence has actually increased as human populations increased. The question for Pinker is: have certain privileged parts of the world's population gained a relatively violence-free society at the expense of the continued violation-destruction of nature, of plant and animal species?

 Edited: Jan2016
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 Barnaby Thieme
 497 reviews 225 followers
 May 13, 2021
 I was recently listening to a BBC interview with two historians on the An Lushan rebellion, and the interviewer read a passage from Pinker's book in which he argued that this Chinese civil war was important evidence for his thesis that human violence used to exist on a scale we would now find hard to believe. When the interviewer read some of Pinker's death statistics about the rebellion, both of them spontaneously burst into laughter and one of them asked "What on earth is his evidence for that?"

 What, indeed? Pinker relies throughout this book overwhelmingly on the death statistics for major historical events compiled by a librarian and published to his personal website in his spare time. Pinker explains that he finds the hobby website impressive, and argues that as a librarian, he can utilize source material better than most academics, i.e., than trained historians. If you think I'm joking, look for yourself .

 No, I'm afraid this book is the joke, and it makes a joke of its credulous audience, making specious, anti-empirical, and fatuous arguments fueled by intellectual narcissism.

 What if the situation were reversed? That is, what if a history professor wrote an eclectic book on cognitive linguistics that was fundamentally at odds with the consensus of trained experts in the discipline, and that relied largely for support on a single source, which was itself entirely the work of an amateur?

 I think such a book would quite likely be universally regarded as a laughingstock. However, we live in a generation in which the increasing consensus among intelligentsia holds that scientists hold the answers to questions that used to be addressed by the humanities, and so Pinker's book is not only accepted as plausible, but widely lauded and championed, including by people who should know better, like Bill Gates. Indeed, many of its chief boosters seem to be techno-utopians already deeply committed to the notion that gains in technology are a rising tide that lifts all boats. This is a work that flatters its secular humanist audience by suggesting we have learned our lesson and, by and large, moved past our brutish origins, carried on the wings of science, progress, and bourgeois values.

 Apparently scientific progress doesn't include historiography, which anyone is qualified to do.
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 Owlseyes
 1,634 reviews 257 followers
 May 25, 2022
 "War is peace"
 in: NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR, by George Orwell


 Magic Mirror, do tell me, which one is Rosier Pinker??

 I still don’t figure it out, in what planet psychologist Pinker lives on. I have watched him many times insisting on “things are getting better”. Due to his studies on violence, he sees there is less violence amongst humans. He adds to this optimistic picture: “we’re getting more humane”.







 One thing is reported, numerical cases of violence, in wars, in crime etc. Another different thing, is the human nature. Despite his studies going back in thousands of years, he just doesn’t report on the POTENTIAL for violence; I mean, atomic weapons still exist today (in big numbers, and in several nations), as well as chemical and biological ones. Should an atomic war conflagrate (say, in the Korean peninsula) (God forbid!), The Day After the next day the book of Pinker would be just obsolete. Yes, you cannot cope with (the idea of) the numbers killed. Pinker, the one who had affirmed “nuclear weapons are useless”, would be instantly refuted. For good.



 Deep down in the human nature, violence does exist. Let’s not put some sort of pink rosy camouflage, in the human nature. I've been thinking about Africa in this and the past century; Mao's China and Russia under Stalin, and other examples, which should make Pinker think thrice, at least,... about demons.

 I would like Pinker to comment on the Mandalay Bay hotel shooting, in Las Vegas, the past October. And on similar cases.



 (decline? what decline??)

 UPDATE

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCm9N...
 Here Pinker is good with numbers; yet, he didn't include mass shootings in the US. How many since the Mandalay Hotel have occurred up to the present moment??

 UPDATE (for 2018 and 2019, for Pinker to check it out)

 https://www.motherjones.com/politics/...


 UPDATE

 "It's Insane We're Having A 'Debate' Over Whether It's Acceptable To Assault A Journalist" (1st of July 2019) Pinker wrote on Twitter, regarding what happened in Portland. Yes, by Antifa people. Pinker is slowly waking up apropos VIOLENCE.

 UPDATE

 This is an important interview because Pinker goes nuclear. 😛

 https://www.forbes.com/sites/rainerzi...


 UPDATE

 How much of a "humanist"?

 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/aut...

 https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nyti...

 UPDATE

 ( This is for Pinkerites)

 https://www.theguardian.com/science/2...

 UPDATE

 Besides the war in Ukraine (it's been 3 months!), much sadly, I would like to add the Texas shooting.
 https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05...

 ---
 "For when they might say, "Peace and security," then suddenly destruction comes upon them, as the labor pains to her having in womb; and they shall not escape."
 in: 1 Thessalonians 5:3
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 Amirography
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 May 15, 2017
 Mind-blowing book! I have never read a book about history and statistics that was this interesting. I love how Steven Pinker argues with countless studies and a great logical validity.
 This book is a must-read book for anyone interested in sociology, history, politics and environment. This book breaks the long romanticized picture of the past which has been filled with nostalgia and confirmation biases.
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 Mehrsa
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 January 15, 2023
 there are some missing connections and it's an ethnocentric view of violence. Like did enlightenment ideas also diminish violence in the East?
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 Fiona
 319 reviews 344 followers
 January 2, 2016
 Did this really take two and a half years to read? I see that it did. I picked it up after a new-ish boyfriend press-ganged me into seeing Pinker talking about his new book - this one - in Edinburgh, and thinking that it sounded fascinating and potentially relevant to a PhD I was considering doing. Well, the PhD idea is discarded, and as for the boyfriend, I swapped Pinker for Susanna Clarke and moved in with him. He finished my book first.

 The premise of The Better Angels of Our Nature is that the world is getting less violent. I read about the first half fairly slowly, as it marched through prehistory and the Middle Ages, with graph upon graph and source upon source - I mean, that's pretty uncontentious, isn't it? That there are far fewer beheadings and settlement-on-settlement raids and Hundred Year Wars as we get through history past the Enlightenment. Knowing next to nothing of east Asian history, I was interested to read about things like the An Lushan Rebellion and a brief history of belligerent Mongols. There are parts on international armed conflict, on genocide, on civil war. I spent a year studying humanitarian law. It felt like a lot of the coursework from that year, albeit a bit rearranged. So far so good, Mr. Pinker; I accept where you're going with this.

 I put the book down, for a very long time. Then in November 2015 two things happened in quick succession: the Paris bombings, followed quickly by the vote in the UK Parliament to bomb Syria. I'm in Scotland, and a more dyed-in-the-wool pacifist you'll not find. So I picked this back up, to keep reading the sections about armed conflict in the twentieth century, because I wanted to be reminded (convinced?) that the world is broadly heading in the right direction.

 I mean, it is. It is; but we're not anywhere near out of the woods yet. And we probably won't be in my lifetime. But maybe we will. Pinker's point is not that violence has gone away. He makes few predictions. (Five years down the line, his predictions on conflict in the Middle East have proved too optimistic. But hold that thought a moment longer.) He plots a direction, and the direction is more peaceful. It seems to involve more things being classed as atrocities and abuses - but that's because we're rightly outraged these days by things that nobody would have cared about fifty or a hundred or three hundred years ago.

 Finally he talks neuroscience and psychology. Do your thing, Steven; that's more your area than mine, so I'll take your word for it.

 Let's come back to the optimism of Mr. Pinker. Because he is very optimistic! Let's get the biggie out of the way first, shall we?:
 In early 2011, as this book was going to press, a swelling protest movement deposed the leaders of Tunisia and Egypt and was threatening the regimes in Jordan, Bahrain, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. The outcome is unpredictable, but the protesters have been almost entirely non-violent and non-Islamist, and are animated by a desire for democracy, good governance, and economic vitality rather than global jihad, the restoration of the caliphate, or death to infidels. Even with all these winds of change, it is conceivable that an Islamist tyrant or radical revolutionary group could drag an unwilling populace into a cataclysmic war. But it seems more probable that "the coming war with Islam" will never come. Islamic nations are unlikely to unite and challenge the West: they are too diverse, and they have no civilization-wide animus against us. (p443)

 ...Oops. Well, he did hedge his bets, I suppose.

 Where he didn't hedge his bets, and where he consequently rather lost me a bit, was when he focused on the US a bit more specifically. When I mentioned to a friend a few weeks ago that I was reading Pinker, she clucked her tongue at me and said, "Oh dear - does he think sexism is over yet?" That's overstating it a bit, but the impression I got was, well, yes - it really is as if he thinks sexism is pretty much winding up, and the civil rights movement put paid to racism and racist violence decades ago. After 500+ pages of meticulous research, it seemed like a glaring oversight to just assume that the various -isms had just upped and finished since 1980. No, it didn't seem like a glaring oversight: the quickly glossed-over suggestion that racism in the US is a relic of days gone by made me think there were things Pinker wasn't telling me. This is a 1100-page book, of which the last 300 pages are entirely citations, and here I am accusing the author of leaving things out. Well, I'm gonna, 'cause I feel like he has. No fifth star for you, Steven.

 And yet I'm still mostly on his side. I'm no John Gray , whose arguments seem to be of the "when you say 'it's got better', I hear 'everything's fine', which it's not" and "I know tribal people and they don't fight each other, therefore science" varieties (and, I might add, get neatly steamrollered by Pinker himself here - I do so love a good academic spat in the Guardian...). Earlier this year, I proofread an essay criticising Pinker (don't ask how I arrived there; terribly unlikely circumstance is how), apparently on the twin bases that how could you possibly know that 15th century middle England executed more people than were executed in 21st century Oxford; and the ever-classic "but NUCLEAR!"

 It plays with an idea that I don't think I'll ever fail to be interested by: it's why I loved The Wake so much last year, and the idea is of a magical past where everyone was nice to each other and had conversations at the dinner table, and none of these horrible new-fangled innovations existed yet to ruin everything. I love this idea! I love what it makes us do, how it makes people react, how intoxicating they (we) find it, how they'll fight so hard to show that it's real - and yet it never was. It's the ultimate bittersweet hope, the most incredible Escher-like illusion, and I just find that the most fascinating thing. There never was an Eden! There never was a perfect 1950s family, or a perfect 1880s family, or however far back you'd like to go! The government never was more competent, and people never had more common sense! The world of your childhood was nowhere near as good as this one, you just weren't looking at the crap bits! The best thing about The Better Angels of Our Nature , or I think, is the same thing that means it's going to wind up people who want to be wound up by it: it's a testament to things getting better, faster. Which if you ask me they absolutely, irrefutably are. Ask yourself this: whenabouts in history would you rather live?

 I mean, I still think he's a bit overoptimistic in places. But at least I'll agree that his views, my views, and the best the world can be are tending to converge. Plus he's a great writer, you know. Stay for the prose, frankly.
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 Marc
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 May 22, 2018
 Anyone who follows me on this site knows that I rarely give high scores to books; I like to make very clear distinctions and to indicate what is just good and what is outstanding. And this book is one of those that belongs to the top category: not because it is a perfect one (see below), but because of the breadth, the depth, the insightful, well-founded, nuanced and yet daring way in which Steven Pinker has tackled the very delicate subject of violence throughout human history.

 It is not feasible to give a thorough presentation of this book. Because it actually is several books together: 1. a global, especially quantitative approach to physical violence in human history in which Pinker establishes that there’s a steady but very clear decline; 2. a tentative explanation of that decline on the macro-level, in which he focuses on the processes of humanization and civilization; and finally 3. a thorough analysis on the microlevel of good and evil in man in general, with particular attention to biological and psychological aspects that promote or reduce violence (our demons and our angels).

 For me, Pinker's presentation is absolutely convincing, both in his observations and in his analysis. It is in line with my inner conviction (which of course is based on personal perception, rational analysis, as well as emotional orientation), but it also fits in with much of what I have read over the past years, especially on history. Pinker is 100% right that we have to get rid of romantic nostalgia and cultural pessimism (“the past was better, now we go from bad to worse”), which is no more than a reactionary reflex, motivated by emotional (especially fear), ideological and religious blindness. For him it is no coincidence that modernity (with its emphasis on rationality) has gone hand in hand with a humanitarian and civilization-revolution that has led, among other things, to a marked reduction in violence worldwide. And that is true, despite the daily flow of negative news coverage on conflicts and injustices that still plague our world.

 Yet, as already indicated, this is not a perfect book. For example, I have some reservations about Pinker's tendency to give great emphasis on evolutionary-biological aspects in his search for explanations; I understand that, because that focus has become a trendsetter in his field of study (social psychology in the broadest sense of the word) and has certainly clarified many things. But the sometimes implicit suggestion of Pinker that these are ultimate clarifications (necessary ànd sufficient) seems rather exaggerated to me. Fortunately, he nuances in other places.

 Second caveat: Pinker regularly warns against statements about future developments, and cites the well-known saying that social scientists better not make any predictions, because they already have so much trouble dealing with the past. Yet Pinker in this book regularly formulates optimistic expectations for the future and that is strange. At the moment, 2018, for example, the world looks slightly different than when he wrote this book (2009-2011) and his unbridled belief in the further advance of liberal humanism and rationalism isn’t that probable any more.

 Third reservation: Pinker continually illustrates his observations with both general statistical material and specific experiments. What is striking is that these studies are mainly Western (in particular American) oriented. Pinker does make attempts to break out geographically and culturally, but still, his evidence is almost entirely Western (American-European). And that involves a great risk of bias. Also his focus on our recent history (after the second world war), an era of globalization and enormous advances in affluence, technology and science, can also cause a bias (although we will only be able to estimate this in a few decades).

 And finally a fourth reservation: especially in the concluding paragraphs, the lyricist in Pinker gets the upper hand and he ventures into a statement of faith in rationalism. Of course, he presents strong arguments that support his theory that the decline of violence in human history ultimately is due to the further advance of reason. But just at that moment he leaves his cautious, nuanced style behind him and his language becomes almost religious (in favor of rationalism); on this instance (after almost 700 pages) he introduces the concept of "modernity", without much clarification, and that’s a bit problematic.

 Pinker has garnered a lot of praise with this book, but also a huge wave of criticism, both on historical details, on the validity of his statistical material, on his psychological-biological approach and on his ode to rationalism and liberal humanism. The critics of this book certainly have a point in some of those cases. But if you look at the 700 pages in their entirety and go through them thoroughly, then you can hardly accuse Pinker of simplism, naivety or deception: he constantly warns about exaggerated expectations; nothing is definitive, and a relapse is always possible, he regularly states. But at the same time his overall conclusion is very outspoken: " while this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, (our) species has also found ways to bring the numbers down, and allow a greater and greater proportion of humanity to live in peace and die of natural causes. For all the tribulations in our lives, for all the troubles that remain in the world, the decline of violence is an accomplishment we can savor, and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible. "(p. 696)

 This book is a tough chunk, which takes a lot of effort to wrestle through, and one certainly has not to agree with everything, but it seems to me that this book deserves its place among the most important ones published in the early 21st century! (4.5 stars)
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 Joseph D. Walch
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 March 22, 2012
 But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.
 --The Federalist, No. 51, James Madison


 This is easily one of the best books of 2011, and I suppose it must already be earmarked as a Pulitzer finalist. It’s about violence, but so much more than that since it strikes at the very core of human nature, the human condition, government, economics, and moral philosophy. Stephen Pinker starts with a simple premise—proving the decline of violence in modern times. This apparently is so controversial to some that he meticulously plots the decline of violence with great historical and statistical detail—this is the descriptive ‘what’ that Dr. Pinker illustrates in the first 2/3rds of the book. The writing is absorbing even if it rings a mildly irreverent tone that betrays a subtle anti-religious bias (especially vis-à-vis politico-religious violence of the Roman Catholic and Old Testament societies—he was a roommate of Harold Bloom after all and is a dedicated humanist) that includes some humorous satire and contemporary references to lighten the mood of such a grim topic. Indeed, his graphic descriptions of torture, rape, suffering and grotesque sadism is enough for even the most macabre minds. Stephen Pinker is a true evolutionary scientist who is adroit in the heuristic of categorization and you can find lists, and lists of lists to aid in understanding the narrative he describes.
 For example, the declining trend of violence is broken down into these historical themes:
 1) The Pacification Process—our evolution from hunter/gatherers into political, agrarian societies.
 2) The Civilizing Process���included the consolidation of feudal economies into larger kingdoms and empires with central authority, trade and economic specialization.
 3) The Humanitarian Revolution—17th and 18th century that marked the that included the Age of Reason and the European Enlightenment
 4) The Long Peace—a result of a Kantian trifecta of 1) Democracy, 2) Trade and 3) International organizations
 5) The New Peace—arising out of a U.S. led post-cold war globalized world
 6) The Rights Revolutions—exhibited a more finely filtered intolerance of violence on smaller scales that included violence against minorities, women, children, and animals.


 Within these historical themes we see five major historical forces that helped snuff out violence:
 1) The Leviathan—this includes a Hobbesian social contract which grants to the state a full monopoly on the use of violence from within
 2) Gentle Commerce—closely connected to #4 this force increases economic incentives for cooperation
 3) Feminization—results in a decline of authoritarian/patriarchal based societies and the empowerment of women as intellectual equals who tend to be more risk-averse and less violent
 4) The Expanding Circle—from a mixture of globalization, commerce, and increased access to information this purportedly increases sympathy and helped usher in the Rights revolution that even extended to animals
 5) The Escalator of Reason—leading to higher levels of intelligence and emotional empathy in conjunction with more sophisticated foundation for managing moralized concerns in favor of the flourishing of all humanity


 The second part of the book is what really interested me and seeks to elaborate the psychological factors that dictate our behavior depending on their interplay with our environment and circumstance. Here the statistical reasoning is a little more squishy and correlational residuals are not quite as well characterized—perhaps leading to creeping confirmational bias. Put aside these minor critiques of this part of the book, the ability to marshal data from such varied fields of study as anthropology, economics (including game theory), social psychology, and cognitive neuroscience into a coherent and powerful explanation of the decline of violence.

 Factors that influence violence are broken down into two categories of human nature: Demons that incite to violence and Angels that slaken the thirst for blood. The demons include the primal urge to dominance, revenge, sadism including the banality of evil, and ideologically driven moralized violence. On the other side of the ledger are qualities such as empathy (or more importantly sympathy, Dr. Pinker distinguishes the two), self-control, our moral sense, and reason. Here, the meat of the book can be found in the chapters on the moral sense. Stephen Pinker adapts from the ethics, moral foundations, and relational models of moral reasoning of other people like Shweder, Haidt, and Fiske. First, to understand the psychology of moral reasoning (as opposed to objective moral truth itself), we are to understand that moralized beliefs are more than just the avoidance of something distasteful, but is a ‘distinctive mode of thinking about an action’. Thus, moralized beliefs are universalized (should apply to everybody), actionable, and punishable. These beliefs spring from relationships since, in Pinker’s view, evolution acted upon the population and there is no such thing as a philosophically independent human being. Moralized norms generally include relationships, a context (at home, in the street, at church, at work, at the beach, etc.), and are centered around a resource (information or knowledge, food, money, land, sex, labor, etc.). These relationships upon which socioeconomic moral reasoning is based are divided into 4 categories:
 1) Communal Sharing—the most basic tribal foundation for moral reasoning emphasizing in-group loyalty, also includes sacred or pure values that are shared within a group and reinforced through rituals and periodic but specific contextual references.
 2) Authority Ranking—e.g., military, paternalistic, totalitarian/fascist, divine right etc.
 3) Equality Matching—gifts, tit-for-tat, first relational moralized norm to recognize individual autonomy, fairness, and reciprocal altruism
 4) Market Pricing/Rational-legal—much more complex relational model of morality that incorporates universal ethical principles, a high level of individual rights, rule-of-law, social contract orientation, and requires a high level of literacy and numeracy along with a grasp of information technology and access to data on price, costs, benefits, risks, alternatives, etc.


 As an explanation of the basis of moralized norms this seems quite well-developed and accurate. As I read through this chapter, the current debate over the allocation of scarce health care resources came to mind as a good illustration of this relational model of moral reasoning. The argument is usually centered on the diametric poles of the relational models between communal sharing of universalized health care to rational-legal/market pricing model. Here again we see that moralized norms require more than facile affirmation of one or the other relational models since the specific contexts and resources are important. Which relational model should be employed in the state of emergency, or when the resource is a human organ in which a dead individual does not benefit, or when the allocation of the resource in the community is considered a sacred good such as the right to life-sustaining medicine.

 Personally, I see a need for a hybrid system that protects sacred values of life, and the protection of the vulnerable (e.g., the elderly and children) with market-pricing and equality matching for preventative or non-emergent care should the patient choose--respecting the autonomy of the patient to make the most rational choice given the risks, costs, benefits, and alternatives. The difficulty with market-based health care, just like the difficulty of running a democracy that this market-based/equality matching system is only functional for the government of a citizenry that is based on the moral foundation of reciprocal altruism and rational-legal system of checks and balances. Like a functioning democracy, a market-based health care system requires high literacy and numeracy rates as well as the dissemination of pricing/cost information (something that the AMA has consistently blocked by restricting access to ICT coding for purposes of pricing across hospitals, specialties and regions). This leads to corruption in which supposed medical principles (e.g., doctors and hospitals who have a fiduciary and moral duty to remain financially disinterested in patient decisions) have the ability to obfuscate their own cost and market prices. With these established cartels, it's not difficult to enrich oneself by choking off a few grains of sand at strategic locations in the billions-dollar health care economy. In this model, there is no difference between the orthopedic surgeon recommending back surgery (that evidence from the Dartmouth ATLAS study shows actually does more harm than good), and the Goldman Sachs executives who traded in collateralized debt obligations, which they 1) controled the price through financial cartels, and 2) were at the same time shorting (had proprietary knowledge that they were bad investments and thus were insuring at low cost against loss of these supposed AAA-rated investments).

 Some favor total universalization of health care based on moral norms, but I simply think this ancient hunter-gatherer communal-based economy is insufficient for the maximization of public good by actually rationing health care resources away from those who by definition need it most (e.g., through price controls and misallocation of scarce resources). Just because other industrialized nations have atavistic central rationing of health care as a vestigial throw-back to the devastation of the post-WWII days when virtually every single resource was rationed (e.g., labor, currency, food, shelter, etc.) is not sufficient rationale for a complex and advance economy like the U.S. to regress to the communal-sharing model of health care delivery.

 Finally, Stephen Pinker is an evolutionary psychologist and a progressive and here his confirmation bias shines through quite strongly in my view. Much has been made of the Flynn effect that made the claim that IQs are actually increasing as people today are evolving on an organic and biological level to be more intelligent than those who came before us just a few decades ago. I and not quite persuaded by the data just yet. Furthermore, there is an assumption that modern western elites who exert social control are currently and likely to continue in the progressive beneficial model; this may be a bit too optimistic. The utility of some form of the Hobbesian social contract for the government monopoly of violence and justice is pretty clearly established by Dr. Pinker, however, caution is warranted in today’s modern age when an fewer and fewer of our ‘best-and-brightest’ sociopolitical/cultural prophets can do increasingly greater damage. This is a view that Pinker seems to acknowledge, but dismiss this line of thinking by citing historical data that the introduction of nuclear weapons or other WMD are uncorrelated residuals in the decline of violence. However historical data do not necessarily determine future relationships between the concentration of greater technical power into the increasingly fewer hands of elite social engineers and the decline of violence.

 With the exception of those minor critiques, however, I am sure this book will contribute greatly to our cultural understanding of the psychology of violence, and by extention, peace. The ideas found here will no doubt be debated everywhere from college bowl sessions up to the halls of congress. This can only be a good thing since the overriding theme of the book is a very well-qualified optimism for the flourishing of humanity.


 Update: 3-22-2012, I increased my review to 5 stars because I have found myself going back to my Kindle version of this book over and over again to review it. It has been a sublime pleasure to breath in the expert wordcraft, and the section on the Demons and Better Angels is like a symphony of well-conducted harmonious truths that come together in very a gratifying way. As a fervent believer, I found it fit very nicely into my worldview even though it is written from the perspective of just as fervent a non-believing skeptic. Such a task is very difficult to do since it takes painstaking effort to extricate one's ego (believer and nonbeliever alike) in the search for more objective reason. I say 'reason' because as Heidegger would say: facts and truth presuppose interpretation.
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 Charles Haywood
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 August 10, 2015
 This is a sprawling mess of a book. Flashes of arguably brilliant insight alternate with meandering musings. Fascinating narrow conclusions are drawn from carefully parsed evidence—and then sweeping conclusions are drawn from highly dubious evidence. Historical insights are used incisively in an argument—then the next argument is undermined by total historical illiteracy. At the end, the reader is left uncertain whether he has read 800 pages of genius, 800 pages of authoritative-sounding-but-meaningless fluff, or something in between. But I’ll go with the last one.

 Other reviews available online cover most of the ground from nearly every possible angle, so I’ll confine myself to a few, reasonably fresh, points. There is plenty positive to say about the book, but it’s all been said by others, so I’ll mostly steer away from praise, with the note that the entire book is a mixed bag.

 The only truly fresh point I have is really not substantive, but is interesting and perhaps shows some tendencies in the book. This is that Pinker makes a bizarre claim about table manners. First, Pinker states that historically people were terrified of being stabbed at the dinner table. Maybe. But in any case, to introduce this concept he spends a lot of time talking about how, as a child, he questioned the Western modern “pointless prohibition” in table manners against using one’s knife to move food onto one’s fork. He concludes that such a prohibition is a type of knife taboo preventing spontaneous stabbings at the dinner table. But I have never heard of such an etiquette prohibition. I cannot find any reference to it in any etiquette manual. I cannot find any reference to it on the Internet. In fact, all etiquette references to knife use I can find specifically REQUIRE using a knife to move food onto one’s fork, in lieu of fingers. As far as I can tell, this “rule” is purely a figment of Pinker’s imagination, and maybe an oddity around his house growing up. Why no editor questioned this, I don’t know. It doesn’t really undercut Pinker’s hypothesis in any material way, but it’s just strange, and maybe symptomatic.

 It’s important to note that for Pinker, violence means not only actions like war, homicide and assault, but more generally any cruel action with a physical component. For Pinker, war and torture are on the same continuum (though not the same thing) as corporal punishment of children and men having fistfights over insults. Reductions in both are considered progress, rather than the first group being considered progress and the second group being considered the sissification of a moribund society. In fairness, though, Pinker does have limits to this continuum—he concludes that some “reductions in violence,” like the elimination of dodgeball for children and the grossly inflated fears of child kidnapping, are silly and not progress at all.

 Pinker uses no primary sources and the secondary sources he uses are mostly popularizations, many of dubious accuracy, suggesting that he relies little on fresh research and puts his faith in fresh perspectives. Similarly, most of his analysis is analysis by anecdote. Yes, he does have a fair amount of statistics in the first part of the book. But those statistics are confined to two general groups: improvements in European civilization (largely taken, with full attribution, from Clark’s “A Farewell To Alms”), and the prevalence and damages of war. Other than that, it is anecdotes all the way down. And as Lincoln apocryphally said of Spiritualists, for people who like that sort of thing, it’s just about the sort of thing they’d like. But the result is, as with Spiritualism, much of what Pinker has to say is less proof than belief.

 And to be clear: Pinker’s conclusions are, fundamentally, predicated on his belief system. For Pinker, his belief system has two related pillars: that religion is evil, and that progress is inevitable, as long as we realize that religion is evil. Pinker is a big believer, whether he admits it or not, in the Whig view of history. He views its driver as the removal of religion from human life. In Pinker’s rosy view of the future, everything (at least in European-origin societies) is getting more moral, as people realize that morality has nothing to do with religion, but automatically arises from “the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games.” Of course, Pinker’s desired end state of empathy, minimal violence, and human happiness is exactly that prescribed by Christianity (and not, contrary to myth, by all religions). The Eschaton is nigh, says Pinker!—just without any eschatology. Pinker thinks that we can all ultimately behave like Francis of Assisi but be totally without religion. Maybe. If history is any guide, though, probably not—no atheist society has ever flourished on Earth. But hey—maybe the future will be different!

 There are many possible criticisms of Pinker’s belief system. One threshold criticism is that Pinker’s violent opposition to religion clouds his judgment badly. Pinker is very anti-religious, and not in an educated, thoughtful way, but in the same way the Ku Klux Klan is violently anti-Catholic. A second threshold criticism is that Pinker is entirely focused on Europe, and his core hypothesis, that we’re becoming less violent people, is confined entirely to advanced modern societies that are both European in their culture and Christian in their ethos, whether or not they are Christian in their observance. Pinker adduces little or no evidence, other than post World War II global statistics of wars, that non-European societies are becoming less violent, and he fails to consider alternative hypotheses for the reduced violence of European societies, such as that they are moribund and declining, in the Lotos Eater phase of their existence. (Again, to be fair, Pinker does draw a pretty clear picture of reduction in European intra-societal violence from 1200 or so on, long before anyone could claim European civilization became moribund as it is today.)

 Pinker’s obsession with demonstrating that religion only creates evil leads him into nearly continuous gross historical and logical errors. He repeats the silly canard (fabricated by 19th Century American Protestants to smear Roman Catholics) that Giordano Bruno was executed for believing in heliocentrism, a position accepted today by exactly nobody who knows anything (although repeated by noted flim-flam man Neil deGrasse Tyson in the recent re-make of “Cosmos”). He gullibly buys into the Black Legend hook, line and sinker. He actually cites for the cruelty of Pope Paul IV “the ‘Inquisition’ coffee table book.” He specifically cites, in-line with the text, as his major source for “the human toll . . . . in medieval and early modern Christendom” a book called “The Great Big Book of Horrible Things.” He confuses the First Crusade and the People’s Crusade. He cites the Anabaptists as “pacifist forerunners of today’s Amish and Mennonites,” apparently unaware of their activities in Munster (which would actually have reinforced his hypothesis). He explicitly equates as identical the judicial murder of Thomas More with random, on-the-spot beheadings of entire companies of dancing girls who displeased an Indian potentate. And on and on.

 Pinker says with a straight face “Christian ideology was hostile to any commercial practice or technological innovation that might eke more wealth out of a given stock of physical resources.” His source for this is a quote from popular historian Barbara Tuchman, to the effect that the medieval Church rejected interest and that St. Jerome said “a merchant can seldom or ever please God.” Of course, the cite lends little support to his conclusion, and the conclusion is ludicrous. In reality, the adoption of new commercial practices and technological changes up until the Renaissance was led by or cooperated with by religious entities, in large part to expand the productivity of the vast lands owned by the Church. These advances ranged from corporate, long-time-horizon management of land by monks to a wide variety of technological advances, such as improvements in plowing, threshing and grinding.

 Pinker also ignores that the medieval Church was the primary instrument of opposition to medieval violence. He talks about how the Church celebrated saints who were gruesomely martyred, implying that rather than being used to show heroism, such examples were somehow used to show how violence against others was good. He ignores the pacifism of the Church (complete until about 1000 A.D., incomplete thereafter, when feudalistic concepts infiltrated, leading in part to the Crusades). He ignores the Peace of God. And so forth. For Pinker, religion is an unmitigated bad, and when it is gone, we will all be happy and free. And he tailors his facts and analysis to fit his conclusion.

 On the other hand, even with its lacks, the book has many good points. It’s refreshing in its lack of ideology (apart from the ideology of atheism). Pinker does not shrink for ideological reasons from addressing unpleasant points. For example, when he talks about the decline in infanticide, he directly addresses whether it is correct to say infanticide has dropped at the same time that abortion has increased by at least the same amount, since abortion logically is indistinguishable from infanticide. (He concludes, in essence, that people don’t feel that abortion is infanticide, and anyway abortion rates have recently dropped too, which he interprets as reinforcing his hypothesis.) Most writers would have simply said that abortion is not the same thing as infanticide and moved on, afraid of being denounced by their liberal friends and no longer being invited to the right dinner parties.

 At the same time, Pinker does manage to pretty frequently fall into occasional silly left-wing tropes. For example, when talking about the demonization of political opponents, he talks about the “victims of Communist atrocities”—but then feels obliged to add also “the victims of their opposite number, the right wing-dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Indonesia and El Salvador.” Equating 100 million people exterminated as part of a deliberate ideological program of Communism with maybe 100,000 killed in civil wars is silly, but pretty much par for the course among leftist types. But, to be fair, given his general ability to resist being politically correct, it’s hard to fault Pinker’s occasional lapses in this area.

 Finally, and oddly, most of the bad reviews on Amazon of Pinker’s book are not objecting to his anti-religious bigotry. Instead, they object to an underlying premise of his thesis—that prior to recorded history, violence was extreme and endemic. I had thought that this was unexceptional—all primitive societies were horrifically brutal and had stratospherically high rates of battle death. This has been common knowledge since Lawrence Keeley, using detailed anthropological data, exploded the myth of the Noble Savage. But apparently there are a large number of, or at least a small number of loud dead enders in this area, who maintain that pre-historical peoples were gentle, meek and mild, gathering nuts and berries hand-in-hand while singing paeans against sexism and racism, in contrast to eeeeevil modern societies. It’s really not worth even considering such silliness, but it’s interesting that fantasists of this sort exist and are willing to attach their names to their fantasies.

 Anyway—this book may be worth reading if you have a ton of extra time, or if you’re particularly interested in the topic. It has certain parallels to studies of the Great Divergence, and once you realize that what Pinker really means is that Europeans have reduced violence over time, leading to improved societies relative to the rest of the world’s societies, it has even more parallels. But unless you’re interested in reading this bookstop for some specialized reason, you’re probably better off spending your time doing something else.
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 Sense of History
 356 reviews 389 followers
 August 8, 2020
 A lot of ink has already been spilled on the question of whether Pinker's claim that the violence of man has diminished enormously in the past centuries and especially in the past decades, is inaccurate or not; in other words whether the quantitative (statistical) support of this claim is correct. I am not able to judge the statistical aspect, but I am quite convinced by the material that he has put together, also in graphs (which he obviously always borrowed from others). What strengthens me in this conviction is that Pinker is very careful with that material, always indicating how reliable or unreliable the statistics are, sometimes warning for less strong numbers or for the interpretation given to the data. But it is absolutely impressive how Pinker substantiates and defends his theses, and also supplements them with narrative material (strong stories, which of course have a more subjective side, but make things more concrete; but also classic, narrative studies). The latter I find a commendable approach, to back up the statistical analyzes; it is a kind of methodological reality check, to see if the conclusions based on the numbers do reflect reality. Of course, this is not obvious, because the stock of narratives in theory is inexhaustible, but if this is done in a balanced and nuanced manner, then it is definitely an advantage, and that is certainly the case with Pinker.

 Here’s a quote that describes his central claim and at the same time indicates how cautious Pinker actually remains: : “ The numbers tell us that war, genocide, and terrorism have declined over the past two decades – not to zero, but by a lot. A mental model in which the world has a constant allotment of violence, so that every cease-fire is reincarnated somewhere else as a new war, and every interlude of peace is just a time-out in which martial tensions build up and seek release, is factually mistaken. Millions of people are alive today because of the civil wars and genocides that did not take place but that would have taken place if the world had remained as it was in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The conditions that favored this happy outcome – democracy, prosperity, decent government, peacekeeping, open economies, and the decline of antihuman ideologies— are not, of course, guaranteed to last forever. But nor are they likely to vanish overnight. ”

 Especially the final chapters, with an elaborate psychological analysis of man regarding good and evil, and in particular violence, sketches an anthropological image (not always very flattering) of man that offers a special added value to anyone who focuses on history, and especially the reasons of human behavior. Pinker dives quite deeply into the current state of science, and it requires some perseverence to follow the accumulation of hypotheses and experiments. But it is worthwhile as a historian to wrestle through this because it gives a fairly comprehensive picture of human existence that makes human action much easier to understand.

 Of course, Pinker places himself very clearly in a context of progress, based on the use of reason. You may have reservations about that, but I always find it a plus when an author puts his arguments on the table, open for scrutiny. And Pinker does so! Absolutely recommended reading.
 anthropology global-history world-history
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 Andy
 1,320 reviews 456 followers
 August 26, 2019
 "The Better Angels of our Nature" is an impressive intellectual feat, and the snarky tone was entertaining, but it was a bit like reading the phone book (800 pages of lists within lists). Despite the size of Pinker's tome, the nitty-gritty of peace-making is given short shrift, even though I think this is the most important issue.

 I don't care too much about the decline in violence over many centuries. I already don't want to live in the Middle Ages, and I couldn't if I wanted to. What matters for all of us living today is whether the current "long peace" is sustainable, and on this Pinker disappoints.

 The answer to this question requires a thorough analysis of why it is currently so unimaginable that, for example, Germany would attack France, as it did in WWI and WWII. A tremendous amount of active, deliberate effort was put into fighting the entropy that would make that possible, but Pinker glosses over this with abstractions. There's a huge story to tell about everything from the Marshall Plan to the European Union to soccer matches b/w sister cities in neighboring countries.

 I'm not a professional historian so I can't address some of the other critiques on Goodreads about whether this book is all B.S. or not.
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 notgettingenough
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 August 1, 2012
 Pinker has disappointed me for so long that it is no surprise to me to discover that this is the work of a charlatan. Here on goodreads try David Giltinan's review .

 But also http://www.zcommunications.org/realit... is worthy of a read.

 Is his basic message pretty much that if first world white people aren't dying, then violence is decreasing? And has this been greeted with great approbation in - ummm - the first white world? Oh deary me.
 haven-t-read-but sociology
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270 reviews45 followers     May 24, 2017   Breathtakingly mindless for 2/5 of the book, blowhard the whole way through.Sometimes a good joke is more revealing than 800 pages of blowhardness. Pinker gives himself away with this quote by George Carlin on page 622: I think motivation is overrated. You show me some lazy prick who's lying around all day watching game shows and stroking his penis, and I'll show you someone who's not causing any fucking trouble!... ...I hope I am not the only one who thinks it is not necessarily a good thing to be reduced to lazy pricks watching game shows and stroking our penises... Anybody with a modicum of a background in anthropology, history, sociology and economics should be laughimg themselves silly (if it weren't so disturbing how much influence Pinker has)...  Pinker proposes 5 ways that have reduced violence and can continue to do so: the Leviathan, Gentle Commerce, Feminization, The Expanding Circle, and the Escalation of Reason. The final 3 I have no argument against. But I have issues with the first 2. The state gets a monopoly on violence and capitalism is caricatured as gentle. But there have been moments when violence spiked and recently, so Pinker has to explain it. Pinker conveniently blames Marxism (and leftism in general is caricatured the whole way through) as the singularly destructive ideology of modern times (without acknowledging the dangers of his own classical liberal ideology) and throws in 'a few other individuals' to the mix as the responsibles for the genocides of the 20th century, and the increase in violence in 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Fascism is acknowledged only as the twin of dialectial Marxism. Classical liberalism gets the nod as the ideology that reduces violence (of course Pinker would never admit that classical liberalism is even an ideology though). There is no comprehensive study of how fascism and communism came to be. It is really lazy stretch to say that fascism was just a few flukes of individual psychology, and not give credence to the idea that both fascism and communism came about from the specific conditions of a social system in crisis. Neither is it mentioned that big business actually financed and promoted fascism in Italy and Germany. That would complicate things too much.  So, nothing about communism coming into being as a reaction to capitalism... it is simply assumed that capitalism has been an overwhelmingly positive contribution to the world, since 'violence has declined since its advent, minus a few inconvenient peaks of violent wars and genocides' which, as I have already said, he attributes to Marxism and a few accidentally placed crazy individuals. Nothing either about theory, philosophy, economics, anthropology, activism owing anything at all to Marx's ideas. Marx isn't even worth the time of day to Pinker, except as an explanation for violence. This should raise the question, really can any intellectual who tries to analyze the history of modern times be taken seriously if they haven't taken the left seriously? how can you call yourself an intellectual if you just shrug off the whole left side of the policial spectrum as ideological nonsense?  So leftism gets all the blame for the bad stuff, but the increased rights that accompanied the 20th century are not attributed at all to leftist ideas or practice. They are accounted for as simply natural by-products of classical liberalism (ie. capitalism). The Expanding Circle of Empathy, the Escalation of Reason and the Feminization of society have nothing at all to do with leftist ideals. Class struggles never happened. Activists weren't leftists, they were classical liberals. These rights eventually became 'common sense'. If there any battles they were set forth by non-violent classical liberals, and always as peacefully as possible.  There are plenty of examples of serious breaches of truth here. According to Pinker, Martin Luther King apparently rejected Marx completely. Something patently false: 'King disagreed with Marxist materialism, but he found certain elements of Marxism's economic critiques of capitalism quite insightful' (I May Not Get There With You: the True Martin Luther King, Eric Michael Dyson). In fact, you would be hard-pressed to find any successful activist who doesn't find certain elements of Marxism insightful. But none of that is mentioned here because Pinker is not at an activist, he is status quo, out of touch with reality, pure and simple.  It is also fairly embarrassing for Pinker to not acknowledge how far from anything even remotely leftist or Marxist several so-called communist and their undoubtely genocidal regimes were. Something akin to blaming Jesus for the Crusades. It is not said that it is a far more convincing argument that Stalinist Russia and Maoist China were actually STATE-CAPITALIST regimes. And indeed ideological twins of fascism, but not at all in the sense that Pinker argues. But if he tried to go there, his simplistic view of everthing would implode.  Most people who rave against communism base their assumptions on secondary sources. It is clear that Pinker hasn't understood Marx (or even remotely leftist politics). As a fairly well-read leftist, it is obvious to me that there hasn't been a communist state to this day, as much as the leaders of those states have claimed to be. Neither is it mentioned how many different interpretaions of communism there are. He lumps the left all together. But if Pinker were to do so honestly, it would be quite a stretch to suggest that leftism is not about equality, freedom and the destruction of totalitarianism, oppression and alienation. In fact, you would think leftism was fascism the way Pinker describes it. Pinker comes across as a reactionary anti-communist suffering from the Red Scare, still inhabiting the frigid mental landscape of the Cold War.  But hey, when you are an authority in Harvard, sweeping caricatures and generalizations are allowed. There’s more. According to Pinker, dialectics are simply mysticism and a justification for violent struggle. Class struggle is of course also blown off as mystical dialectical hogwash. Well, that is some feat blowing off dialectics, considering how many of the greatest philosophical works in world in the last 2 centuries have had to deal with the idea of dialectics (because of its intellectual force), but the eminent Steven Pinker waves it off with his magic wand and without anything at all to back it up.  He also blows off 'intellectuals' in general because 'they are attracted to extreme ideas'. But he wholly contradicts himself when he proposes the superior intellectual value of classical liberalism. Which of course isn't extreme, it is just the obvious rational choice that doesn't even need to be intellectually defended. How arrogant can you get? It's also fairly wacky when he argues that 'intelligent people overwhelmingly tend to be liberals'. Based on IQ test scores and surveys of people with high scores he concludes that the smartest people are liberals and the other lesser ones are leftists and conservatives. But what about the smartest of the smart (the intellectuals) being attracted to extremes? This should leave you wondering if these arguments are for real? Apparently so. I am not familiar enough with the statistics that Pinker inundates us with to know if 'violence' has actually dropped or not consistently, progressively and continuously throughout history. But our propaganda alarm bells should sound when anyone makes a statement like that. According to Pinker, it is obvious that primitive tribes were the most violent humans ever. I have read some fairly convincing arguments otherwise, but I think it is likely the differences in opinion are going to come in the very definition of violence. The definition of violence by Pinker is dictionary strict, and very limited. Humans sometimes have to fight to survive. Pinker doesn't substantiate any difference in self defense and aggression, justice is mocked, freedom is not even covered. But when class struggle is just vain ideology to him, what can you expect?  Neither does he take on the prison industrial complex, although he does acknowledge the importance of caging up of the maximum amount of people that are considered most likely to fight back and apparently thinks it a necessary evil if there are 'a few too many' (as deterrence). Apathy or depression is not even mentioned. But of course if you look it up in a dictionary, violence isn't any of those things. Since only 100,000 have been killed in Iraq(a disputed low-flying number) and there were at least 1,5 million in Vietnam, apparently US foreign policy is getting way more compassionate. Of course nothing is even mentioned of thinly-covered up US intervention all over the world (like in Latin America). An ignorance easily corrected by leafing through books like 'Killing Hope' by William Blum (on the ongoing American holocaust). A book Chomsky says is 'far and away the best book on the subject'. But the book has leftist leanings, and is therefore intellectually irrelevant to a religiously loyal status quoer.  Democracy is hailed as a reducer of violence, and justifiably so. However he also has an extremely limited idea of democracy. There is a crisis of democracy right now because of a lack of participation (the Manufacturing of Consent and Public Opinion) and fast-growing awareness of it. What about acknowledging the advent of a type of coercion that creates ignorance, apathy and depression? This is not considered as an element of violence of course. It would even appear to be a positive thing, if it can reduce those violence stats and keep us wanking. Even if certain types of coercion cannot be defined as violence, why not acknowledge it for what it is?  As said, Pinker targets ideology as a main cause of violence. When ideologies clash it often creates even more violence. Obviously. But it would seem Pinker is unaware of the current ideology’s potential for violence (and many have argued quite well that it is the main present cause of violence today). Currently the ideology of capitalism is being questioned by a large variety of people (because of its weaknesses). If and when that increases there may just be an increase in violence again, and not only from the Leviathan state that Pinker raves so much about.  Of course Pinker would blame the new ideology if that happened, instead of the old one and all its weaknesses that brought it to the conflict. This is ironic because he does spend some time criticizing conservative ideology for its inability to adapt to progressive change. I argue that Pinker betrays exactly that attribute despite his humanist claims. Liberals and conservatives are the only two electable parties (because neither is so different from the other and neither is at all threatening to the current status quo). But for Pinker to have his moral authority he should also be arguing that if capitalism doesn't work well enough or starts to create bigger problems than it solves (ie. environmental destruction and huge gaps in wealth and debt), it is the one that may actually PROPAGATE violence. But then again we might just sit around watching game shows and stroking our penises. If Pinker is right, that would be ideal. Perhaps this can be avoided if the old ideology adapts peaceably. But neither should anyone who analyzes history or anthropology honestly assume that the current ideology is forever. Of course capitalism hasn’t always been there, has only been there for a tiny amount of history, but Pinker sidesteps that. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. The thing is that a large amount of us aren’t convinced it ain’t broke. But perhaps Pinker’s main point is that we are less likely to adapt violently no matter what the change. Perhaps so, but denying or misunderstanding certain causes of violence (gross inequality and oppression which lead to new ideologies) will not help the matter. The so-called mystical class struggle and violence around the time of Karl Marx and the following century were actually consequences of the inability of capitalism to adapt to its structural weaknesses. If there were enough reforms the violence caused may not have been necessary, or rather it could have convinced the masses it wasn't necessary to challenge the system.  However, the inflexibility and fundamentalism of classical liberalism would seem to have actually CAUSED the majority of violent conflicts. One doesn't have to be a Marxist to see that the capitalist system did not adapt appropriately (or peacefully) to the class awareness (or if you prefer inequality awareness) that was developing. Pinker calls 'class awareness' ideology though. A more peaceful adaptation did not come until after World War 2 (with Keynesianism) IN REACTION to THE CLASS AWARENESS. But this has been progressively taken apart since around 1980. The fear of class war retribution has diminished. With the recent austerity measures only being the latest in a series of measures to increase the wealth of the rich at the expense of the middle class and poor.  But that doesn't mean that a self-defense type of violence will not develop in the near future if the current system doesn't adapt appropriately (rising homelesseness or unemployment could escalate things). The fact that violence actually went down during the 30s Great Depresssion is almost gleefully mentioned by Pinker though. So there really isn't a guarantee that violence will increase. In fact, it would seem that the elite powers are getting impetus from implementing their austerity measures because of Pinkeresuqe ideas of how non-violent we have become. Anyhow, if Pinker is right and the world is better off being wankers than trouble-makers, then our intellectuals should be the best wankers. And so for that reason a wanker cannot read trouble-making literature, or leftist perspectives, one cannot at least acknowledge their intellectual validity and consider them. Pinker doesn't acknowledge these debates because he is pushing his own ideology, or rather absurdly and falsely pushing the idea of the 'end of ideology' (which is actually a thinly-veiled support for the current neoliberal utopian ideal). One that is as unsustainable and unrealistic as any utopia or ideology. Keep wanking. The book was long and tiresome in many parts, but also very rewarding in the sense that it is an incredibly revealing look at how corrupt and anti-intellectual academics can be. Pinker is arrogant, puffed-up, self-promoting and irresponsible in his ideologizing (ironic isn’t it?) here. In Pinker's mind, it would seem he has earned the right to step right out of his specialty of psychology and linguistics and make sweeping generalizations in anthropology, history, sociology and economics.      anthropology civilization gs-exemplar               809 reviews14.4k followers     April 26, 2013   VIOLENCE HAS DECLINED, AND I WILL KICK THE LIVING SHIT OUT OF ANYONE WHO SAYS IT HASN'T Disappointingly, Pinker strikes a slightly less confrontational tone than that, but the basic idea is the same. His thesis is that violence of every kind, from international warfare down to murder and corporal punishment, has been on a steady decline throughout human history, up to and including the present day – and not only does he make this case in considerable detail, but he goes on to give a very wide-ranging discussion of possible political and psychological causes for what's happened. This book is big, and it needs to be: it's built around a vast accumulation of raw evidence. Historical, statistical, sociological, neurobiological, and anecdotal – and I'm slightly confused by some of the negative reviews here, because although you might not like all of his conclusions, it's not easy to argue with the facts when they're laid out in this much detail.  Not convinced? Wondering if village life in the 30s can really have been as bad as dodging rapists in today's inner cities? Well, prepare for approximately 8,266 graphs and charts proving you wrong in every direction. Leafing through them is at first daunting, then fascinating, then astonishing, and eventually wearying. But they keep coming!    The decline in some forms of violence is so dramatic that the figures have had to be plotted on a logarithmic scale, so vertiginous is their descent. Hitting kids – gone from normal to unacceptable in barely a generation. Murder rates? Dropping like a knackered lift. Paedophiles and child abduction? Statistically speaking, if you wanted your child to have a better-than-average chance of being abducted and held overnight by a stranger, ‘you'd have to leave it outside unattended for 750,000 years’. Terrorism, surely? Nope; in fact ‘the number of deaths from terrorist attacks is so small that even minor measures to avoid them can increase the risk of dying’ – one study suggests that 1,500 more Americans died in the year after 9/11 because they started driving rather than flying.  Okay then, what about WAR. ‘As of May 15, 1984, the major powers of the world had remained at peace with one another for the longest stretch of time since the Roman Empire.’ This is important, because inter-state warfare is much, much more deadly than the small-'n'-nasty invasions and civil wars that are more common today. And even they are becoming less frequent and less individually deadly.  Don't get me wrong, this is not a happy-clappy book about mindless optimism, and he is assiduous in stressing that the situation could easily change. The point is not that we have entered an Age of Aquarius in which every last earthling has been pacified forever. It is that substantial reductions in violence have taken place, and it is important to understand them. Pinker takes a good, long look at several possibilities, and (to my mind at least) identifies three major factors behind the decline. The first is the growth of democracy, which strongly correlates with lower rates of violence across the board, and we get the figures to prove it. The second is the revolution in communications, firstly during the Enlightenment, and then more recently with the birth of the mass media age. Again, huge numbers of studies are adduced to make the point.  The third factor is what he calls ‘feminization’: women are just less violent than men, and the more involved they are in a society the more peaceful it is. ‘We are all feminists now,’ he concludes, after a typically detailed examination of changing attitudes to, and rights of, women through history. (He is talking about the West here, but even elsewhere the trend is unmistakeable.) Studies suggest that this is not just a consequence of changing attitudes, but a cause of them, particularly given that ‘the one great universal in the study of violence is that most of it is committed by fifteen-to-thirty-year-old men.’ Pinker hones in on the obvious implications: Would the world be more peaceful if women were in charge? The question is just as interesting if the tense and mood are changed. Has the world become more peaceful because more women are in charge? And will the world become more peaceful when women are even more in charge? The answer to all three, I think, is a qualified yes.  When he's finished considering social movements and political changes, he pokes inside your brain. We have pages and pages of various neuro-sociological experiments where people were strapped to an MRI machine and told to slap a puffin in the face, or something, so that various lobes and cortexes could be identified and examined. The question is whether there are anatomical, or evolutionary-psychological, causes for violence, and if so how easily they can be overcome. We get a lot of impressive-looking diagrams like this (I may have remembered some of the details wrong):    Pinker is very interesting on the Flynn Effect, which, if you're not aware of it, is the upward trend in general intelligence observed around the world in standardised testing since such things began. Many people that have written on this subject are skeptical that folk nowadays can really be smarter than anatomically-identical humans of a few generations ago, despite what the tests say – but Pinker, after a careful examination of how thought processes are influenced by changing social norms, is not afraid to draw his conclusions, at least in the ethical sphere: The other half of the sanity check is to ask whether our recent ancestors can really be considered morally retarded. The answer, I am prepared to argue, is yes. Though they were surely decent people with perfectly functioning brains, the collective moral sophistication of the culture in which they lived was as primitive by modern standards as their mineral spas and patent medicines are by the medical standards of today. Many of their beliefs can be considered not just monstrous but, in a very real sense, stupid. Obviously we are into speculative territory here, but I actually found it very heartening and thought-provoking to see someone prepared to follow the evidence that far.  How's it written? His style is exact without being dense, although he is not averse to the odd cliché (‘capital punishment itself was on death row’), and from time to time his desire to cloak the science in colourful imagery leads him into some awkward prose: The age distribution of a population changes slowly, as each demographic pig makes its way through the population python. Yikes. Also…and this may sound like a weird thing to pick up on, but once I noticed it I couldn't take my eyes off it…he is absolutely obsessed with telling the reader to ‘recall’ things he's already said. Recall the mathematical law that a variable will fall into a power-law distribution…Recall from chapter 3 that the number of political units in Europe shrank…Recall that there were two counter-Enlightenments…Recall that the statistics of deadly quarrels show no signature of war-weariness.…and recall that duelling was eventually laughed into extinction.Recall that the chance that two people in a room of fifty-seven will share a birthday is ninety-nine out of a hundred.England and the United States, recall, had prepared the ground for their democracies…Recall that for half a millennium the wealthy countries of Europe were constantly at each other's throats.Cronin, recall, showed that terrorist organizations drop like flies over time…And recall the global Gallup survey that showed…Recall that narcissism can trigger violence…Recall that the insula lights up when people feel they have been shortchanged…Patients with orbital damage, recall, are impulsive…Recall from chapter 3 the theory of crime… Just how much stuff are you expecting me to remember, Pinker?! And surely someone who wrote three books on language has a fucking thesaurus handy?  There are a couple of minor errors, too, that an editor should have caught. The Polish city of Wrocław is printed in my edition as ‘Wroctaw’; and he also refers to some statistics gathered in the ‘town of Kent’ (there are dozens of towns in Kent, which in the dataset concerned is a county). However, and despite my sometimes flippant tone in this review, the truth is that I thought this was a magnificent book – convincingly argued and truly multidisciplinary, so that I felt like I was getting a synthesis of the important studies carried out in half a dozen different fields. It's a big, serious argument that deserves proper consideration, and one that'll give you some ammo to argue back next time you're feeling cynical about the relentless news headlines. I think it's a clear 4.5 – and since Goodreads won't let me do that, I'm inclined to bump it up rather than down.     history psychology social-history               653 reviews6,927 followers     December 8, 2014     The Skeptic’s Peace Pinker warns the reader upfront that the book is huge, and with more than 800 dense pages there is no question about it. It is so wide-ranging that it is fortunate it has such a memorable title - the reader might have easily lost track of where it is all supposed to be heading. Individually, any single section of the book is a throughly entertaining masterpiece, but as a whole, in terms of coherence, and on how the thesis and the direction of the arguments hold together, the book is not as much of a delight.  But it is an ambitious book and is in some respects a new sort of history - almost a moral history of the world and Pinker deserves praise for the attempt. The next such historian to come along has been given much to work with. Pinker is very convincing about the fact that violence has indeed declined; he is even persuasive on why it was but bound to happen. But when it comes to explaining the phenomenon (which he spends most of the book convincing us is real) based on his strength (psychology and evolutionary biology), he comes up slightly short. Pinker says all the right things and spares no punches and doesn’t flinch from taking on the worst arguments the critics might throw at him but his arguments still seem to lack that knockout blow. This is not to say that the arguments are weak. Pinker does a remarkable job in his survey of history, of stats and of a multitude of ideas. The scholarship is immaculate, the intentions are noble and the conclusions are plausible but I would still wager that Pinker would fail to convince the majority of his readers.  Why? Because he ignores the contingent nature of history and he forgets that the 'better angels' has not only made us a more moral society but has also made us a more skeptical society. I was disappointed that Pinker does not explore the preventive powers of sheer skepticism.  My own thesis, which was evolving as I read Pinker’s, is ultimately that the skeptical mentality is what the ‘civilizing process’ (and the years of bloody wars) has ultimately given us - a conviction that there are no easy answers, no ‘final solutions’. And that is a powerful deterrent to most forms of drastic action, since now it is harder to justify them. This to me is the real cause for optimism (of the measured and skeptical sort, as is our wont now).      history-civilizations media-hyped pop-history               865 reviews1,271 followers     February 15, 2012   This seems like a stunning misstep by the normally brilliant Steven Pinker. His ability to write with extraordinary force and clarity has been demonstrated repeatedly in two separate areas of expertise -- linguistics and cognitive science. Unfortunately, the brilliance of his earlier books in those areas is nowhere in evidence in this regrettable dog's breakfast of a book. I found it almost unreadable - poorly argued, undisciplined, self-indulgent, and - despite its grotesquely bloated length (800 pages) - support for its main thesis is woefully inadequate, dependent on a highly selective interpretation of existing data and completely unconvincing. Pinker can sling the statistical jargon (Poisson processes, power laws, the gambler's fallacy, the Gini coefficient) like a pro, but all the jargon in the world cannot make up for his recurrent habit of over- or mis-interpreting data whose limitations he consistently glosses over.  The jacket cover breathlessly promises "more than a hundred graphs and maps". Any graph is open to misinterpretation. Three of the most common ways of doing so are (i) selective interpretation (ignoring or explaining away the data that don't fit one's preconceived ideas) (ii) inappropriate extrapolation beyond the range of available data and (iii) failure to acknowledge the data's limitations, such as likely sources of bias, or extreme sparsity of information.  Pinker commits each of these errors, with such numbing frequency that one loses all respect. We are seriously asked to draw conclusions from a graph of the "rate of battle deaths in state-based armed conflicts between 1900 and 2005" (Figure 6-1) while being instructed to ignore the figures for the first and second world wars. After all, "the world has seen nothing close to that level since". This kind of rubbish insults the intelligence. Or you could look at Figure 7-28. Lest you be distracted by the actual data, Pinker has helpfully superimposed some very impressive looking solid lines documenting his cheerful belief in the rise of vegetarianism. These are much darker than the actual data points, presumably in the hope that the reader might be distracted from noting their complete lack of fit to the data. Worried about racially motivated killing of black people? Here are the yearly data (number of such killings) from 1996 to 2008: 5,3,3,4,3,3,3,4,1,2,1,1,1 Pinker's gleeful trumpeting of a five-fold reduction seems to rest on a pretty flimsy foundation to me. Not to mention being a little premature.  But nothing as inconvenient as facts, or their absence, can stand in the way of a man who has already decided he knows the answer. The threat of nuclear holocaust? Exaggerated, because - as any fool can see - nuclear weapons have never been used in wartime since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One imagines this argument must be of great comfort to those who survived those particular "anomalies". Just as Pinker's breezy insistence that the only meaningful way to interpret the number of people killed in a given conflict is relative to the world's population at the time is surely meaningless to anyone who has lost a family member in battle. It's at best breathtakingly insensitive; some would find it deeply offensive.  To anyone who respects the scientific method, this is a horrifyingly bad book, one which completely obliterates Pinker's credibility. Don't waste your time.     disappointing intellectual-con-artist-at-work never-gonna-finish               39 reviews361 followers     March 18, 2012   When an academic steps outside his or her field of expertise, it's best to brace yourself for a torrent of nonsense. Steven Pinker, whose work in linguistics and psychology I greatly enjoy, has made a habit of using that work as a springboard to foist his pet political theories on the public. Whereas his previous attempt in The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature was a vehicle for his ideological ramblings, it was at least not based on a gaping statistical flaw and had some value in refuting common misconceptions, even if it did so in a fundamentally dishonest way.Whatever redeeming qualities to be found in Better Angels are far outweighed by the failure of Pinker's thesis. Has violence actually declined? If not, the rest is window dressing. Pinker quickly notes that the reader will be skeptical of his thesis off the bat -- we are inclined to believe the world is getting more violent due to our constant exposure to it in the media, which is biased toward reporting bad news, criminality, etc. No doubt he is correct in this. It is well known that crime rates in the United States have been in decline for the past 20-30 years yet many continue to believe that crime is on the rise. This likely comes from a bit of selective reporting mixed with confirmation bias; the proverbial man searching for his keys under the streetlight. The main reason I was immediately skeptical about this thesis was that I had seen it before! The general thrust of Pinker's argument appears in a brief section in The Blank Slate and a TED talk he adapted that into a few years back. (http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinke...) Here he totally mangles basic anthropology and archaeology. The chart he presents is a misinterpretation of data from Lawrence Keeley's War Before Civilization -- anyone familiar with the societies he presents knows that most of them are not nomadic hunter-gatherer bands but partly or fully sedentary and horticulturalist, e.g., the Gebusi and Yanomamo. (As an aside, I find the use of Keeley ironic as he argues against a biological view of warfare in the book while Pinker is an ardent supporter of this view.) Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha devote an entire section to deconstructing this Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality (a book not without its own problems, as Ryan and Jetha play Rousseau to Pinker's Hobbes). (An adapted excerpt can be found here: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/s...)  Using modern hunter-gatherer societies (or at least what Pinker thinks are hunter-gatherer societies) as stand-ins for pre-historic societies is a rookie mistake. The degree to which modern hunter-gatherers have been displaced and influenced by industrial societies and nation-states has been one of the big debates over the last half-century in anthropology. Thus, whether they are representative of some "state of nature" at all is highly questionable. (See this brief summary of the "hunter-gatherer revisionist debate" by Thomas N. Headland for an overview and references: http://www.sil.org/~headlandt/huntgat...) Pinker notes this at one point but then completely forgets about it in taking his own cooked numbers at face value. Even if we accept Pinker's definition of violence, the whole undertaking itself is an exercise in guesswork and absurdity. There were no census programs or bureaus of statistics throughout much of history. Written records of war often inflate or deflate the body count depending on whose side you're reading from (and as we know, winners write the history books) and the archaeological record is spotty in a large number of places. Perhaps we can get fairly accurate body counts here and there, but there are large swaths of history that we essentially have to just guess at. Fortunately, the good folks at Quodlibeta, actual historians, have broken down a good deal of the historical and statistical flaws in the book (starting here): http://bedejournal.blogspot.com/2011/...  Considering he has been "refining" this argument since The Blank Slate (read: futilely polishing a turd), Pinker seems unlikely to back down. His FAQ released to "respond" to criticism completely dodges the fact that he's pulled a good deal of his numbers straight from his nether region. (See Quodlibeta again for an appropriately snarky take-down: http://bedejournal.blogspot.com/2011/...) At some point, it begins to stretch credulity that he doesn't realize there's a hole big enough to drive an eighteen-wheeler through in this argument. (This does, however, make the book a useful litmus test to see which critics will gush how "thoroughly researched, amply documented, and strongly argued" something is as long as you flash a few fancy charts 'n graphs and pseudo-intellectual smoke and mirrors their way. Unfortunately, it seems that the answer is "A whole lot of them.") Once you realize the entire book is a house of cards that's more or less already collapsed, the rest of it becomes an incredible grind. As above, the rest is just window dressing, a game of make believe. Sure, there's some interesting parts about, say, the psychology of aggression and a few delicious nuggets and tidbits of trivia along the way. Digging through the rough for them seems a rather pointless exercise, though, especially where it's already been done better. Large chunks of his argument are recycled from other authors such as Peter Singer and Lynn Hunt. The end result is a whiggish history where sense and nonsense blend together seamlessly, thus negating any use the layperson might find in it. The presentation of history too often crosses into the cartoonish, being loaded down with ad hoc theorizing deployed to save the book's overarching narrative. Pinker's goal is, at base, to push his ideology, his own brand of secular humanism he claims to be based in "Enlightenment values." It is an ideology whose values I happen to largely share, but history demonstrates that anything can be taken too far. This is why Pinker is forced to downplay or omit the excesses of the Enlightenment such as the French Revolution with its Jacobins and Cult of Reason. The irony here is that Pinker reveals himself to be as much of a romantic as his ideological opponents. The doomsayers appeal to a mythical past to buttress their claims (Arthur Herman has written an amusing account of this phenomenon in The Idea of Decline in Western History), but the optimists of modernity similarly appeal to a mythical future. While the notion that the kids these days are just rotten and the world is going to hell in a hand-basket has been with us for millennia, one of the central narratives of modernity has been a belief in a steady incline. With an increasingly global economy and the inevitable advance of science and technology, the high priests of modernity preach time and again, we are surely on our way to the best of all worlds. Predicting the future direction of humanity, though, has proven to be a fool's game, a bit of off-track betting for the intellectual class. While Pinker never commits to this teleological narrative wholesale, he does bang the drum for the steady march of progress quite a bit throughout the book. Obviously, while I don't pine for the days of King Cotton or colonial Africa, I don't find much comfort in the fact that while the number of debt and sex slaves has exploded in absolute numbers, their proportion of the total population has decreased. Oh, how marvelous! What Bjorn Lomborg did for environmental issues, Pinker has done for the history of violence.     hack-jobs-and-bullshit history politics-and-political-philosophy               643 reviews111 followers     January 22, 2014   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.”                   585 reviews217 followers     November 23, 2022   I love optimistic books, and there is a lot of optimism in the almost 800 pages of "The better angels of our nature". At the same time, I find it impossible to give a single opinion about this behemoth of a book, because I found some of its elements truly excellent, some ok, and some absolutely scream-out-loud dreadful, so I'll try to explain.In brief:  - the great: the quality of the writing is superb. This is one of the best books I've ever read in terms of clarity of exposition and effectiveness of the writing. Also, at the very beginning the author outlines the structure of the book, which gives you a clear mental map of what you're getting into. As a plus, Pinker peppers his prose with anecdotes, jokes and references to pop culture (a bit like Malcolm Gladwell) that enliven the experience. I know some may not enjoy that. I do. - the good: the analysis of the decrease in violent behavior throughout history is deep and overall fairly convincing. Pinker acknowledges the fact that we are missing a lot of crucial data (about deaths and violence in the past), and he's received a lot of criticism for presenting a thesis that's partially based on guesswork, but I think there is a lot of value in making the layman (like me) think about these topics, and at least in trying to find some general patterns. Some reviewers hated his methodology, or the way he handles some piece of data - all fair. I think it all makes for a healthy discussion. - the not so good: is that Pinker didn't make much of an attempt to present a truly global perspective on the subject: in this book, Western world = The World. China, India, Africa, South America... marginal "who knows?" footnotes. "Religion" = Christianity. He explains that European history has the most available data, but I'm not the only one to think that he could have made a much better effort in this regard.  - the dreadful is where Pinker lets his underlying personal New Atheist agenda seep through without any restraint. Sadly, this lowers the level of the book in many parts to pure tripe, in particular when it comes to the very subjective reasons behind the apparent decrease in violence throughout history.  On page 642 Pinker spells out exactly what the main problem with his own book is: "Even the scientists are piling on. Human beings are led by their passions, say many psychologists, and deploy their puny powers of reason only to rationalize their gut feelings after the fact". Ironically, that is precisely what he ended up doing with this book.  To be clear, this has nothing to do with Pinker's titular argument in favor the decline of violence, which as I said I found fairly convincing and rational. No, Pinker's emotional, irrational underlying argument is the following:  1) Enlightenment humanism, secularism and atheism are the only cultural forces for good in the world. 2) Religions have been purely a destructive, negative force throughout history, therefore our planet will be a much better place when religions have completely disappeared.  THAT is where the author's heart is.  "As if biology didn't make things bad enough, the Abrahamic religions ratified some of our worst instincts with laws and beliefs that have encouraged violence for millennia". Incidentally, I just found out that Pinker and Richard Dawkins are buddies and share the same New Atheist credo. That gave me a sudden bout of nausea... Dawkins, the Grand Master of Missing The Point himself!  Watching Pinker zig-zag his way through his own version of world history where religion has caused only mayhem and suffering is like watching a professional skier slalom down through the obstacles. You have to admire his incredible ability to make it through without tripping over every few seconds.    For example: in Pinker's world, the "Rights Revolutions show that a moral way of life requires a decisive rejection of instinct, culture, religion, and standard practice. In their place is an ethics that is inspired by empathy and reason and stated in the language of rights. [ ] This conclusion, of course  [but OF COURSE!],  is the moral vision of the Enlightenment and the strands of humanism and liberalism that have grown out of it. The Rights Revolutions are liberal revolutions".  Under this light, it becomes hard to reconcile and explain how Martin Luther King, perhaps the greatest protagonist in the "Rights Revolutions", was a Baptist preacher who dedicated his life to worship, prayer and to following Jesus Christ as a role model. But no worries! Slalomist Pinker turns his skis swiftly and manages to dismiss MLK's adherence to Christianity almost completely!  What a feat, ladies and gentlemen!! Here he goes: "MLK, as a graduate student in theology, was, of course, conversant with the Bible and orthodox theology. But he also read renegade theologians such as Walter Rauschenbusch, who criticized the historical accuracy of the Bible and the dogma that Jesus died for people's sins. King then embarked on a serious study of the social and ethical theories of the great philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle down to ... [etc. etc.].". "King was profoundly inspired by Gandhi's theory of nonviolent resistance not as a moralistic affirmation of love, as nonviolence had been in the teaching of Jesus".  And now - pay very close attention. After this microscopic cherry-picking, later on, on page 677 comes the master stroke. Here’s how Pinker references his ridiculously insufficient excursus through MLK's cultural influences: "As we saw, Martin Luther King rejected mainstream Christian theology and drew his inspiration from Gandhi, secular Western philosophy, and renegade humanistic theologians". Wait wait wait ..... we "saw" what??? The only thing you said was that he read some books, that is all we "saw". We never "saw" that MLK "rejected mainstream Christian theology"! Oh, what a number he just pulled there. Of course, an anti-christian MLK would fit perfectly in Pinker's nice little box. If only it wasn't a complete fabrication! Maybe, if we stretch it a bit, King was a "liberal Christian", but still very deeply and fully embracing Christian theology. www.sfgate.com/news/article/Writings-...  For King, his Christian faith was far more than a source of soaring rethoric. It was the boundless reservoir of the colossal courage he would need to risk his life day after day. Frankly, I find Pinker's statements about MLK's faith quite offensive.  So it is with unbelievably misguided violence (pun intended) that Pinker strips our history of any trace whatsoever of the positive influence of religion and religious people on the world, while focusing only on the stereotypical negative stories (of course, confusing "religion" with "corrupted clergy"). As I said above, what Pinker really means with Religion is Christianity, because it's the only one he keeps referring to, and he doesn't seem to know much at all about Hinduism or Buddhism.  "Very little good has come from these ancient tribal dogmas. [List of stereotypical pub-banter-level bad things that the Church did] Defenders of religion claim that the two genocidal ideologies of the 20th century, fascism and communism, were atheistic. But the first claim is mistaken and the second irrelevant".  Pinker is often leaving rationality aside to go FANTASTICALLY off the rails like this. Aside from the fact that he is wrong, what is even the point of this argument? What value does a defense of atheism bring to this book?  Pinker then constructs a couple of sentences aimed at resolving and clarifying why he has chosen to completely ignore religion in the 800 pages of "The better angels of our nature": "Religion plays no single role in the history of violence because religion has not been a single force in the history of anything. [Says the erudite expert on religion, as we have just seen] The vast set of movements that we call religions have little in common but their distinctness from the secular institutions that are recent appearances on the human stage".  Ok. So, let me get it straight: you find it reasonable to metaphorically pee on 100% of what goes under "religion" because you say it's always been so diverse and multifaceted that its overall impact on history is, in the end, completely irrelevant? There is no fundamental golden rule, no consolidated drive for empathy and compassion, no focus on respect for human life across the main religions? The declaration of Human Rights has been inspired exclusively by Enlightenment humanism, and not at all by Christian values? You are actually using the horrors committed by a small part of the clergy to invalidate all the positive messages of religion and, more importantly, the useful and positive initiatives that most religious institutions pursue throughout the world (and very rarely make it to the news - like these www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/17/100...) ? After these statements, it's not surprising that the author forgets to articulate how "secular ideas" possess this ideal quality of being "a single force in the history of something" that religions do not have. As if everyone who was ever inspired by secular ideas behaved in the same way and went exactly in the same direction - the BEST direction, of course.  Here Pinker goes on to perform some more professional skiing to get around other obstacles, like the excesses of the French Revolution, Cult of Reason etc., at the risk of losing his pants:    I thought people who kill, or in general use violence, do it in the name of anything at all: good, bad, old, new, religious beliefs, political beliefs, and science- or reason-based beliefs (a small example: the interpretation of Darwinism by the Columbine killers). More in general, I wonder: was it really that difficult for Pinker to admit that all types of cultural movements, religious and non-religious, have been influencing each other and impacting the history of violence in many different ways? Why did he need to defend secular ideologies as if they'd never been the inspiration for violence or violent acts? And why did he pinpoint all these cultural movements as a cause "in themselves" for violence and war? How would communism IN ITSELF or atheism IN ITSELF or Christianity IN ITSELF cause atrocities and wars? They are ideas: words on paper. None of these ideas was ever a specific order to commit atrocities. I've always thought that, in reality, bad or deranged people are the ones who read those words and bend them to their basic, animal desires.  But again, Pinker is a human being himself, and each human being needs to worship something - we are powered by emotions, not by reason. As much as he tries to tackle this immense subject with pure rationality, his personal opinions come through loud and clear and crash to a pulp any of his efforts to sound objective and fully rational.  So, in the end, to go back to the main official thesis of this book: violence has probably decreased, overall. We can talk forever about the type of statistics used by Pinker in this book, but it seems he could be right, and I hope he is.  As for the reasons behind the decrease, as discussed, Pinker gets irrational about it, for understandable reasons (his wife). Here is his own explanation from his website: " It was only through the intellectual influence of my wife, the philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, that I understood the logic connecting them. She explained to me how morality can be grounded in rationality, and how secular humanism is just a modern term for the world view that grew out of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment (in particular, she argues, from the ideas of Spinoza). To the extent that the decline of violence has been driven by ideas, it’s this set of ideas, which I call Enlightenment humanism, which has driven it, and it offers the closest thing we have to a unified theory of the decline of violence".  A crucial passage here is "To the extent that the decline of violence has been driven by ideas". No one knows how much this is! It could be 0.2%! But Pinker certainly thinks the history of ideas has been much more impactful on reality than what it actually has been.  This is a common misjudgement of academics: many of them tend to give far too much practical importance to ideas, books and cultural movements, and too little to money and power.  If violence has decreased, I see no evidence that the decrease has been directly and mainly caused by the advent of the Enlightenment ideas, as Pinker is trying to convince us with this book. Those ideas were certainly a big piece of the puzzle, a great inspiration, just like many other ideas have been a positive inspiration. But fundamentally, I think what needs to be credited most of all is: military technology, increased wealth and global commerce, a change in the cost / profit scenarios of violence, the increased spread of information, and therefore better risk assessment tools. Maybe, but only maybe, we could also add to this list some steps forward on the path of evolution of our collective consciousness.  -------------------------- Here is a good book that quietly destroys the myth of Enlightenment perfection: "In defense of Faith", by David Brog  Here are some interesting articles that talk about Pinker's world view: On his view of scientism: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013...  On his New Atheist credo: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/scienceo...  On his (mis)understanding of religion: http://bedejournal.blogspot.com/2008/...                    801 reviews2,502 followers     January 9, 2014   In this book, Steven Pinker explores a very controversial thesis, that is, violence is declining. Different types of violence are declining on multiple time scales. It would seem like the twentieth century had some major wars and plenty of genocide to make his thesis sound rather foolish. But in the first seven chapters he shows lots and lots of statistics to back up his thesis. In the eighth and ninth chapters he also explores the scientific reasons for violence and the reasons for increasingly non-violent behavior. The book is very comprehensive--it is quite long and detailed. The first chapters are not particularly "heavy" reading, but towards the end of the book, it can be tough-going--but fascinating throughout. Pinker tackles the main objection to his thesis--the three worst dictators of the twentieth century (Hitler, Stalin, Mao) were responsible for an immense amount of violence, deaths and misery. Some of the reviewers here at Goodreads have remarked that Pinker underestimates the number of deaths that are attributable to Mao. Perhaps he did grossly underestimate the numbers--I really don't know. Pinker makes an interesting point about the recent theory, raised in the book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, that crime in the United States declined in the past few decades, because of the legalization of abortion in 1973. The idea is that the reduction in unwanted children led to fewer violence-inclined youths. Pinker argues that after 1973, the proportion of children born to vulnerable women actually increased, rather than decreased. One of the reasons for the decline in violence is the increase in literacy and reading. Pinker argues that the transmission of new ideas in books has acted as a liberal force in society. He shows that during the Middle Ages, most people were religious and believed in the literal truth of the bible. Heretics were everywhere, and were persecuted in wars, massacres, pogroms, executions and torture. Nowadays, while religious people "believe" in the bible, most do not take such a literal interpretation. They don't think that it is moral to invade a city and kill--or take as slaves--every single person. A higher value is placed on human life, because of the "shift from valuing souls to valuing lives." Pinker writes,  The theory that religion is a force for peace, often heard among the religious right and its allies today, does not fit the facts of history. Later, he writes, The world has far too much morality. Very true indeed.Pinker shows how game theory plays a big role in the evolution of morality. In fact, he defines morality as the opportunity for positive-sum games. In so much of history, people played in zero-sum or even in negative-sum games. For example, war is usually a negative-sum game, in the sense that so many people die and suffer, that the gains to the victor are completely overwhelmed by the losses to both sides.  Nowadays, the language of violence is often cloaked in "bureaucratese", in words like purges, deportations, bombardments, pacification, rectification, ethnic cleansing, collateral damage, and rendition. These euphemisms help to self-exculpate the perpetrators of violence, and make violence seem to be justified or involuntary.  Pinker discusses in some detail the factors that he believes have led to decreased violence in recent times. He talks a lot about the concept of Leviathan from the book by this name by Thomas Hobbes. According to Pinker, the presence of a legitimate, strong central government helps to reduce violence, at least on a personal basis. People are less inclined to violence when they think that punishment is likely. (Not always true, but usually.)  He describes how "gentle commerce" helps to "turn zero-sum warfare into positive-sum mutual profit ... sweetening the outcome of mutual pacifism with the mutual gains of exchange." Pinker also shows how "feminization" has helped to move society "... away from a culture of manly honor, with its approval of violent retaliation for insults, toughening of boys through physical punishment, and veneration of martial glory." One of the most interesting--and potentially useful--parts of the book is his analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The root of the problem is that there are so many sacred concepts on both sides. A sacred concept is one that is not subject to negotiation--it is completely off the table. People will not compromise on their sacred values, but they might compromise on so-called "pseudo-sacred" values. Pinker describes evidence that both sides might be willing to declare compromises through symbolic concessions, even though they are not actually willing to perform on their compromises. Pinker writes,  To find anything that softens the opposition of Israeli and Palestinian fanatics to what the rest of the world recognizes as the only viable solution to their conflict is something close to a miracle. It all has to do with the symbolic framing of a peace agreement.There are certain parts of the book that might make a squeamish reader cringe--there are some short descriptions of barbaric tortures. If you can get through (or skip) those parts, then you will find a fascinating theory developed from the point of view of scientific scholarship--sociology, psychology, and evolutionary biology. As with all of Steven Pinker's writings, this book is fascinating, comprehensive, and sure to be controversial. He has (most of) the facts behind him, and it is difficult to argue against his major points.      biology ethics history               269 reviews564 followers     November 17, 2022   This book asserts that violence has decreased. I can set this aside as a worthy discussion. However, that is just the hook to catch readers. The purpose here is spreading ideologies to explain why violence has decreased. The Bad:Well, it turns out Pinker puts much of his faith in the status quo (i.e. power) as directly responsible, i.e. the State ("Leviathan") and Capitalism ("Gentle Commerce").  Let us consider status quo bias:1) One can argue that it is resistance to power that has brought much of the decrease in violence we see today! After all, slavery and colonialism were the most profitable Capitalist ventures, backed and enabled by the growth of States. Elites sure are innovative at co-opting grassroots demands (and then smugly taking credit for it!), like the liberal elite property-holders who did all they could to thwart democracy ("mob rule") until it became advantageous to run as "democrats" (while power migrated from the political sphere to the private economic sphere of one-dollar-one-vote).  2) Even if such violent power structures were capable of forcing an increase in material production, must we assume they are the only options? Have we really reached "The End of History" in finding the optimal social system, as another status quo shill put it? (Indeed, we might soon reach the end of history given climate change and other destruction of crucial Earth systems, but never mind that; Pinker just picks out the "science" that conforms to status quo triumphalism)...Euro/Americentric Liberal elitists and their useful idiots (Pinker?) place their faith in "the Enlightenment" (similarly, the "Founding Fathers") as the foundational social movement in human history, but we should look beyond Orwellian history, towards accounts that do not just assume whatever is written by the victors is the totality of reality. The autonomous communities not requiring and openly resisting the violent shepherding by authority are indeed written out of history...  I tried to re-read these 800+ pages to give a thorough unpacking, but frankly there are better uses of one's time. I am thankful for 
 The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions
 which brings an accessible dose of decolonization ideologies to expose just how atrocious Pinker's ideologies are.  ...and these beautiful (negative) reviews, enjoy! Brilliant review #1  Brilliant review #2  Inception of spicy reviews  ...and one more ...in fact, there's an entire book (Reality Denial: Steven Pinker’s Apologetics for Western-Imperial Violence), co-written by Edward S. Herman (who also lead the co-writing of that famous Chomsky book on foreign policy media: Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media)  The Missing:I used to first recommend the following critiques on power and appraisal of popular resistance and decision-making for Western audiences given their accessibility. They are still useful:-Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky -The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement  However, to appreciate why socialism in 20th century revolutions took place in the Global South/periphery is to build the historical context of the violence of global capitalism. This is crucial to avoid becoming the smug Western armchair critic that sees everyone else as primitive/violent/"totalitarian"/"anti-democratic"/"not real socialism", while at the same time failing to prevent the exportation of bombs and embargoes, or achieving economic democracy at home. Where to start? 1) I'm accumulating a playlist on Global South Socialism, featuring Vijay Prashad, Michael Parenti, Utsa Patnaik, Max Blumenthal, etc.:  https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...  --Highlights include:i) Michael Parenti:-on Cuban Revolution:  https://youtu.be/npkeecCErQc  -full: https://youtu.be/O8k0yO-deoA?t=27 ii) Vijay Prashad -on ideological censorship: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jKcs... -"The Many Lives of Communism in the Third World": https://youtu.be/NZXh2Guebhg?t=104 -Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations -The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World -The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South  2) Books on the history of global capitalism not glossing over its violence and contradictions: -accessible intros: -Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (has reformist blind-spots towards empire, but very accessible intro to the history of economic development where long-term productivity gains require nurturing/protection from ruthless short-term market competition)-The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry -Capitalism: A Ghost Story -A People's History of the United States (history from below instead of by the winners)-A People's History of the World ...deeper dives:-Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present -Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World --Debt: The First 5,000 Years -Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital  3) Capitalism as the end of history?-Intro on capitalism's dynamism being at the same time its volatility: Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails -Structural alternatives? Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present -Capitalist growth on a finite planet: -Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World -Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System -Capitalist State as a tool to manage class conflict: -A Brief History of Neoliberalism -The State and Revolution      critique-violence theory-psych theory-violence               509 reviews427 followers     September 29, 2016   Steven Pinker has written a monster of a book. He has used his intelligence to crunch a huge volume of material. He has made a number of great points to which I'm sure to be referring often.Yet despite all the insights and accompanying drum rolls, I am suspicious of the dramatic hypothesis, the grand prediction that humankind has learned in any permanent sense to be kinder and gentler. That hypothesis is a welcome change from all the dystopian predictions, and I do think I, and western civilization in general, has it pretty good right here and now in terms of space to survive and thrive. I just don't think it's necessarily a permanent pinnacle. And when people are thumping their chests and seeing themselves as representing that pinnacle, well, that's concerning--even though he insists his views are scientific and not in the least messianic. So, if Steven Pinker had been a little more humble and had spoken of current times as pretty nice for some without necessarily approaching the best of all possible worlds, I could better countenance him. But Steven Pinker can be hard to take and he doesn't do humble. Here's a cartoon making fun of Obama from the right--and of the notion that violence has declined. But, as when we see ten feet of snow and sneer at "global warming," everything is not always as it appears!  --Ramirez, 06-17-2014 On the other hand, given all the predictions of doom for the world that are in circulation, it's good to hear thinking from the other angle for a change. We need it. Having leaned too far one way, maybe the only way to get back in form is to lean the other way. And that's why, when I finish complaining, I'll be touching on some of Pinker's many surprising assertions, despite not being a Pinkerite. But, first, here are some more of my objections. Steven Pinker has thrown so many ideas and hypotheses into this book, and he's such a fast talking, smooth intellect that it's hard to evaluate all of it--as though he were some rogue trader wheeling and dealing beyond the capacity of his would-be supervisors. You can't help but be impressed by his moves even when they're too fast to follow and you know he's sometimes pulling a fast one. Steven Pinker doesn't do justice by his opponents. I remember the Platonic principle I learned in Plato at the Googleplex--that you haven't refuted an argument unless you have it in its best articulation. Straw men won't do. We hear references to opposing ideas and their proponents but in this book it's assumed that Pinker's views represent the "normal" and "best" views. I mean his views that the current commercial economy and individualism do represent the best of all possible worlds. I may even agree with him, but my point is that not everyone does.  One of Pinker's main arguments for the decline of violence is that a lower percentage of humans suffer violence now than in the early modern period, medieval times, the Renaissance, or in antiquity or prehistory. Yes, a lot of people suffered violence in the 20th century, but, according to him, a lower percentage. But, if more people suffer now but are a lower percent of the total population, is that really less violence? Did anybody ask the particular sufferers? If each human is an end in him- or herself, and a greater number are suffering, can that really be considered evidence for the decline of violence? Actually, I took that line of argument--asking what the individuals themselves would have had to say--straight from Pinker's mouth: Ho Chi Minh was correct when he prophesied, "Kill ten of our men and we will kill one of yours. In the end, it is you who will tire." 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 proverbial ten men how they felt about this), and the United States eventually conceded the war of attrition despite having every other advantage. (p. 309)(my italics) Something similar happens--the author's doing what he himself reprimands others for--in the area of religion. Over and over, Pinker comes down hard on religion, blaming it for the violence and excesses of earlier eras. Yet he has to employ the most fundamentalist interpretations and he has to ignore aspects that run counter to that thesis, and all in a field that is outside his area of expertise. He has to take things literally and his interpretations as the one-and-only interpretations, laid down once and for all, for example, to take a common and conventionally-made criticism:  The overriding principle was that animals exist for the benefit of humans. In the Hebrew Bible, God's first words to Adam and Eve in Genesis 1:28 are "Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." (p. 458) And he has to pick out only the aspects of scripture that he finds distasteful. And use whatever "God said" in some Bible verse as if an actual historical event to compare to "other" historical events. Apparently he must even keep the King James flavor (moveth). Expounding on the meaning of seemingly arbitrary and bizarre but nevertheless rigidly required manners and rules of etiquette, Pinker studies their history. But studying the history of religion that way wouldn't advance Pinker's argument, while blindness to any such thing does, so he leaves it in the dark. "What you see is all there is," as Daniel Kahneman, another cognitive psychologist, says. My early impression from the quotes that were up when I started out was that most casual readers were reading The Better Angels of Our Nature primarily to hear Steven Pinker diss religion and reinforce their own views. In an apparent spirit of fairness, Pinker disses the New Testament, too, but he reserves most of his ire for the Hebrew Bible. Let that be a lesson for you, Christians who disrespect your Old Testament. You are doing the work of atheists for them.  Speaking of cognitive psychology, Pinker pretty much worships at the alter of reason. Doing otherwise wasn't something that was going to advance his thesis; the reader will have to look elsewhere for the limits of reason and for the understanding of consciousness as a system of attention rather than as some pristine space for free choice. One more criticism: I was surprised by a clear inconsistency on Pinker's part. This author loves local authority, and, on the national level, Leviathan--a central government large and powerful enough to reserve violence to itself and wield it in an increasingly disinterested and just manner--as an alternative to a wild, wild west scenario of every man for himself. Yet when it came to the international level he argues correlationally for a "Democratic Peace" theory, calling the "empire" theory of peace "cynical." (p. 281) Huh? And going back to religion for a minute, what about God and religion as a means to call up a symbolic "Leviathan," long before there could be an actual central government in that role. He hints as much on p. 539, quoting from Martin Daly and Margo Wilson's 1988 book Homicide on the subject of our retention of a "just deserts" approach to justice as opposed to adopting a purely utilitarian "deterrence" approach: From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, this almost mystical and seemingly irreducible moral imperative is the output of a mental mechanism with a straightforward adaptive function: to reckon justice and administer punishment by a calculus which ensures that violators reap no advantage from their misdeeds. The enormous volume of mystico-religious bafflegab about atonement and penance and divine justice and the like is the attribution to higher detached authority of what is actually a mundane, pragmatic matter: discouraging self-interested competitive acts by reducing their profitability to nil. Pinker himself goes on to argue that just deserts itself may serve a deterrent function, and that if we were to get rid entirely of the just deserts, "retributive" aspect, making the justice system "too narrowly utilitarian," then "malefactors would learn to game it. Just deserts can close off that option." I think it is here, in those words, and in waffling sprinkled throughout the book on the subject of religion, that Pinker concedes the value of of the very phenomenon against which he becomes so exercised. But he doesn't get that he has done so. I got the impression that Steven Pinker really, really wants his theory that our better angels have won to be true. More on that at the end... Now to some of his thought-provoking assertions and conclusions: Prehistorical hunter-gatherer times were not some idyllic period during which the world was populated by noble savages free from the corrupting influence of civilization. On the contrary, life was nasty, brutish and short; those times were dominated by sneaky, murderous, rapacious raiding parties. Things had to settle down considerably before anybody could write or read any books, people! Yes, it was two steps forward, one step backward for eons; people lost health and strength when they traded in hunting and gathering for agriculture--but still! Nor were medieval times some idyllic period over which to nostalgically yearn. That would be "cutting off your nose to spite your face," nose-snipping being one common response to a slight. Honor was priceless but life was cheap. The way we feel now--that our bodies belong to us and are ours to care for--a perception that seems to reflect "reality" but is of recent, modern derivation. It is an attitude we anachronistically think always existed. Instead, individualism developed gradually. With modern times we no longer belonged to some warlord or king; and with the spread of trade we had to get inside the head of the prospective trading partner and see others as we see ourselves..as we see others....  The biggest problems for a society come with an overload of young males. And, yet, the confounding preference for male babies that drives female infanticide in many cultures! Infanticide itself is far from being some aberration attributable to the impact of modern stress and alienation. Infanticide was the norm from time immemorial--if it helped the survival of current young whose viability was already established, circumstances being such that a mother could care for only so many. This kind of thinking--some people don't want to hear it! It's enough to garner threatening letters for poor scientists. Genocide is not a disease of modernity either. We've just learned to recognize it, that's all. Life used to be a permanent holocaust for nameless multitudes, in slavery and through the impact of war and violence. No one thought anything was wrong with it unless it happened to you, says Pinker. Murderous death was supposed to represent the verdict of history, of God, in accordance with a way of thinking only lately subject to question.  In this day of competition for victimhood (at best a two-edged sword!), silence in the aftermath of genocide seems inconceivable, but if genocide was a just verdict, no wonder that, at first, Holocaust survivors couldn't talk about it. I am told that changed for American Jews in consequence of the 1967 Six Day War. Did that raise the possibility of an alternative verdict? I want to digress here on how views on the suffering of violence are shifted around in religious narratives. Some ideas have begun to consolidate themselves while I've been working on this review but since they are off the beaten path of the review I'll hide them.  In particular I came back to Galatians 3:13 in which Paul turns around the crucifixion of Christ from the "curse of the law" to a blessing. That has always bothered me because Deuteronomy 21:22-23 doesn't say being hanged (or crucified) is a curse. (The Jewish Study Bible and the NRSV share an editor; the translations and footnotes are very similar.) It says that leaving the body out and unburied is the curse (affront to God)--basically the same as for Sophocles' Antigone and her brother whom Cleon considered a traitor and wouldn't let her bury, to the misfortune of all. In biblical times--meaning Hebrew biblical times--stoning was the method. The final redaction was around the time of the Exile, when crucifixion didn't yet loom large. The Hebrew bible--"the law" in Paul's terms--recognized that, atypically, some traitor-types might be hanged or impaled; in that case, leaving the body exposed might well be part of the punishment. So the bible, to circumscribe such practices, said the body must not be exposed and left overnight to become carrion. The bible, in other words, sided with the morals of Sophocles' Antigone. That is what Deuteronomy is saying. But, by post-testamental--make that intertestamental times, if you're from a Christian tradition--that had changed. The sadistic execution method of crucifixion had become unfortunately well-known, and, by then, that's what people thought of when they read those Deuteronomy verses. Here's an article I came across--the first few pages, anyway: http://www.tsm.edu/sites/default/file... So, I think Paul thought what he thought and wrote what he wrote--and isn't the part about suffering a bad end as a curse typical? Isn't turning that upside down what religions do? But, "the Law" didn't say that being crucified is a curse. No gas chambers? We may think genocide requires modern technology, but it doesn't. Just lock a town's population in a building and come back in two weeks. Think of the sieges of the ancient world, or of chariots, the advanced weapons of a long-ago day. And, now--political correctness. For Pinker, PC is the residue of changes that have occurred and that we've therefore forgotten about.  During the transition to modernity, people did not fully appreciate that they were undergoing changes aimed at reducing violence, and once the changes were entrenched, the process was forgotten. When Europeans were mastering norms of self-control, they felt like they were becoming more civilized and courteous, not that they were part of a campaign to drive the homicide statistics downward. Today we give little thought to the rationale behind the customs left behind by that change.... ...(A) civilizing offensive can leave a culture with a legacy of puzzling customs, peccadilloes, and taboos. ... The code of etiquette bequeathed by this and other Rights Revolutions is pervasive enough to have acquired a name. We call it political correctness. He also thinks we become amnesiac about the degree of change. We forget what the past was really like. We say little has changed. That is related to PC, enabling us to keep our guard up against the return of "the bad old days," and it also enables activists to exhort us to do more. In other words, exaggeration. If we had to acknowledge how much better things are, could we get away with it? People say racism is just as bad as it always was, but it isn't. Same for antisemitism. Not so far.  My husband was taking a Greek course last fall. In Georgia, people over 65 can take college courses for free within the state university system if there is space--isn't that nice? In connection with his course we could attend some lectures on antiquity, and at one the doctoral candidate made reference to the Greek "dark ages" (from about 1200-800 BCE). There was an African-American woman of uncertain age--meaning not young (but younger than I, as nearly everyone is getting to be) in the audience. I mention her ethnicity for any light that may shed on her reply, and what she did, during the question-and-answer period, is take issue with the "dark ages" designation, for, she said, we shouldn't make such a designation given that this is such a dark age.  That exemplifies the point Pinker was making re forgetting what the past was really like and exaggerating the problems of the present, even as we all sat safe, secure, comfortable and diverse, discussing our esoteric subject. That segues to the Moralization Gap.  Say I've done something to you. From your point of view, you were my victim. Our perspectives are going to be very different. Mine will be that whatever I did wasn't all that serious. At any rate it was a long time ago. Did I really have a choice? What can one expect, anyway? My stance is going to tend toward you should get over it already, and, while you're at it, stop being so over-sensitive. Meanwhile, you don't see it that way, not by a long shot. Whatever it is lives on in your memory and your heart. For you, not forgetting is more than common sense; it's a sacred trust.  In short, the Moralization Gap is about the impact of self-interest on our views and dealings with each other, a potentially fruitful method of analysis for understanding the dynamics of a situation and why it's so hard to get along. According to Pinker the scientist is usually going to side against the past as a living cause and with what's over being over. So, in other words, he's assuming whatever it is is over. One can envisage still more angry letters and protests against that poor scientist. Why does Pinker need to believe at all costs in his Enlightenment values? It occurs to me that for a philosophe who is not from the religious majority it's distinctly unpalatable to consider what it would be like if the hands of the majority tradition were to be untied. What would happen to his vaunted authority then? And yet when he goes on and on with his criticism of the Hebrew bible, it sounds like sucking up to that majority, as if to say "Listen to me: I'm putting them down; I'm not like them." And, in that way, he's reminiscent of Marx. Here's a 2008 article by Jerry Muller asserting the triumph of ethnonationalism. If Muller's assertions are correct, they undermine Pinker's general hypothesis. (Foreign Affairs allows non-subscribers one article a month and two if you register.) http://www.foreignaffairs.com/article... Here, critics try to refute Muller but don't succeed: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/article...  Finally, don't think that all that's here is all there is. This review isn't very systematic. Or comprehensive; for example, there's game theory and the Prisoner's Dilemma in the evolution of cooperation. Or the concept "self-determination of peoples" as instigator of blood baths....     audio history morality-justice               5 reviews32 followers     July 22, 2016   Loathing is the word. It infuriated me. You'd think that after all these years one would stop being surprised by this style of typical new-atheist/liberal argumentation but when I see this much cherrypicking, oversimplification, handwaving and western supremacism shoved into a single book, I still get all worked up. And of course, it doesn't help that they call themselves "The Brights" and "The Enlightened" etc. I mean, who does that? Even if I was intellectually convinced by their arguments, I still wouldn't wanna hang around these jerks.His main thesis is simple and for anyone brought up after the 19th century, overly familiar: We were savages, then we were saved by Science and Reason. Not all of us, of course, only Europeans and Americans at first, but thanks to Capitalism (or as he labels it, the gentle commerce), everywhere else is catching up slowly, too. One time this evil thing called Communism had suddenly sprung up out of nowhere and caused many deaths and suffering but it was ultimately defeated by the Allies of Light. Etc. "If you'd suggest occupying another country today, everyone would laugh at you and they'd think you were crazy; it is a thing of the past", he says (paraphrasing). So what about Iraq or Afghanistan? Panama, Bolivia, Vietnam, Libya and countless other bloody conflicts and interjections by the Western forces, mainly USA? Oh, they are not "wars", he says, but merely unfortunate but "defensive" actions taken by civilized nations to protect their democratic ways. Isn't it incredibly telling that in an EIGHT-HUNDRED-page book about the history of world politics and violence, the word "imperialism" is not uttered at all. Not even once. There are a myriad of graphs and numbers stuffed inside. But the way he handles them and the way he chooses the sources he gets them from is so blatantly manipulative that it's cringe-inducing. A source repudiates his claims about "The Long Peace" and "the waning of war", and draws a bleak picture of the condition the world is in outside TheCivilizedNations? Well they are extremist, communist, leftist fanatics, you can't trust their data. Here, we have a government-funded organization that prints out numbers that fit my theory beautifully; surely they're the trustworthy ones. In one of the most embarrasing moments of the book, «we are seriously asked to draw conclusions from a graph of the "rate of battle deaths in state-based armed conflicts between 1900 and 2005" (Figure 6-1) while being instructed to ignore the figures for the first and second world wars »**. Why should we ignore two world wars, while looking at the history of wars, you ask? Because "after all, the world has seen nothing close to that level since". It was a fluke. This is kinda like saying "please don't call it murder just because there's a body lying on the floor with a knife in the back, since it's not like we see something like that everyday". Forgive me for the vulgar language, but this reminds me of a lovely Turkish idiom: "If my aunt had balls, she would be my uncle". Well, I could go on and on (like this occasionally biased and contrived -leftists!- but very detailed and informative review does) but you get the gist. In the end, it's not that I find the claim that violence in general is getting comparatively subsided (and it's at least partially thanks to Western Civilization) completely worthless. It doesn't even have to be a glorious, total, irreversible change of paradigm to be worth praising. If we are living in a marginally better, more peaceful world, we should know about it, and understand the why and the how so we can push it further. If it really turns out that the Westerners are morally superior and more evolved or something, so be it; it's not the premise that bugs me at all, but if it takes this much deceptive and manipulative "scholarship" to prove a point, maybe we should at least raise an eyebrow in mild suspicion before patting our world of gentle commerce in the back, you know. **Quote from David's review, because I'm too lazy to look it up myself.     history non-fiction               443 reviews90 followers     December 14, 2018   What an interesting read! If the idea is to give the reader food for thought this book more than nourishes. My approach to this book was a bit different than is usual. I have tended to write a review and then read others. Not in this case. I read many good reviews and few that were critical so was very open to being a critic. I am of the opinion that a few did not take note of what Pinker wrote. He got some numbers wrong was a fairly common complaint. He may have and admits as much. A few times he made it clear that his numbers were estimates based on researchers who are respected in the field. “…. so there is no single correct estimate” he writes on page 60 of my copy. Page 168 “….. no one knows exactly how many were killed…..” when discussing holy slaughters. In fact Pinker supports scepticism as he suggested on page 217 when discussing the Enlightenment.  As a westerner living a very comfortable life in Australia I was intrigued to read a comment by US politician John Kerry on page 417. “We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorist are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance. As a former law-enforcement person, I know we’re never going to end prostitution. We’re never going to end illegal gambling. But we’re going to reduce it, organised crime, to a level where it isn’t on the rise. It isn’t threatening people’s lives every day, and fundamentally it’s something that you continue to fight, but it’s not threatening the fabric of your life” He was right of course but he became “unfit to lead” and had to back pedal as the reality is that the authorities may well have reduced and contained crime, by cripes don’t tell the people that because the media will not be happy unless they are able to make you feel bad about just about every part of your life. Less violence? How dare that be considered when there is news to sell. And take it in your stride as you are not going to get hit by the Mafia? Bah!  This book covered a variety of female issues and after conversation elsewhere I even read On Rape by Germaine Greer. Hardly an area I knew much about. Glad I did. Perhaps blokes my age, 60ish, need to get of their fat arses and not think they rule the world as Pinker has given a very good case that the rise of feminist thought has been good for our collective health. While reading this I came across this item on the repulsive practise of female circumcision. Yes the item says caution is required but it is good to read that progress is taking place.   https://www.theguardian.com/global-de...  This book has some fascinating sub chapters and one on page 572 called Whence The Rights Revolution? should thrill the hearts of all book readers. Among other things is a fivefold increase in books published from 1960 to 2000. The information we are getting seems to just make us collectively smarter when it comes to treating each other with a little bit of respect and not get on our high horse and want to smash the face in of our neighbours be they next door or in the nation next door.  So does Pinker say we are in for even less violence in the future? No! In fact he makes it abundantly clear that one bit of lunacy can change everything. I personally am very unsure we have rosy future. I am like the next father of children and worry about the environment, that a loony with a nuke will go mad but the book itself is in fact not really about that. It is about the data that shows violence has dropped and gives several reasons why. Disagree with the reasons by all means but also enjoy the fact you have more chance of dying in a car crash than by a terrorist attack no matter what the newspapers tells you.     history my-non-fiction           September 24, 2012   I have a peripheral awareness that Pinker awakens red penitus in a goodly proportion of his stalwart readers: but I don’t know why. I shan’t delve into this before I write up ‘better angels’: don’t want to be distracted by ‘noise’. 800 pages of socio-economic postulating: always an inexact science, is going to rub someone the wrong way hither or thither. We see what we want to see, and 800 pages of the ‘humanities’ is like waving a red flag to a bull: plenty of scope to flare up, statistically speaking, and isn’t that just what we love to do best: exploit the ‘Moralizing Gap’ to justify our own world view:we’re brushed up dammit: well, OK, we may not be able to prove a point statistically, mathematically, economically, biologically or physically, but give me the humanities, I say: and see if I know my oochie from my achie.  The subject centre stage here is violence, (mainly in the westen hemisphere, where data is more readily available)and the overarching conclusion is that it has decreased over time: in terms of war, rape, homicide and any other conceivable physical violation against the person.  No one, as far as I am aware, has disagreed with this overall premise, although certain definitions of violence are under debate : e.g. the high prevaleence of infanticide has been supplanted with high levels of abortion, so in this particular area Pinker’s hypothesis does not hold up: but this is and other instances are outliers in the more general scenario of violence reduction. Pinker’s starting premise is the biological impulse, the Darwinian hegemony for survival . This type of thinking will either resonate or repel. But it is an important point because if you’re going to go down the route of biological justification, then its inadmissible to switch and bait halfway through as Pinker does. And he does so by positing the issue of excessive violence in terms of biological necessity, but resolves its decrease through ambiguous channels such as self control, empathy, reverse morality and, incongruously, and ultimately, the Flynn effect. Hence the incompatibility? How can something which starts off as nature be dampened by nurture? Huh? Huh? On the surface, all of the theories Pinker posits withstands microscopic examination: the Civilizing Process (e.g. the contract between man and state) does indeed explain the decline in violence: prior to Henry II introducing the state vs Jane Doe as opposed to Joe Bloggs vs Jane Doe, violence was the only way out: you smacked your feudal neighbours about, or you lost out. The aristocracy were just as likely as the hoi polloi to ‘engage’ in a good brawl. After the change in law, it wasn’t so beneficial. The upper and middle classes modified their behaviour. The lower classes persisted (and persist), because they have never fully bought into the state-citizen contract (and to be fair, neither has the state, on their behalf). Other influencing factors intervene: commerce, the integration of minorities in spheres of influence which engender the ‘rights revolution’, the pacifying influence of women, the clear demarcation of national borders, the influx of democracy, the redefinition of moral values. And you know what: its all true. All of it. All of these trends decreased violence. And not one person can nary say it didn’t. But how exactly:well, Pinker’s final analysis is: mainly, Reason. Now, I’ve cut and pasted this next section from Peter Singer in the New York Times book review, because he rightly summarises Pinker’s position and I am too lazy to. I’m saving my fire for the constructive anlaysis after: ‘Pinker’s claim that reason is an important factor in the trends he has described relies in part on the “Flynn effect” — the remarkable finding by the philosopher James Flynn that ever since I.Q. tests were first administered, the scores achieved by those taking the test have been rising. The average I.Q. is, by definition, 100; but to achieve that result, raw test scores have to be standardized. If the average teenager today could go back in time and take an I.Q. test from 1910, he or she would have an I.Q. of 130, which would be better than 98 percent of those taking the test then. Nor is it easy to attribute this rise to improved education, because the aspects of the tests on which scores have risen most do not require a good vocabulary or even mathematical ability, but instead test powers of abstract reasoning. ...... Pinker argues that enhanced powers of reasoning give us the ability to detach ourselves from our immediate experience and from our personal or parochial perspective, and frame our ideas in more abstract, universal terms. This in turn leads to better moral commitments, including avoiding violence. It is just this kind of reasoning ability that has improved during the 20th century. He therefore suggests that the 20th century has seen a “moral Flynn effect, in which an accelerating escalator of reason carried us away from impulses that lead to violence” and that this lies behind the long peace, the new peace, and the rights revolution. Among the wide range of evidence he produces in support of that argument is the tidbit that since 1946, there has been a negative correlation between an American president’s I.Q. and the number of battle deaths in wars involving the United States. ‘ Here is where I wade in now: First of all, surely the Flynn effect is fallacious? There has been much debate about the accuracy of IQ tests in general, and how they are loaded with prescribed sense-data which automatically ‘disqualifies’ intelligent people who have not been immersed in the culture of this sense data. Second, the mode in which abstract reasoning is included in standardised tests is very easily a ‘learnable’ rather than an ‘applicable’ commodity, whose sequences have been incorporated in thousands of ephemeral ways in the educational system to begin with, and routinely tested over time. To use the Flynn effect as some overarching proof that we are ‘smarter’ than our predecessors is a travesty. But no more so than Pinker’s next theory, that ‘Reason’ has finally got the upper hand and carried us away ‘from impulse led violence’. This must be intuitively wrong, even to a philosophical novice. How can Reason deal with a biological impulse? In fact, when has Reason ever successfully ‘eliminated’ a biological impulse? Need I remind Pinker about the painful, unnecessary and degrading experiments in say trying to ‘reason with homosexuals’ that they have other choices? Conversely, I’m pretty certain no amount of reasoning will sway my biological sexual impulses either. Obviously countless other examples pertain. Pinker!!!And yet violence has gone down. How to explain this, then? Given I don’t buy Pinker’s theory, I’m going to have to have a go at this myself. Why not?  First, Pinker concedes the impulse to violence is biologically driven. Then, buried deep within the 800 page text is a study by Preston and de Waal in 2002 ‘aversiveness of conspecifics in pain’, which basically translates into primates (and humans) having a natural inbred revulsion to inflicting violence on other primates/humans (backed up by Stanley Milgram’s shock experiment and the Trolley Problem). On a separate note, there is also the well known concept of ‘crowd mechanics’: or how we all fall into rank when the mob rules. My personal theory here is that, based on the studies above, it is possibility that violence was ‘overexaggerated’ in early history to begin with, due to lack of behaviour limiting controls. Perhaps in the wild these might be say greater geographical distances between competing primate groups. In human history, perhaps it was the state contract which modified an unnaturally rampant exhibition of violence between competitors in close proximity.(picture two pitbulls in a ring: excessiveness, eh?) Effectively then, an ‘overly violent’ population was stabilised to its natural levels. But this is not the whole story. ‘Better Angels’ shows we have gone one further, and overt violence is now perhaps below what might be considered the natural equilibrium. How did this happen?  Well, it didn’t. The first thing that I must concede if I am to accept that violence is a biologically driven impulse, is that it simply can NOT have been dissipated, and certainly not by Reason. The question then is, where did the violence go? Its not easily seen as a subject-object agreement, so what happened? Its been redirected, I think. We’re not rid of it, we’re simply rechanneling in a ‘non statistical’ way. Its not with a little trepidation I’m going to mention the xBox and film now. I realise I might be relegated to cuckoo territory (my only consolation is I’ll be sharing it with Pinker though!).  In the first half of the last century we had two world wars to keep us busy (and I think anybody would agree a combined total of over 40 million casualties is enough to keep anyone’s bloodthirsty instinct at bay), in the 60s there was the Vietnam war and the most intense cold war stand off ever (Bay of Pigs), and from the eighties onwards, we have: well, video games. The xBox (and read here all its technical predecessors and contemporaries) cuts across class, race, age divide and unite men (yes, men) in an indiscriminate guts and glory campaign. Usage is phenomenal., and all inclusive. If you’re old enough to hold the controller: you’re in. Its the new passage of initiation: four year olds sat next to fourteen year olds next to forty year olds: killing, massacring, rampaging, destroying and eviscerating (apparently the only taboo is raping: there is no button for it. Says Pinker). If its not the xBox its organised sport in a way well, in a way sport hasn’t been organised ever before. Not for nothing do we have the football hooligans and the mandatory Saturday matches. And finally. Film. This is something I’ve been ‘doing’ for the last month and a half: I’ve traversed the chronological gamut of film, and I find that the level of violence in film ‘now’ is phenomenal compared to anything found before the 1960s, with ever escalating etudes since. Its gotten so bad, that at the moment we are in a new era of image making: and I call it gender segregation. The majority of current offerings seem to run across gender biased lines: mindless violent action for the men, where the directors don’t even pretend to be aiming for all round inclusivity, tempered with a backlash for women: just as silly a regression in stereotypical ‘romcom’ where no allowances are made for the non chicklit minded. Cinema is divided, in a way it never was prior to the 1960s onwards. Which serves no one well. But apropos of violence: this is where its all happening. Behind the scenes, where the victims are not ‘real’ people, and the statistics don’t register. Which means, of course, that the problem of violence hasn’t gone away.  It will resurface in all its glory. Just give it the right time and place.     2012               1,131 reviews1,007 followers     February 10, 2017   Steven Pinker certain ranges widely in intellectual circles. Although he is nominally a professor of psychology at Harvard, but even with specialties (per Wikipedia) in experimental psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, he somehow dove into history to present one of the best TED Talks, back in 2007: 
 Steven Pinker on the myth of violence
 (watch those nineteen minutes, if you haven't already).Wonderfully, he has now followed that presentation up with an entire volume. Peter Singer wrote the glowing review of this book for the New York Times, and that somewhat lengthy essay is itself well worth reading: 
 Is Violence History?
. Update — the Autumn 2011 issue of the excellent pop sociology quarterly The Wilson Quarterly also enthusiastically recommends the book (with minor caveats) in 
 Peace on Earth
. Update — Just got this from the library; must read within three weeks since the number of holds will prevent me from renewing. Curiously, the podcast I was listening to on the way to the library was on a related topic. The U.C. Berkeley School of Law professor (and socioologist) Franklin Zimring wrote an article back in August on the precipitous decline in crime in New York City, and was interviewed by the charming SciAm editor Steve Mirsky, 
  The City That Became Safe: What New York Teaches about Urban Crime and Its Control
. Check it out! Update — just stumbled on a brief Q&amp;A with the Economist here. Poked around and found a review, also covering A History of Violence: From the End of the Middle Ages to the Present, titled 
 Punchline
; and a summation by the Economist blogger Buttonwood at 
 A Cause for Celebration
. Yet another update — since I bought the book, I'm hoping to read it again after I finish a few others. Meanwhile, I've found a few other reviews and interviews. The philosopher Nigel Warburton interviews Steven Pinker on the Social Science Bites podcast. A transcript of the interview is here, along with a downloadable PDF or audio MP3. Pinker was interviewed on the Charlie Rose Show. A review of the book on the GuardianUK Observer column by John Naughton,  Steven Pinker: fighting talk from the prophet of peace.  An audio interview from the GuardianUK's Science Weekly podcast. A text interview with author Sam Harris (who is Pinker's friend and wrote the introduction to Pinker's book),  Twilight of Violence. A vigorously negative review (albeit simplistic and misguided, in my quick, and as-yet contingent appraisal) by the philosopher John Gray in Prospect Magazine, Delusions of peace. Finally, the book's Wikipedia page has additional citations in the praise and criticism sections.­     awaiting-big-review nonfiction own               288 reviews291 followers     September 10, 2017   Are you afraid of being of being attacked or murdered? Do you think our society is becoming more violent and less safe? If you watch the news, read the papers and listen to politicians it would be logical to be afraid of the seemingly rising tide of violence and criminality in the world. However, Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature will show you your feelings are misguided- crime and violence in society is lower than it has ever been, and our often idealized past (even the recent past) was a very violent and scary place.Before you read this book (and you should read it) be aware that it is Looooong. Weighing in at 832 pages  The Better Angels of our Nature is no reading Everest, no Tolstoy, but each of those pages is a heavy bit of paper, drowning in a kudzu of fascinating facts and info that has spread to near every sentence. It was a long march to the final page, but trust me, it was worth it. This is a fascinating and constantly surprising read. Pinker presents the perfect antidote for the doom, gloom and bolt-your-doors crime hysteria present in the media. I already knew that we live in a comparatively safe era of history- the lack of recent Viking raids on my apartment block is noticeable - but Pinker makes it clear that this is by far the safest period of human history that there has ever been. Present-day developed nations make even the 1970s and 80s look like a time when to step outside was to enter a gritty urban version of the hunger games, complete with roving packs of armed rapists (the sexual violence stats for those decades are genuinely horrifying). The United States, sadly, is still more violent than Europe or Australasia, but even with all the shootings and killings of recent years the cold hard statistics show that Americans are still safer than ever. This completely flips the established narrative in politics and the media, and the hard data shows that suicide is a greater threat than murder, or even from war and natural disasters combined. The average person in twenty-first century society is more likely to die by their own hand than they are by the hands of others.  The reality of contemporary crime and violence is completely contrary to the apocalyptic vision presented by fearmongering politicians and news outlets and The Better Angels of our Nature, or at least a summary of Pinker’s findings, should be compulsory reading for anyone standing for public office. Pinker's book stands as an engaging testament to how much progress we have made in making our broader human society far less violent.     history non-fic               Author  9 books455 followers     November 2, 2017   Steven Pinker’s "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined" is a big ambitious book. Perhaps too big, perhaps too ambitious. And perhaps, too sprawling for its own good. One could opt for a Peace Studies reader and get a more eclectic taste of what research is out there. Would it be as comprehensive as this book? Maybe, maybe not, but you would get the benefit of tasting the many kinds of literature through many different voices. Here, we get a great deal of peace science, behavioral science, religious literature and more, all sifted through one scientific (and often brilliant) voice. Much research is included in this volume, and the many references often drown out the voice, but the voice is also in control of how we receive the literature.  So, what is the book -- polemical argument, scientific memoir, or reference volume? I doubt it knows the answer.  The point of the book is simple: to outline how violence has decreased, and to answer why so that we may learn from our successes and continue to replicate them.  The book might strike some as counter-intuitive -- in the time of Rwanda, Darfur, Iraq, mass-casualty terrorism, runaway gun violence in the US, and much, much more, it would seem like our times are just "another bloody century". Surely, if we subtract the effects of nuclear weapons in deterring warfare between major powers, and on top of that, if we discount the way modern battlefield medicine has led to a decrease in fatalities from warfare (many are still wounded and crippled), then our century can't be that much more peaceful than others. And there is also the other issue, the possible historical contingency of our own "long peace" (much like the long relative peacefulness between the Napoleonic wars and the first World War). One really bloody hegemonic war between nuclear powers might be all that's needed to eliminate our current gains.  And yet there is a surprising body of evidence that suggests that violence has decreased that spans across multiple disciplines. Pinker makes the case that this trend is deep, enduring, and possibly sustainable. Ancient and medieval societies took genocide, rape, mutilation and other types of violence as given. All of these forms of violence were permissible as long as customs and traditions were adhered to.  For me, the most interesting aspects of the book are the tracking of the rights movements and the civilizing processes. These are truly fascinating aspects of the evolving peace that I was not fully aware of. I think for many of the scholars coming to this book with some background in peace studies or studies of violence, they will have a similar reaction to mine. I know that...and I know that...and I know that...but ah!, I didn't know that!  This speaks to the benefit of having such a comprehensive volume. Peace researchers who are aware of one of type of literature might be bored by some chapters of the book, and yet, find themselves enthralled by others.  Overall, a fantastic read and one that I would readily recommend to others.     books-of-2017 international-relations-classics               337 reviews288 followers     January 12, 2018   Pinker goes into voluminous detail to show us that violence has steadily declined in human society since prehistoric times. In this well-structured work rich with statistics, charts, and the ideas of influential scholars he identifies six prevailing trends: The Pacification Process, the Civilizing Process, the Humanitarian Revolution, the Long Peace, the New Peace, and the Rights Revolutions. Turning from history to psychology he identifies five inner demons that lead us to violence: Predation, dominance, revenge, sadism, and ideology. Then he identifies four better angels: Empathy, self-control, morality and reason. He gives us a brief review of violence in human history before explaining each trend and the underlying psychology. Below is my recap.The first trend, the Pacification Process, explains the decline of violent deaths as a percentage of the population from the time of prehistoric tribes to today’s modern nation states. Incessant feuding and raiding between tribes gave way to organized societies that enforced laws and weighed more carefully the consequences of war. The decline has been steady but not smooth with large conflicts and exterminations causing big blips in the trend line but not breaking it.  The second trend, the Civilizing Process, explains how people acquired manners and standards of behavior that were less prone to violence. Pinker attributes much of both processes to Hobbes Leviathan, the state. From 5000 fiefdoms in 15th century Europe came 30 nations in 20th century Europe. As these states grew in size, so did strong central authority. Laws, rules and norms on behavior were imposed to ensure loyalty and stability decreasing internal violence. Increased commerce created interdependence between states also engendering stability and reducing the benefits of interstate conflict. The degree of violence in a country or even a region in the US is best explained by acceptance of the rule of law. The rule of law is not accepted where governments are weak or by people in remote regions or by people who feel discriminated against. In these situations street law replaces government laws, honor systems prevail and personal disputes are much more likely to end in violence. The third trend, the Humanitarian Revolution, developed from the Enlightenment which began in the seventeenth century led by philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. The Humanitarian Revolution challenged sadism, despotism and cruel punishments for people and animals. The invention of the printing press had resulted in an explosion of books and rapid increase in literacy. Reading, particularly popular novels which induced vicarious emotion, led to shared ideas, values and perspective crossing traditional community lines. People from different backgrounds congregating in cities and increased international trade contributed to the Humanitarian Revolution as did the Civilizing Process. Prior to the Humanitarian Revolution the world was brutish and cruel. Pinker goes into great detail about many popular tortures that were widely enjoyed such as burning witches and dangling cats over fires for evening fun. Communities even purchased prisoners from other jurisdictions so they could hold executions for public entertainment. Reading this section is like reading about a completely different world. Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror provides good background. The fourth trend Pinker calls the Long Peace. He is referring to the relatively peaceful period since WWII. He also points to the long period of relative European peace between the Napoleonic Wars and WWI. Pinker goes back further amassing a plethora of statistical measures to posit that the trend of the world since at least the fifteenth century is towards fewer wars and fewer war deaths as a percentage of world population. This holds true even considering the huge casualties of WWI and WWII and other deadly calamities. Pinker believes nationalism and territorial conquest are on the decline as Enlightenment values such as human rights take hold. The humanitarian influence is strongly reinforced by the now readily available real-time graphic pictures of war. He sees hope in the number of countries that have stopped conscription and the slower than expected rate of nuclear proliferation. He goes back 200 years to Kant who pointed out three forces that promoted peace – democracy, international trade, and international organizations. All three have experienced recent dramatic growth supporting Pinker’s trends of pacification, civilizing, and humanitarianism to support peace.  The fifth trend is the New Peace. This encompasses the period following the end of the Cold War in 1989 up to the time Pinker wrote the book, published in 2011. Pinker analyses different types of wars (interstate, non-state, and civil), mass exterminations (racial and political) and terrorism to show the world has continued to become more peaceful. He points out how our perceptions have changed. Compare the 5,000 Americans and 100,000 Iraqis that have died during this period in Middle Eastern conflicts to the 58,000 Americans and 1,000,000 or more Vietnamese who died in that conflict. What shocks today would have seemed far less significant just decades prior. Once, even genocide didn’t raise the eyebrows of those not affected. Pinker discusses modern exterminations including the Armenian genocide, Soviet collectivization, the Holocaust, Chinese land reform, and Rwandan genocide. Political instability, ethnic divisions and ideology all play roles leading to authoritarianism and genocide. Terrorism has always afflicted the world. But reliable statistics are available only going back to the 1970’s. Western Europe has seen a steady decline of terrorism as has the US with major exceptions: 9-11 in 2001 and to a lesser extent the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Pinker points out with the exception of 2001 and 1995 “more Americans were killed each year from lightening, deer, peanut allergies, bee stings, and ‘ignition or melting nightwear’ than by terrorist attacks.” So the recent trend, despite all the histrionics, is toward less violence, but it only takes one megalomaniac with nuclear weapons to undo all the trend lines. The sixth trend Pinker calls the Rights Revolutions, which were primarily due to the increase in access to information exposing people to new ideas and different viewpoints. Contributing are democracies which promote access and prosperity which allows people to focus beyond necessity. Pinker describes five Rights Revolutions: Civil Rights: From the lynchings of the American South to the pogroms of Russia, racial and religious violence has persisted throughout history. In America only since Truman integrated the armed forces in 1948 and Johnson signed the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 did change begin to take hold. Today most Americans accept diversity and respect differences.  Woman’s Rights: Rape and wife beating have been endemic in every society. Women were regarded as property. Rape was considered a crime against the husband or father. Not until the late middle ages did Western views begin to change and so.me cultures still haven’t. It wasn’t until the 1970’s that states in the U.S. began to pass laws against husbands raping their wives. As late as the 1970’s women were denied credit unless their husbands signed. A 1974 law made that illegal. Change has been dramatic in the last fifty years with the “me too” movement the latest iteration of progress.  Children’s Rights: Until recently 10-15% of all children were killed shortly after birth. Infanticide has been regularly practiced by all types of societies. Mothers did it to ensure the survival of other children. Men did it because they did not believe the child was theirs. Both men and women did it because the child was a girl. For children that survived, beating or at least spanking them was considered good parenting until the last half of the twentieth century. Today the danger may be that parents are obsessively controlling their children’s lives and taking “safety” precautions that are counterproductive. Children should be allowed to learn how to play without adults around. Parental influence has its limits. Children take on the values and vernacular of their peers.  Gay Rights: As late as 1969 homosexuality was illegal in every U.S state except Illinois. That gay and lesbian marriage is now legal and widely accepted in the U.S. is to me the most unanticipated of all the gains in human rights in my lifetime.  Animal Rights: Abuse of animals like abuse of humans has a long history and only in the last decades has the issue come to the forefront. Rising concern over the humane treatment of pets, farm animals, and laboratory animals has spawned action groups and regulations to protect animals. Cock fighting and dog fighting are outlawed many places and even bullfighting is on the decline. This is a far cry from primitive, ancient and medieval societies where torturing animals for fun was widely practiced.Next Pinker describes the psychology that predisposes us to violence. He describes the Moralization Gap, self-serving biases used to justify our actions and feelings. This gap enables perpetrators and victims to create widely different narratives of the same event. He even digs into brain structure to explain how violent and anti-social impulses are generated and to further discredit the concept of pure evil. The ingredients for evil lurk inside all of us. One is reminded of Solzhenitsyn’s observations that, “…the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” and “To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good...” Pinker identifies what he terms the five demons that drive violent behavior:  Predation is exploitive, practical violence done for personal gain.  Dominance is characterized by actions that tell others - Don’t mess with me, I’m in charge. Narcissistic (grandiose, needs admiration, lacks empathy) political leaders are particularly violence prone. Thwarted narcissists feel humiliated leading to envy and rage. Virulent nationalism and tribalism can form in the presence of group narcissism.  Revenge is a common urge and major cause of violence. Empathy, dependence and close connections can modulate revenge.  Sadism, inflicting pain for pleasure, is hard for most of us to understand. It can grow out of predation and punishment. It is largely an acquired taste. People in control of others can slide into sadism.  Ideology justifies violence as a means to an end for the greater good. People in tightly knit groups feed off each other making violence seem reasonable. When the group is dominant others behave like sheep and pretend to believe. Euphemisms, gradualism, diffusing responsibility, distancing from and denigrating victims are common techniques that lead to moral disengagement.Lastly Pinker reviews four “Better Angels”, those traits that mitigate violence:  Empathy, often used in the sense of sympathy or compassion, has several meanings. One is perspective taking which refers to seeing things from someone else’s point of view. Another is theory of mind, trying to figure out someone else’s thoughts and emotions. Empathy is typically applied disproportionately to individuals in the same community, or who share our values, or are cute. Thus empathy does not embody fairness. Expanding our perception of interconnectedness with others can expand our circle of empathy and altruistic behavior.  Self-Control often means delaying gratification. It’s fair to discount future benefits but many of us discount them far too much. Individual self-control is rooted in brain structure and function including the workings of hormones and neurotransmitters. But it can be cultivated. The Civilizing Process by setting behavioral norms has helped us make substantial improvements over the centuries.  Recent Biological Evolution (not a better angel) has been proposed based on varying demographics in birth and death rates, but there is not adequate proof for this. The Humanitarian Revolution, The Rights Revolution and significant recent declines in crime have happened too rapidly for biological evolution to be a factor.  Morality and Taboo have shifted. Pinker reviews several models. The shift has been from morals based on purity, community and authority which appeal to social conservatives to those based on fairness, individual autonomy and rationality which are values embraced by social liberals. The shift is reflected in recent changes in minority, women’s and gay rights.  Reason despite newsworthy examples to the contrary is on the rise. It reduces violence by identifying the absurd, promoting self-control and even morality. It introduces the concept of proportionality which is essential to fairness. For whatever purpose reason originally developed, its continued expansion to other areas is only natural. IQ test do show people are getting smarter, at least in the area of abstract reasoning, a skill that is developed as educational levels, science, technology and a symbol rich environment have increased. This does not mean underlying general intelligence has increased only the way it is applied has changed. The development of abstract reasoning promotes cooperation, liberalism, economic literacy and democracy; all of which help reduce violence. To put this all together Pinker looks, “for common threads in the Pacification Process, the Civilizing Process, the Humanitarian Revolution, The Long Peace, the New Peace and the Rights Revolutions. Each should represent a way in which predation, dominance, revenge, sadism, or ideology has been overpowered by self-control, empathy, morality, or reason.” He identifies forces that turned out not to be important to the six trends: Weaponry and disarmament, resources and power, affluence, and religion and ones that did matter: The Leviathan, gentle commerce, feminization, the expanding circle of sympathy and the escalator of reason. It is popular to opine nostalgically on the good old days and extol the simpler more natural life of past centuries and eons, but as Pinker points out those past times for most people were harsh, bitter and much more violent. Pinker makes a convincing and well documented case that we have gone from a society where violence is the accepted and expected norm to one where violence has diminished to the point that we look on it as an aberration. He takes pains to not predict the future even though the many statistical trend lines Pinker presents imply that we might expect more of the same in the future. I’m not swayed by statistical implications for the future but his analysis of the forces at play give me hope. Pinker’s thesis is not uncontroversial. However, despite its detractors, it has won many awards and significant endorsements. But even if you don’t buy in to Pinker’s conclusions, there is much food for thought. This book is for readers with a serious interest. It is well written and clear but there is a lot to digest and I think most readers will be best served by patience and allotting the time necessary to take it all in. It is, as widely claimed, a very important book that can change the way you look at the world and the human animal that is dictating its future.     science               Author  154 books37.5k followers     June 27, 2013   After a steady recent diet of short-attention-span theater internet surfing, it was very interesting to dive into a dense read that took me a week to chew through. (I am not a very fast reader, but I'm usually faster than that.) The exercise of following a really long, complex, sustained argument was probably good for me.Seven chapters of convincing examination of historical evidence to the best approximation that could be managed, all of which jibes well with what I know or have experienced of history, followed by three chapters of attempts to figure out the why of the what. Pinker was pretty good about fencing off his facts from his hypotheses with suitable disclaimers. Several times he more-or-less interrupts his narrative to give the reader tutorials on basic statistics, in a desperate bid to bring his audience up to speed so that they can understand his data and how he massages it to get it to yield up more understanding. I was very interested in the brief survey of recent formulations in neurology and cognitive psychology that he used to underpin his arguments.  I was also reminded of a classic little book from the 50s, How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff, which should really be required reading for every voter and consumer. (It has been reprinted in paperback and is now available on Kindle, I'm pleased to note.) Pinker, I think, is trying very hard to tell the truth with statistics; that little book would help ground one's evaluation either way. I was charmed by how many of my own humanist beliefs about history and human nature were supported variously, not to mention how many of the jokes and cultural references I got, but naturally, I would be; Pinker and I are of the same generation and share a certain amount of world-view, after all. I am pretty fond of the modernity that cocoons me and has repeatedly saved my life, and he does not underrate it, either. Not everything worked for me in his arguments, but enough did for going on with. He footnotes the hell out of everything, which I appreciate. Along the way he dropped recs for what sounds like a lot of potentially interesting further reading, should I find energy for it. (31 pages in very small print of sources one could go check up, ditto.) Highly recommended.                    137 reviews84 followers     July 8, 2016   This book is sure to anger or confuse just about everyone who cares about the world today, but particularly those who love to hate the idea of cultural progress: "What? You gotta be kidding - violence has declined over time? No frikin' way - just look at the news." But be assured - after you read only a few pages of this book, you'll be reminded of what life used be like in the foreign country called The Past and you just might change your tune and recognize how, for large sectors of the world's population, life today is less violent, less brutal, and less cruel. Pinker's basic thesis is that, no matter how you look at the data, no matter what time frame, no matter what part of the world or what era, and no matter what form it takes, violence, cruelty, and brutality in human society has declined over time. With over 700 pages of detailed charts, data, and references to other such studies (such as the books "Homicide" by Daly/Wilson and Keeley's "War Before Civilization"), Pinker demonstrates the astonishing fact that, despite the continued violence everywhere in the world today, much of today's world lives in a time of relative peace and safety unknown to past generations. It's not an argument that violence has been eliminated but that there is a pacification and civilizing process at work in history in which violence in its many forms has been decreasing over time. It is especially an argument for the success of secularism, modernity, liberalism, the democratic state, and societies based in law and order, an argument many just don't want to hear. Many of my friends simply refuse to read it because they're unwilling to challenge their adherence to some version of the narrative that "the world is going down the toilet" and that some version of modern western culture is the reason why. They may be right in some sense but they're not in terms of what Pinker is talking about.  When you are able (willing?) to separate out just how Pinker is framing "violence" from your overall view of violence in today's world, his argument becomes crystal clear. He is quite aware that there still exists cruelty, slavery, and horrific brutality in today's world but, like the difference between the institutionalized, culturally-sanctioned slavery of the past and the clandestine forms of human trafficking of today (not to mention the sheer numbers difference), there really has been progress here as there has in so many other areas.  Pinker's book deals mostly with human-on-human violence and to a lesser extent, human-on-animal violence. While the evidence he presents points to an ongoing decline in the former, it could be argued that human&gt;animal and human&gt;natural world violence has actually increased as human populations increased. The question for Pinker is: have certain privileged parts of the world's population gained a relatively violence-free society at the expense of the continued violation-destruction of nature, of plant and animal species?  Edited: Jan2016     all-time-favorites history-cultural social-science-theory               497 reviews225 followers     May 13, 2021   I was recently listening to a BBC interview with two historians on the An Lushan rebellion, and the interviewer read a passage from Pinker's book in which he argued that this Chinese civil war was important evidence for his thesis that human violence used to exist on a scale we would now find hard to believe. When the interviewer read some of Pinker's death statistics about the rebellion, both of them spontaneously burst into laughter and one of them asked "What on earth is his evidence for that?" What, indeed? Pinker relies throughout this book overwhelmingly on the death statistics for major historical events compiled by a librarian and published to his personal website in his spare time. Pinker explains that he finds the hobby website impressive, and argues that as a librarian, he can utilize source material better than most academics, i.e., than trained historians. If you think I'm joking, look for yourself. No, I'm afraid this book is the joke, and it makes a joke of its credulous audience, making specious, anti-empirical, and fatuous arguments fueled by intellectual narcissism.  What if the situation were reversed? That is, what if a history professor wrote an eclectic book on cognitive linguistics that was fundamentally at odds with the consensus of trained experts in the discipline, and that relied largely for support on a single source, which was itself entirely the work of an amateur?  I think such a book would quite likely be universally regarded as a laughingstock. However, we live in a generation in which the increasing consensus among intelligentsia holds that scientists hold the answers to questions that used to be addressed by the humanities, and so Pinker's book is not only accepted as plausible, but widely lauded and championed, including by people who should know better, like Bill Gates. Indeed, many of its chief boosters seem to be techno-utopians already deeply committed to the notion that gains in technology are a rising tide that lifts all boats. This is a work that flatters its secular humanist audience by suggesting we have learned our lesson and, by and large, moved past our brutish origins, carried on the wings of science, progress, and bourgeois values.  Apparently scientific progress doesn't include historiography, which anyone is qualified to do.      hated history               1,634 reviews257 followers     May 25, 2022    "War is peace" in: NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR, by George Orwell 
 
 Magic Mirror, do tell me, which one is  RosierPinker??I still don’t figure it out, in what planet psychologist Pinker lives on. I have watched him many times insisting on “things are getting better”. Due to his studies on violence, he sees there is less violence amongst humans. He adds to this optimistic picture: “we’re getting more humane”.   
 
  
 
  
 
  
 
  One thing is reported, numerical cases of violence, in wars, in crime etc. Another different thing, is the human nature. Despite his studies going back in thousands of years, he just doesn’t report on the POTENTIAL for violence; I mean, atomic weapons still exist today (in big numbers, and in several nations), as well as chemical and biological ones. Should an atomic war conflagrate (say, in the Korean peninsula) (God forbid!),  The Day Afterthe next day the book of Pinker would be just obsolete. Yes, you cannot cope with (the idea of) the numbers killed. Pinker, the one who had affirmed “nuclear weapons are useless”, would be instantly refuted. For good.  
 
  Deep down in the human nature, violence does exist. Let’s not put some sort of  pinkrosy camouflage, in the human nature. I've been thinking about Africa in this and the past century; Mao's China and Russia under Stalin, and other examples, which should make Pinker think thrice, at least,... about demons.I would like Pinker to comment on the Mandalay Bay hotel shooting, in Las Vegas, the past October. And on similar cases.  
 
  
 
 (decline? what decline??) UPDATE  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCm9N... Here Pinker is good with numbers; yet, he didn't include mass shootings in the US. How many since the Mandalay Hotel have occurred up to the present moment?? UPDATE (for 2018 and 2019, for Pinker to check it out)  https://www.motherjones.com/politics/...  UPDATE "It's Insane We're Having A 'Debate' Over Whether It's Acceptable To Assault A Journalist" (1st of July 2019) Pinker wrote on Twitter, regarding what happened in Portland. Yes, by Antifa people. Pinker is slowly waking up apropos VIOLENCE.  UPDATE This is an important interview because Pinker goes nuclear. 😛  https://www.forbes.com/sites/rainerzi...  UPDATE How much of a "humanist"?  https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/aut...   https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nyti...  UPDATE ( This is for Pinkerites)  https://www.theguardian.com/science/2...  UPDATE Besides the war in Ukraine (it's been 3 months!), much sadly, I would like to add the Texas shooting.  https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05...  ---"For when they might say, "Peace and security," then suddenly destruction comes upon them, as the labor pains to her having in womb; and they shall not escape."in: 1 Thessalonians 5:3     6-major-declines deep-down forensic-archeology               198 reviews123 followers     May 15, 2017   Mind-blowing book! I have never read a book about history and statistics that was this interesting. I love how Steven Pinker argues with countless studies and a great logical validity. This book is a must-read book for anyone interested in sociology, history, politics and environment. This book breaks the long romanticized picture of the past which has been filled with nostalgia and confirmation biases.      cognitive-science next philosophy               2,234 reviews3,663 followers     January 15, 2023   there are some missing connections and it's an ethnocentric view of violence. Like did enlightenment ideas also diminish violence in the East?                  319 reviews344 followers     January 2, 2016   Did this really take two and a half years to read? I see that it did. I picked it up after a new-ish boyfriend press-ganged me into seeing Pinker talking about his new book - this one - in Edinburgh, and thinking that it sounded fascinating and potentially relevant to a PhD I was considering doing. Well, the PhD idea is discarded, and as for the boyfriend, I swapped Pinker for Susanna Clarke and moved in with him. He finished my book first.The premise of The Better Angels of Our Nature is that the world is getting less violent. I read about the first half fairly slowly, as it marched through prehistory and the Middle Ages, with graph upon graph and source upon source - I mean, that's pretty uncontentious, isn't it? That there are far fewer beheadings and settlement-on-settlement raids and Hundred Year Wars as we get through history past the Enlightenment. Knowing next to nothing of east Asian history, I was interested to read about things like the An Lushan Rebellion and a brief history of belligerent Mongols. There are parts on international armed conflict, on genocide, on civil war. I spent a year studying humanitarian law. It felt like a lot of the coursework from that year, albeit a bit rearranged. So far so good, Mr. Pinker; I accept where you're going with this. I put the book down, for a very long time. Then in November 2015 two things happened in quick succession: the Paris bombings, followed quickly by the vote in the UK Parliament to bomb Syria. I'm in Scotland, and a more dyed-in-the-wool pacifist you'll not find. So I picked this back up, to keep reading the sections about armed conflict in the twentieth century, because I wanted to be reminded (convinced?) that the world is broadly heading in the right direction. I mean, it is. It is; but we're not anywhere near out of the woods yet. And we probably won't be in my lifetime. But maybe we will. Pinker's point is not that violence has gone away. He makes few predictions. (Five years down the line, his predictions on conflict in the Middle East have proved too optimistic. But hold that thought a moment longer.) He plots a direction, and the direction is more peaceful. It seems to involve more things being classed as atrocities and abuses - but that's because we're rightly outraged these days by things that nobody would have cared about fifty or a hundred or three hundred years ago. Finally he talks neuroscience and psychology. Do your thing, Steven; that's more your area than mine, so I'll take your word for it. Let's come back to the optimism of Mr. Pinker. Because he is very optimistic! Let's get the biggie out of the way first, shall we?:  In early 2011, as this book was going to press, a swelling protest movement deposed the leaders of Tunisia and Egypt and was threatening the regimes in Jordan, Bahrain, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. The outcome is unpredictable, but the protesters have been almost entirely non-violent and non-Islamist, and are animated by a desire for democracy, good governance, and economic vitality rather than global jihad, the restoration of the caliphate, or death to infidels. Even with all these winds of change, it is conceivable that an Islamist tyrant or radical revolutionary group could drag an unwilling populace into a cataclysmic war. But it seems more probable that "the coming war with Islam" will never come. Islamic nations are unlikely to unite and challenge the West: they are too diverse, and they have no civilization-wide animus against us. (p443) ...Oops. Well, he did hedge his bets, I suppose.Where he didn't hedge his bets, and where he consequently rather lost me a bit, was when he focused on the US a bit more specifically. When I mentioned to a friend a few weeks ago that I was reading Pinker, she clucked her tongue at me and said, "Oh dear - does he think sexism is over yet?" That's overstating it a bit, but the impression I got was, well, yes - it really is as if he thinks sexism is pretty much winding up, and the civil rights movement put paid to racism and racist violence decades ago. After 500+ pages of meticulous research, it seemed like a glaring oversight to just assume that the various -isms had just upped and finished since 1980. No, it didn't seem like a glaring oversight: the quickly glossed-over suggestion that racism in the US is a relic of days gone by made me think there were things Pinker wasn't telling me. This is a 1100-page book, of which the last 300 pages are entirely citations, and here I am accusing the author of leaving things out. Well, I'm gonna, 'cause I feel like he has. No fifth star for you, Steven. And yet I'm still mostly on his side. I'm no John Gray, whose arguments seem to be of the "when you say 'it's got better', I hear 'everything's fine', which it's not" and "I know tribal people and they don't fight each other, therefore science" varieties (and, I might add, get neatly steamrollered by Pinker himself here - I do so love a good academic spat in the Guardian...). Earlier this year, I proofread an essay criticising Pinker (don't ask how I arrived there; terribly unlikely circumstance is how), apparently on the twin bases that how could you possibly know that 15th century middle England executed more people than were executed in 21st century Oxford; and the ever-classic "but NUCLEAR!" It plays with an idea that I don't think I'll ever fail to be interested by: it's why I loved The Wake so much last year, and the idea is of a magical past where everyone was nice to each other and had conversations at the dinner table, and none of these horrible new-fangled innovations existed yet to ruin everything. I love this idea! I love what it makes us do, how it makes people react, how intoxicating they (we) find it, how they'll fight so hard to show that it's real - and yet it never was. It's the ultimate bittersweet hope, the most incredible Escher-like illusion, and I just find that the most fascinating thing. There never was an Eden! There never was a perfect 1950s family, or a perfect 1880s family, or however far back you'd like to go! The government never was more competent, and people never had more common sense! The world of your childhood was nowhere near as good as this one, you just weren't looking at the crap bits! The best thing about The Better Angels of Our Nature, or I think, is the same thing that means it's going to wind up people who want to be wound up by it: it's a testament to things getting better, faster. Which if you ask me they absolutely, irrefutably are. Ask yourself this: whenabouts in history would you rather live? I mean, I still think he's a bit overoptimistic in places. But at least I'll agree that his views, my views, and the best the world can be are tending to converge. Plus he's a great writer, you know. Stay for the prose, frankly.     books-i-have-taken-to-dinner i-also-read-nonfiction-occasionally recommended-to-me               3,023 reviews1,011 followers     May 22, 2018   Anyone who follows me on this site knows that I rarely give high scores to books; I like to make very clear distinctions and to indicate what is just good and what is outstanding. And this book is one of those that belongs to the top category: not because it is a perfect one (see below), but because of the breadth, the depth, the insightful, well-founded, nuanced and yet daring way in which Steven Pinker has tackled the very delicate subject of violence throughout human history.It is not feasible to give a thorough presentation of this book. Because it actually is several books together: 1. a global, especially quantitative approach to physical violence in human history in which Pinker establishes that there’s a steady but very clear decline; 2. a tentative explanation of that decline on the macro-level, in which he focuses on the processes of humanization and civilization; and finally 3. a thorough analysis on the microlevel of good and evil in man in general, with particular attention to biological and psychological aspects that promote or reduce violence (our demons and our angels). For me, Pinker's presentation is absolutely convincing, both in his observations and in his analysis. It is in line with my inner conviction (which of course is based on personal perception, rational analysis, as well as emotional orientation), but it also fits in with much of what I have read over the past years, especially on history. Pinker is 100% right that we have to get rid of romantic nostalgia and cultural pessimism (“the past was better, now we go from bad to worse”), which is no more than a reactionary reflex, motivated by emotional (especially fear), ideological and religious blindness. For him it is no coincidence that modernity (with its emphasis on rationality) has gone hand in hand with a humanitarian and civilization-revolution that has led, among other things, to a marked reduction in violence worldwide. And that is true, despite the daily flow of negative news coverage on conflicts and injustices that still plague our world. Yet, as already indicated, this is not a perfect book. For example, I have some reservations about Pinker's tendency to give great emphasis on evolutionary-biological aspects in his search for explanations; I understand that, because that focus has become a trendsetter in his field of study (social psychology in the broadest sense of the word) and has certainly clarified many things. But the sometimes implicit suggestion of Pinker that these are ultimate clarifications (necessary ànd sufficient) seems rather exaggerated to me. Fortunately, he nuances in other places. Second caveat: Pinker regularly warns against statements about future developments, and cites the well-known saying that social scientists better not make any predictions, because they already have so much trouble dealing with the past. Yet Pinker in this book regularly formulates optimistic expectations for the future and that is strange. At the moment, 2018, for example, the world looks slightly different than when he wrote this book (2009-2011) and his unbridled belief in the further advance of liberal humanism and rationalism isn’t that probable any more. Third reservation: Pinker continually illustrates his observations with both general statistical material and specific experiments. What is striking is that these studies are mainly Western (in particular American) oriented. Pinker does make attempts to break out geographically and culturally, but still, his evidence is almost entirely Western (American-European). And that involves a great risk of bias. Also his focus on our recent history (after the second world war), an era of globalization and enormous advances in affluence, technology and science, can also cause a bias (although we will only be able to estimate this in a few decades).  And finally a fourth reservation: especially in the concluding paragraphs, the lyricist in Pinker gets the upper hand and he ventures into a statement of faith in rationalism. Of course, he presents strong arguments that support his theory that the decline of violence in human history ultimately is due to the further advance of reason. But just at that moment he leaves his cautious, nuanced style behind him and his language becomes almost religious (in favor of rationalism); on this instance (after almost 700 pages) he introduces the concept of "modernity", without much clarification, and that’s a bit problematic. Pinker has garnered a lot of praise with this book, but also a huge wave of criticism, both on historical details, on the validity of his statistical material, on his psychological-biological approach and on his ode to rationalism and liberal humanism. The critics of this book certainly have a point in some of those cases. But if you look at the 700 pages in their entirety and go through them thoroughly, then you can hardly accuse Pinker of simplism, naivety or deception: he constantly warns about exaggerated expectations; nothing is definitive, and a relapse is always possible, he regularly states. But at the same time his overall conclusion is very outspoken: "while this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, (our) species has also found ways to bring the numbers down, and allow a greater and greater proportion of humanity to live in peace and die of natural causes. For all the tribulations in our lives, for all the troubles that remain in the world, the decline of violence is an accomplishment we can savor, and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible. "(p. 696) This book is a tough chunk, which takes a lot of effort to wrestle through, and one certainly has not to agree with everything, but it seems to me that this book deserves its place among the most important ones published in the early 21st century! (4.5 stars)     evolution globalisation history               181 reviews3 followers     March 22, 2012     But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. --The Federalist, No. 51, James Madison  This is easily one of the best books of 2011, and I suppose it must already be earmarked as a Pulitzer finalist. It’s about violence, but so much more than that since it strikes at the very core of human nature, the human condition, government, economics, and moral philosophy. Stephen Pinker starts with a simple premise—proving the decline of violence in modern times. This apparently is so controversial to some that he meticulously plots the decline of violence with great historical and statistical detail—this is the descriptive ‘what’ that Dr. Pinker illustrates in the first 2/3rds of the book. The writing is absorbing even if it rings a mildly irreverent tone that betrays a subtle anti-religious bias (especially vis-à-vis politico-religious violence of the Roman Catholic and Old Testament societies—he was a roommate of Harold Bloom after all and is a dedicated humanist) that includes some humorous satire and contemporary references to lighten the mood of such a grim topic. Indeed, his graphic descriptions of torture, rape, suffering and grotesque sadism is enough for even the most macabre minds. Stephen Pinker is a true evolutionary scientist who is adroit in the heuristic of categorization and you can find lists, and lists of lists to aid in understanding the narrative he describes. For example, the declining trend of violence is broken down into these historical themes:   1)	The Pacification Process—our evolution from hunter/gatherers into political, agrarian societies.  2)	The Civilizing Process���included the consolidation of feudal economies into larger kingdoms and empires with central authority, trade and economic specialization. 3)	The Humanitarian Revolution—17th and 18th century that marked the that included the Age of Reason and the European Enlightenment 4)	The Long Peace—a result of a Kantian trifecta of 1) Democracy, 2) Trade and 3) International organizations 5)	The New Peace—arising out of a U.S. led post-cold war globalized world  6)	The Rights Revolutions—exhibited a more finely filtered intolerance of violence on smaller scales that included violence against minorities, women, children, and animals. Within these historical themes we see five major historical forces that helped snuff out violence:  1)	The Leviathan—this includes a Hobbesian social contract which grants to the state a full monopoly on the use of violence from within 2)	Gentle Commerce—closely connected to #4 this force increases economic incentives for cooperation  3)	Feminization—results in a decline of authoritarian/patriarchal based societies and the empowerment of women as intellectual equals who tend to be more risk-averse and less violent  4)	The Expanding Circle—from a mixture of globalization, commerce, and increased access to information this purportedly increases sympathy and helped usher in the Rights revolution that even extended to animals  5)	The Escalator of Reason—leading to higher levels of intelligence and emotional empathy in conjunction with more sophisticated foundation for managing moralized concerns in favor of the flourishing of all humanity The second part of the book is what really interested me and seeks to elaborate the psychological factors that dictate our behavior depending on their interplay with our environment and circumstance. Here the statistical reasoning is a little more squishy and correlational residuals are not quite as well characterized—perhaps leading to creeping confirmational bias. Put aside these minor critiques of this part of the book, the ability to marshal data from such varied fields of study as anthropology, economics (including game theory), social psychology, and cognitive neuroscience into a coherent and powerful explanation of the decline of violence.  Factors that influence violence are broken down into two categories of human nature: Demons that incite to violence and Angels that slaken the thirst for blood. The demons include the primal urge to dominance, revenge, sadism including the banality of evil, and ideologically driven moralized violence. On the other side of the ledger are qualities such as empathy (or more importantly sympathy, Dr. Pinker distinguishes the two), self-control, our moral sense, and	reason. Here, the meat of the book can be found in the chapters on the moral sense. Stephen Pinker adapts from the ethics, moral foundations, and relational models of moral reasoning of other people like Shweder, Haidt, and Fiske. First, to understand the psychology of moral reasoning (as opposed to objective moral truth itself), we are to understand that moralized beliefs are more than just the avoidance of something distasteful, but is a ‘distinctive mode of thinking about an action’. Thus, moralized beliefs are universalized (should apply to everybody), actionable, and punishable. These beliefs spring from relationships since, in Pinker’s view, evolution acted upon the population and there is no such thing as a philosophically independent human being. Moralized norms generally include relationships, a context (at home, in the street, at church, at work, at the beach, etc.), and are centered around a resource (information or knowledge, food, money, land, sex, labor, etc.). These relationships upon which socioeconomic moral reasoning is based are divided into 4 categories:  1)	Communal Sharing—the most basic tribal foundation for moral reasoning emphasizing in-group loyalty, also includes sacred or pure values that are shared within a group and reinforced through rituals and periodic but specific contextual references. 2)	Authority Ranking—e.g., military, paternalistic, totalitarian/fascist, divine right etc. 3)	Equality Matching—gifts, tit-for-tat, first relational moralized norm to recognize individual autonomy, fairness, and reciprocal altruism 4)	Market Pricing/Rational-legal—much more complex relational model of morality that incorporates universal ethical principles, a high level of individual rights, rule-of-law, social contract orientation, and requires a high level of literacy and numeracy along with a grasp of information technology and access to data on price, costs, benefits, risks, alternatives, etc. As an explanation of the basis of moralized norms this seems quite well-developed and accurate. As I read through this chapter, the current debate over the allocation of scarce health care resources came to mind as a good illustration of this relational model of moral reasoning. The argument is usually centered on the diametric poles of the relational models between communal sharing of universalized health care to rational-legal/market pricing model. Here again we see that moralized norms require more than facile affirmation of one or the other relational models since the specific contexts and resources are important. Which relational model should be employed in the state of emergency, or when the resource is a human organ in which a dead individual does not benefit, or when the allocation of the resource in the community is considered a sacred good such as the right to life-sustaining medicine.  Personally, I see a need for a hybrid system that protects sacred values of life, and the protection of the vulnerable (e.g., the elderly and children) with market-pricing and equality matching for preventative or non-emergent care should the patient choose--respecting the autonomy of the patient to make the most rational choice given the risks, costs, benefits, and alternatives. The difficulty with market-based health care, just like the difficulty of running a democracy that this market-based/equality matching system is only functional for the government of a citizenry that is based on the moral foundation of reciprocal altruism and rational-legal system of checks and balances. Like a functioning democracy, a market-based health care system requires high literacy and numeracy rates as well as the dissemination of pricing/cost information (something that the AMA has consistently blocked by restricting access to ICT coding for purposes of pricing across hospitals, specialties and regions). This leads to corruption in which supposed medical principles (e.g., doctors and hospitals who have a fiduciary and moral duty to remain financially disinterested in patient decisions) have the ability to obfuscate their own cost and market prices. With these established cartels, it's not difficult to enrich oneself by choking off a few grains of sand at strategic locations in the billions-dollar health care economy. In this model, there is no difference between the orthopedic surgeon recommending back surgery (that evidence from the Dartmouth ATLAS study shows actually does more harm than good), and the Goldman Sachs executives who traded in collateralized debt obligations, which they 1) controled the price through financial cartels, and 2) were at the same time shorting (had proprietary knowledge that they were bad investments and thus were insuring at low cost against loss of these supposed AAA-rated investments).  Some favor total universalization of health care based on moral norms, but I simply think this ancient hunter-gatherer communal-based economy is insufficient for the maximization of public good by actually rationing health care resources away from those who by definition need it most (e.g., through price controls and misallocation of scarce resources). Just because other industrialized nations have atavistic central rationing of health care as a vestigial throw-back to the devastation of the post-WWII days when virtually every single resource was rationed (e.g., labor, currency, food, shelter, etc.) is not sufficient rationale for a complex and advance economy like the U.S. to regress to the communal-sharing model of health care delivery. Finally, Stephen Pinker is an evolutionary psychologist and a progressive and here his confirmation bias shines through quite strongly in my view. Much has been made of the Flynn effect that made the claim that IQs are actually increasing as people today are evolving on an organic and biological level to be more intelligent than those who came before us just a few decades ago. I and not quite persuaded by the data just yet. Furthermore, there is an assumption that modern western elites who exert social control are currently and likely to continue in the progressive beneficial model; this may be a bit too optimistic. The utility of some form of the Hobbesian social contract for the government monopoly of violence and justice is pretty clearly established by Dr. Pinker, however, caution is warranted in today’s modern age when an fewer and fewer of our ‘best-and-brightest’ sociopolitical/cultural prophets can do increasingly greater damage. This is a view that Pinker seems to acknowledge, but dismiss this line of thinking by citing historical data that the introduction of nuclear weapons or other WMD are uncorrelated residuals in the decline of violence. However historical data do not necessarily determine future relationships between the concentration of greater technical power into the increasingly fewer hands of elite social engineers and the decline of violence. With the exception of those minor critiques, however, I am sure this book will contribute greatly to our cultural understanding of the psychology of violence, and by extention, peace. The ideas found here will no doubt be debated everywhere from college bowl sessions up to the halls of congress. This can only be a good thing since the overriding theme of the book is a very well-qualified optimism for the flourishing of humanity. Update: 3-22-2012, I increased my review to 5 stars because I have found myself going back to my Kindle version of this book over and over again to review it. It has been a sublime pleasure to breath in the expert wordcraft, and the section on the Demons and Better Angels is like a symphony of well-conducted harmonious truths that come together in very a gratifying way. As a fervent believer, I found it fit very nicely into my worldview even though it is written from the perspective of just as fervent a non-believing skeptic. Such a task is very difficult to do since it takes painstaking effort to extricate one's ego (believer and nonbeliever alike) in the search for more objective reason. I say 'reason' because as Heidegger would say: facts and truth presuppose interpretation.     great-scientists history nonfiction               488 reviews677 followers     August 10, 2015   This is a sprawling mess of a book. Flashes of arguably brilliant insight alternate with meandering musings. Fascinating narrow conclusions are drawn from carefully parsed evidence—and then sweeping conclusions are drawn from highly dubious evidence. Historical insights are used incisively in an argument—then the next argument is undermined by total historical illiteracy. At the end, the reader is left uncertain whether he has read 800 pages of genius, 800 pages of authoritative-sounding-but-meaningless fluff, or something in between. But I’ll go with the last one.	Other reviews available online cover most of the ground from nearly every possible angle, so I’ll confine myself to a few, reasonably fresh, points. There is plenty positive to say about the book, but it’s all been said by others, so I’ll mostly steer away from praise, with the note that the entire book is a mixed bag. The only truly fresh point I have is really not substantive, but is interesting and perhaps shows some tendencies in the book. This is that Pinker makes a bizarre claim about table manners. First, Pinker states that historically people were terrified of being stabbed at the dinner table. Maybe. But in any case, to introduce this concept he spends a lot of time talking about how, as a child, he questioned the Western modern “pointless prohibition” in table manners against using one’s knife to move food onto one’s fork. He concludes that such a prohibition is a type of knife taboo preventing spontaneous stabbings at the dinner table. But I have never heard of such an etiquette prohibition. I cannot find any reference to it in any etiquette manual. I cannot find any reference to it on the Internet. In fact, all etiquette references to knife use I can find specifically REQUIRE using a knife to move food onto one’s fork, in lieu of fingers. As far as I can tell, this “rule” is purely a figment of Pinker’s imagination, and maybe an oddity around his house growing up. Why no editor questioned this, I don’t know. It doesn’t really undercut Pinker’s hypothesis in any material way, but it’s just strange, and maybe symptomatic. It’s important to note that for Pinker, violence means not only actions like war, homicide and assault, but more generally any cruel action with a physical component. For Pinker, war and torture are on the same continuum (though not the same thing) as corporal punishment of children and men having fistfights over insults. Reductions in both are considered progress, rather than the first group being considered progress and the second group being considered the sissification of a moribund society. In fairness, though, Pinker does have limits to this continuum—he concludes that some “reductions in violence,” like the elimination of dodgeball for children and the grossly inflated fears of child kidnapping, are silly and not progress at all. Pinker uses no primary sources and the secondary sources he uses are mostly popularizations, many of dubious accuracy, suggesting that he relies little on fresh research and puts his faith in fresh perspectives. Similarly, most of his analysis is analysis by anecdote. Yes, he does have a fair amount of statistics in the first part of the book. But those statistics are confined to two general groups: improvements in European civilization (largely taken, with full attribution, from Clark’s “A Farewell To Alms”), and the prevalence and damages of war. Other than that, it is anecdotes all the way down. And as Lincoln apocryphally said of Spiritualists, for people who like that sort of thing, it’s just about the sort of thing they’d like. But the result is, as with Spiritualism, much of what Pinker has to say is less proof than belief. And to be clear: Pinker’s conclusions are, fundamentally, predicated on his belief system. For Pinker, his belief system has two related pillars: that religion is evil, and that progress is inevitable, as long as we realize that religion is evil. Pinker is a big believer, whether he admits it or not, in the Whig view of history. He views its driver as the removal of religion from human life. In Pinker’s rosy view of the future, everything (at least in European-origin societies) is getting more moral, as people realize that morality has nothing to do with religion, but automatically arises from “the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games.” Of course, Pinker’s desired end state of empathy, minimal violence, and human happiness is exactly that prescribed by Christianity (and not, contrary to myth, by all religions). The Eschaton is nigh, says Pinker!—just without any eschatology. Pinker thinks that we can all ultimately behave like Francis of Assisi but be totally without religion. Maybe. If history is any guide, though, probably not—no atheist society has ever flourished on Earth. But hey—maybe the future will be different! There are many possible criticisms of Pinker’s belief system. One threshold criticism is that Pinker’s violent opposition to religion clouds his judgment badly. Pinker is very anti-religious, and not in an educated, thoughtful way, but in the same way the Ku Klux Klan is violently anti-Catholic. A second threshold criticism is that Pinker is entirely focused on Europe, and his core hypothesis, that we’re becoming less violent people, is confined entirely to advanced modern societies that are both European in their culture and Christian in their ethos, whether or not they are Christian in their observance. Pinker adduces little or no evidence, other than post World War II global statistics of wars, that non-European societies are becoming less violent, and he fails to consider alternative hypotheses for the reduced violence of European societies, such as that they are moribund and declining, in the Lotos Eater phase of their existence. (Again, to be fair, Pinker does draw a pretty clear picture of reduction in European intra-societal violence from 1200 or so on, long before anyone could claim European civilization became moribund as it is today.) Pinker’s obsession with demonstrating that religion only creates evil leads him into nearly continuous gross historical and logical errors. He repeats the silly canard (fabricated by 19th Century American Protestants to smear Roman Catholics) that Giordano Bruno was executed for believing in heliocentrism, a position accepted today by exactly nobody who knows anything (although repeated by noted flim-flam man Neil deGrasse Tyson in the recent re-make of “Cosmos”). He gullibly buys into the Black Legend hook, line and sinker. He actually cites for the cruelty of Pope Paul IV “the ‘Inquisition’ coffee table book.” He specifically cites, in-line with the text, as his major source for “the human toll . . . . in medieval and early modern Christendom” a book called “The Great Big Book of Horrible Things.” He confuses the First Crusade and the People’s Crusade. He cites the Anabaptists as “pacifist forerunners of today’s Amish and Mennonites,” apparently unaware of their activities in Munster (which would actually have reinforced his hypothesis). He explicitly equates as identical the judicial murder of Thomas More with random, on-the-spot beheadings of entire companies of dancing girls who displeased an Indian potentate. And on and on. Pinker says with a straight face “Christian ideology was hostile to any commercial practice or technological innovation that might eke more wealth out of a given stock of physical resources.” His source for this is a quote from popular historian Barbara Tuchman, to the effect that the medieval Church rejected interest and that St. Jerome said “a merchant can seldom or ever please God.” Of course, the cite lends little support to his conclusion, and the conclusion is ludicrous. In reality, the adoption of new commercial practices and technological changes up until the Renaissance was led by or cooperated with by religious entities, in large part to expand the productivity of the vast lands owned by the Church. These advances ranged from corporate, long-time-horizon management of land by monks to a wide variety of technological advances, such as improvements in plowing, threshing and grinding. Pinker also ignores that the medieval Church was the primary instrument of opposition to medieval violence. He talks about how the Church celebrated saints who were gruesomely martyred, implying that rather than being used to show heroism, such examples were somehow used to show how violence against others was good. He ignores the pacifism of the Church (complete until about 1000 A.D., incomplete thereafter, when feudalistic concepts infiltrated, leading in part to the Crusades). He ignores the Peace of God. And so forth. For Pinker, religion is an unmitigated bad, and when it is gone, we will all be happy and free. And he tailors his facts and analysis to fit his conclusion. On the other hand, even with its lacks, the book has many good points. It’s refreshing in its lack of ideology (apart from the ideology of atheism). Pinker does not shrink for ideological reasons from addressing unpleasant points. For example, when he talks about the decline in infanticide, he directly addresses whether it is correct to say infanticide has dropped at the same time that abortion has increased by at least the same amount, since abortion logically is indistinguishable from infanticide. (He concludes, in essence, that people don’t feel that abortion is infanticide, and anyway abortion rates have recently dropped too, which he interprets as reinforcing his hypothesis.) Most writers would have simply said that abortion is not the same thing as infanticide and moved on, afraid of being denounced by their liberal friends and no longer being invited to the right dinner parties.  At the same time, Pinker does manage to pretty frequently fall into occasional silly left-wing tropes. For example, when talking about the demonization of political opponents, he talks about the “victims of Communist atrocities”—but then feels obliged to add also “the victims of their opposite number, the right wing-dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Indonesia and El Salvador.” Equating 100 million people exterminated as part of a deliberate ideological program of Communism with maybe 100,000 killed in civil wars is silly, but pretty much par for the course among leftist types. But, to be fair, given his general ability to resist being politically correct, it’s hard to fault Pinker’s occasional lapses in this area. 	Finally, and oddly, most of the bad reviews on Amazon of Pinker’s book are not objecting to his anti-religious bigotry. Instead, they object to an underlying premise of his thesis—that prior to recorded history, violence was extreme and endemic. I had thought that this was unexceptional—all primitive societies were horrifically brutal and had stratospherically high rates of battle death. This has been common knowledge since Lawrence Keeley, using detailed anthropological data, exploded the myth of the Noble Savage. But apparently there are a large number of, or at least a small number of loud dead enders in this area, who maintain that pre-historical peoples were gentle, meek and mild, gathering nuts and berries hand-in-hand while singing paeans against sexism and racism, in contrast to eeeeevil modern societies. It’s really not worth even considering such silliness, but it’s interesting that fantasists of this sort exist and are willing to attach their names to their fantasies. Anyway—this book may be worth reading if you have a ton of extra time, or if you’re particularly interested in the topic. It has certain parallels to studies of the Great Divergence, and once you realize that what Pinker really means is that Europeans have reduced violence over time, leading to improved societies relative to the rest of the world’s societies, it has even more parallels. But unless you’re interested in reading this bookstop for some specialized reason, you’re probably better off spending your time doing something else.                   356 reviews389 followers     August 8, 2020   A lot of ink has already been spilled on the question of whether Pinker's claim that the violence of man has diminished enormously in the past centuries and especially in the past decades, is inaccurate or not; in other words whether the quantitative (statistical) support of this claim is correct. I am not able to judge the statistical aspect, but I am quite convinced by the material that he has put together, also in graphs (which he obviously always borrowed from others). What strengthens me in this conviction is that Pinker is very careful with that material, always indicating how reliable or unreliable the statistics are, sometimes warning for less strong numbers or for the interpretation given to the data. But it is absolutely impressive how Pinker substantiates and defends his theses, and also supplements them with narrative material (strong stories, which of course have a more subjective side, but make things more concrete; but also classic, narrative studies). The latter I find a commendable approach, to back up the statistical analyzes; it is a kind of methodological reality check, to see if the conclusions based on the numbers do reflect reality. Of course, this is not obvious, because the stock of narratives in theory is inexhaustible, but if this is done in a balanced and nuanced manner, then it is definitely an advantage, and that is certainly the case with Pinker.Here’s a quote that describes his central claim and at the same time indicates how cautious Pinker actually remains: : “The numbers tell us that war, genocide, and terrorism have declined over the past two decades – not to zero, but by a lot. A mental model in which the world has a constant allotment of violence, so that every cease-fire is reincarnated somewhere else as a new war, and every interlude of peace is just a time-out in which martial tensions build up and seek release, is factually mistaken. Millions of people are alive today because of the civil wars and genocides that did not take place but that would have taken place if the world had remained as it was in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The conditions that favored this happy outcome – democracy, prosperity, decent government, peacekeeping, open economies, and the decline of antihuman ideologies— are not, of course, guaranteed to last forever. But nor are they likely to vanish overnight.” Especially the final chapters, with an elaborate psychological analysis of man regarding good and evil, and in particular violence, sketches an anthropological image (not always very flattering) of man that offers a special added value to anyone who focuses on history, and especially the reasons of human behavior. Pinker dives quite deeply into the current state of science, and it requires some perseverence to follow the accumulation of hypotheses and experiments. But it is worthwhile as a historian to wrestle through this because it gives a fairly comprehensive picture of human existence that makes human action much easier to understand. Of course, Pinker places himself very clearly in a context of progress, based on the use of reason. You may have reservations about that, but I always find it a plus when an author puts his arguments on the table, open for scrutiny. And Pinker does so! Absolutely recommended reading.     anthropology global-history world-history               1,320 reviews456 followers     August 26, 2019   "The Better Angels of our Nature" is an impressive intellectual feat, and the snarky tone was entertaining, but it was a bit like reading the phone book (800 pages of lists within lists). Despite the size of Pinker's tome, the nitty-gritty of peace-making is given short shrift, even though I think this is the most important issue.I don't care too much about the decline in violence over many centuries. I already don't want to live in the Middle Ages, and I couldn't if I wanted to. What matters for all of us living today is whether the current "long peace" is sustainable, and on this Pinker disappoints.  The answer to this question requires a thorough analysis of why it is currently so unimaginable that, for example, Germany would attack France, as it did in WWI and WWII. A tremendous amount of active, deliberate effort was put into fighting the entropy that would make that possible, but Pinker glosses over this with abstractions. There's a huge story to tell about everything from the Marshall Plan to the European Union to soccer matches b/w sister cities in neighboring countries.  I'm not a professional historian so I can't address some of the other critiques on Goodreads about whether this book is all B.S. or not.                   1,015 reviews1,163 followers      Read  August 1, 2012   Pinker has disappointed me for so long that it is no surprise to me to discover that this is the work of a charlatan. Here on goodreads try David Giltinan's review .But also http://www.zcommunications.org/realit... is worthy of a read. Is his basic message pretty much that if first world white people aren't dying, then violence is decreasing? And has this been greeted with great approbation in - ummm - the first white world? Oh deary me.     haven-t-read-but sociology
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Decli…
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13543093-the-better-angels-of-our-nature
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/835623.How_the_Mind_Works
How the Mind Works
1997-01-01
Author
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 Language and Human Nature Tetralogy #2

 How the Mind Works

 Steven Pinker

 3.99
 20,438 ratings 675 reviews
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 In this extraordinary bestseller, Steven Pinker, one of the world's leading cognitive scientists, does for the rest of the mind what he did for language in his 1994 book, The Language Instinct . He explains what the mind is, how it evolved, and how it allows us to see, think, feel, laugh, interact, enjoy the arts, and ponder the mysteries of life. And he does it with the wit that prompted Mark Ridley to write in the New York Times Book Review , "No other science writer makes me laugh so much. . . . [Pinker] deserves the superlatives that are lavished on him." The arguments in the book are as bold as its title. Pinker rehabilitates some unfashionable ideas, such as that the mind is a computer and that human nature was shaped by natural selection, and challenges fashionable ones, such as that passionate emotions are irrational, that parents socialize their children, and that nature is good and modern society corrupting. Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize A New York Times Notable Book of the Year and Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1997 Featured in Time magazine, the New York Times Magazine , The New Yorker , Nature , Science, Lingua Franca , and Science Times Front-page reviews in the Washington Post Book World , the Boston Globe Book Section , and the San Diego Union Book Review
 Genres Psychology Science Nonfiction Neuroscience Philosophy Brain Biology
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 660 pages, Paperback

 First published January 1, 1997

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 About the author

 Steven Pinker

 63 books 9,942 followers
 Steven Arthur Pinker is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science. Pinker is known for his wide-ranging explorations of human nature and its relevance to language, history, morality, politics, and everyday life. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as the New York Times, Time, and The New Republic, and is the author of numerous books, including The Language Instinct , How the Mind Works , Words and Rules , The Blank Slate , The Stuff of Thought , The Better Angels of Our Nature , The Sense of Style , and most recently, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress .

 He was born in Canada and graduated from Montreal's Dawson College in 1973. He received a bachelor's degree in experimental psychology from McGill University in 1976, and then went on to earn his doctorate in the same discipline at Harvard in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, then became an assistant professor at Harvard and then Stanford University. From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. (Except for a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1995-6.) As of 2008, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard.

 Pinker was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in 2004 and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in 2005. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv, McGill, and the University of Tromsø, Norway. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003. In January 2005, Pinker defended Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, whose comments about the gender gap in mathematics and science angered much of the faculty. On May 13th 2006, Pinker received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.

 In 2007, he was invited on The Colbert Report and asked under pressure to sum up how the brain works in five words – Pinker answered "Brain cells fire in patterns."

 Pinker was born into the English-speaking Jewish community of Montreal. He has said, "I was never religious in the theological sense... I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew." As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969. His father, a trained lawyer, first worked as a traveling salesman, while his mother was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has two younger siblings. His brother is a policy analyst for the Canadian government. His sister, Susan Pinker, is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and the author of The Sexual Paradox and The Village Effect .

 Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too divorced. He is married to the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, the author of 10 books and winner of the National Medal of the Humanities. He has no children.

 His next book will take off from his research on "common knowledge" (knowing that everyone knows something). Its tentative title is: Don't Go There: Common Knowledge and the Science of Civility, Hypocrisy, Outrage, and Taboo .

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 3.99
 20,438 ratings 675 reviews
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 Kalliope
 691 reviews 22 followers
 April 14, 2014

 This morning while swimming I thought of this book. And I thought also of a conversation I had recently with a friend. We were talking about human consciousness.

 Swimming is a perfect thing to do when thinking about consciousness. While sliding along the water we are deprived of many things, in particular of the full powers of our senses. There is very little to hear; smellandtaste are also kept at bay; what we can look at is reduced to a wall and a straight line on the floor of the pool; and the pleasant and refreshing water assuages our touch. So, even if we stop being ourselves since we are not in our natural medium, we can however only be ourselves.

 Consciousness runs galore.

 I actually read this book a while ago, and I did so also some time after I interrupted my studies in neurobiology. I had to stop because of personal reasons. But I remember two things clearly about this book.

 The first is that It was an excellent summary of what was known about the brain when the book was published, and which I had been studying in more detailed textbooks. Alas, I have not kept with further advances, but my guess is that it is still a very relevant read today.

 The study is very well structured as a survey of the various considerations on how the mind works, and it is written in a very engaging style. It is also engaging because it addresses our immediate and commonsensical concerns about how our mind works. Why we forget, how do we recognize faces, what falling in love may entail, what it is to laugh.. etc.

 The best part was the chapter on vision, may be because to me that is one of the most magical powers of our brain. How it can process what our light detecting organs perceive, and create vision in its rear part is a phenomenon that defies our senses.

 Pinker does not deal with language in this book because he devoted another book, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language which I have not read yet. He designed them to complement each other.

 The second thing I remember is the conclusion.

 After examining scientifically the various abilities of the brain, Pinker finally gets to the idea of Consciousness, the most perplexing aspect of the brain. But then he gives up and admits that our human capacities are unable to understand how consciousness has come to be, nor what it is. He proposes that probably only an entity with higher abilities than those of our brain would be able to look down upon human Consciousness and understand what it is (does he mean a god, or a machine, or martians?).

 Of course, so far he is completely right. No one has, as yet, been able to explain Consciousness satisfactorily, and it has been approached from a myriad of fields. Is Consciousness created or has it evolved?. Is it only in our bodies, and therefore mortal, or can it transmigrate?. What is it anyway?

 So, the missing star is not because of what Pinker has written in this book but for its title. He does not really explain, fully, what he promises: how our mind works.


 In any case, I am going swimming tomorrow again, and my Consciousness is delighted with the idea, even if it does not know what it-self is.
 popular-science
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 Mikael Lind
 179 reviews 54 followers
 May 27, 2015
 The book does not lack good qualities, but I generally dislike the technique of argumentation that is too often characterized by poor proof backed by a certain arrogance towards alternative explanations. The chapter on the sexes is particularly shoddily presented. The "proof" that Pinker refers to when trying to back his claims that (simply put) evolution and innateness alone explain the differences between the sexes when it comes to attitudes to sex (the male hunter/gatherer has logically a greater chance of spreading his genes since he doesn't have to carry the baby for nine months, and so on) is based on polls filled out by university students. That these students are also caught up in a social reality doesn't seem to have crossed Pinker's mind.

 Good scholars know where to draw the boundaries between science and speculation. Chomsky has said that one can learn more about human nature from reading a novel than from scientific psychology. In other words, he knows that his scientific field is limited to a certain aspect of human nature and language, and thus doesn't try to explain more than can be deducted by reasoning from the facts presented. (One can have opinions as to how successful Chomskyan linguistic science actually is, but that's another matter.) Certainly, Pinker is allowed to speculate, as is any scientist. The problem is that Pinker's speculations are sometimes presented as truths. Therefore, this book does, despite some interesting facts being presented in it, leave me with a bitter taste in my mouth.
 cognitive-science
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 Chrissie
 2,811 reviews 1,443 followers
 April 7, 2017
 I started this, listened to 3.5 hours of the audiobook’s total of 26 and simply couldn’t imagine continuing. The first chapter (2.5 hours), which the author calls an “opening brief”, can in simple terms be seen as an introduction. This introduction was not concise; it was rambling and consisted of mundane generalizations. It did not clarify how the book would be organized nor in precise terms what the author wished to show. Nothing enticed me to continue.

 To better understand the field of cognitive science I am looking for a book based on solid scientific backing, not one based on speculation. I want at least a modicum of solid proof for what is being claimed, and I found not one smidgeon of that here.

 There was an excessive amount of criticism of other scientists’ views while at the same time the author’s own views were not made clear.

 I disliked the manner in which the author gave an enormous number of examples which supposedly were meant to prove the generalizations made. Many examples proved nothing. They referred to movie figures, characters in fiction, objects we use in our daily life and further generalizations about human behavior. The list of examples drowned out the statement that was to be proven.

 Even in the first introductory chapter there were statements made the validity of which can be debated. We are told that humans today no longer worry about robots / computer programs being made that function better than man. That is not true! In the news recently was a debate about the inequitable use of artificial intelligence programs.

 So I finished the unwieldy, long-winded, empty first introductory chapter and moved on to the second. Before quitting the book I wanted to check if perhaps the style of writing altered. It did not.

 The narration by Mel Foster started off too fast, but I got used to it. At one point I set the speed down to 75%, and that was too slow! Sentences become distorted. In a book such as this a listener needs time to consider what is being said so they can themselves evaluate what they are being told.

 The rambling, chatty writing style, the multitude of generalizations and the lack of both conclusive evidence and scientific backing are not what I am looking for. If I do not want to read a book, this says clearly that I did not like that which I read. I am giving this one star.
 audible-us disliked dnf
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 David Rubenstein
 822 reviews 2,664 followers
 December 30, 2010
 This is a truly comprehensive treatment of the human mind. Pinker delves deeply into the reasons why the mind has evolved to make decisions in the way it does. There is very little discussion about the biology of the brain; the book points out that a good understanding of the origins of human behavior requires descriptions at a higher level--at the level of the mind, and how it evolved through natural selection. Pinker shows how natural selection has worked its way into every nook and cranny of the mind ... absolutely fascinating. Every chapter goes into great detail about how our belief system developed, our vision, our reasoning abilities, our family structures, and our emotions. Pinker describes how our minds are similar to computers and neural networks, and how they are different. I've read other books by Pinker, and they are all great. Highly recommended to every human with a mind!
 biology philosophy psychology
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 Joshua Nomen-Mutatio
 333 reviews 945 followers
 May 16, 2009
 I think this a great way of addressing a widespread misunderstanding about genetics, biological evolution and human thought & behavior.

 Slight background story: I was having a discussion with a guy on goodreads.com within his comments on his review of Why I Am Not A Muslim and eventually it came to this:

 Myself: "It’s a categorical mistake to think this about biological evolution. To put it bluntly: our genes are selfish, but we are not (not necessarily, unconditionally so at least)."

 Him: "One last question, so how are we different than our genes?"

 And my reply and the whole point of this post:

 This may sound mean, but it’s simple. You are not a gene, nor am I. We’re animals, unique and beautiful and ugly and all qualities in between, both as a species and as individuals.

 Here’s an explanation though:

 "But almost everyone misunderstands this theory. Contrary to popular belief, the gene-centered theory of evolution does not imply that the point of all human striving is to spread our genes. With the exception of the fertility doctor who artificially inseminated patients with his own semen, the donor to the sperm bank for Nobel Prize winners, and other kooks, no human being (or animal) strives to spread his or her genes. Dawkins explained the theory in a book called The Selfish Gene , and the metaphor was chosen carefully. People don’t selfishly spread their genes, genes selfishly spread themselves. They do it by the way they build our brains. By making us enjoy life, health, sex, friends, and children, the gene buys a lottery ticket for representation in the next generation, with odds that were favorable in the environment in which we evolved. Our goals are subgoals of the ultimate goal of the genes, replicating themselves. But the two are different. As far as we are concerned, our goals, conscious or unconscious, are not about genes at all, but about health and lovers and children and friends."

 That seems to be enough to get the point across, but I think this is such a good point that I’ll type the next paragraph up as well:

 "The confusion between our goals and genes’ goals has spawned one muddle after another. A reviewer of a book about the evolution of sexuality protests that human adultery, unlike the animal equivalent, cannot be a strategy to spread genes because adulteres take steps to prevent pregancy. But whose strategy are we talking about? Sexual desire is not people’s strategy to progagate their genes. It’s people’s strategy to attain the pleasures of sex, and the pleasures of sex are the genes strategy to propagate themselves. If the genes don’t get propagated, it’s because we are smarter than they are. A book on the emotional life of animals complains that if altruism according to biologists is just helping kin or exchanging favors, both of which serve the interests of one’s genes, it would not really be altruism after all, but some kind of hypocrisy. This too is a mix up. Just as blueprints don’t necessarily specify blue buildings, selfish genes don’t necessarily specify selfish organisms. As we shall see, sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is build a selfless brain. Genes are a play with in a play, not the interior monologue of the players."

 -Steven Pinker, How The Mind Works , pp. 43-44

 Also, for anyone interested in listening to the audiobook version:

 http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list...

 The reader sounds like one of those prototypical 1950's or 60's educational film narrators. It works pretty well.

 cognitive-science-and-or-psychology evolutionary-theory neuroscience
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 Amirography
 198 reviews 118 followers
 April 22, 2017
 This book was an amazing read!
 I cannot get around the fact that it was written by one person, let alone one person with a lot of other books on the same topic, and yet more provocative each time.

 I loved the detailed and comprehensive outlook on each subject matter.

 It is not a textbook, It is a long essay that gives you a rational, up-to-date, coherent, general yet accurate, A frame for thinking about mind, cognition, and emotions, and also changes our day-to-day worldview about people in general."

 The only complaint I have is that this book could have used more hierarchical structure.
 cognitive-science favorites philosophy
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 Michael
 1,094 reviews 1,816 followers
 September 8, 2012
 This is a very readable and influential synthesis of the cognitive science view of the mind with that of evolutionary psychology. The overall thrust is that the mind is a neural computer closely governed by feelings and desires that were shaped by natural selection for their adaptive value in the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of our ancestors. The book is lively, with lots of down to earth examples. He holds your hand when wading through many technical subjects, faces disputes in a non-dogmatic way, and addresses political spins on scientific matters in a forthright way.

 The heft and scope of the volume is daunting. Yet it is written to be accessible to the general reader as well as scholars. As the emphasis is on synthesis and not a unifying novel theory of mind dependent on the cohesion of all its parts, I feel that the average reader could benefit from reading only the chapters of interest to them. There are sections on visual perception, neural network modeling, passionate emotions, social behaviors, and cultural innovations. As with Wilson’s “Sociobiology”, many readers will be interested in what he has to say about biological roots of human violence, sexual behavior, family values, and the arts. This includes accounts of adaptive values for lying, self delusion, war, mass murder, rape, pornography, parent-child and sibling conflict, altruism, love, marriage, and friendship. Particularly fascinating is his coverage of the cross-cultural phenomenon of people going “amok” and tie-in with the “doomsday machine” theory of passionate emotions, the adaptive value of which lies in their service as “guarantors of threats and promises”.

 He makes a good argument that thinking conforms to a kind of language, or mentalese, with categorical, syntactical, and generative properties aligned with Chomsky’s conceptions. He places a big emphasis on the role of beliefs and desires in his perspective on the core properties of human intellect. He doesn’t hold out much hope in the explanatory potential of neuroscience, considering models at that level an inadequate reductionism: "Even if neuroscientists someday decode the entire wiring diagram of the brain, human behavior makes the most sense when it was explained in terms of beliefs and desires, not in terms of volts and grams. Physics provides no insight into the machinations of a crafty lawyer, and even fails to enlighten us about many simpler acts of living things." I agree that explanations at the level physics will not help understand the mind, but I feel hopeful that neuroscience can make much progress in merging biological and psychological models. As this book was written in 2007, it misses the neurological synthesis of the computational and emotional aspects of the mind achieved by Damasio in his 2009 book and the decade of great ferment in cognitive neuroscience due to studies using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging.

 No matter how much it looks like he is on the pathway to biological determinism for so many “bad” human behaviors, he takes great pains to dissociate our inherited mental equipment from our systems of moral responsibility and vision of equal rights: "To understand is not to forgive". For example, understanding a human tendency to revile other cultures does not excuse the Holocaust. Biological determinism for even liberal values can be misguided, e.g. “The argument against persecuting gay people must be made not in terms of the gay gene or the gay brain but in terms of people’s right to engage in private consensual acts without discrimination or harassment.” In the case of the male tendency to mate with any women they can, even to the point of rape, rather than agreeing with one of his students that the key conclusion is that “Men are slime!”, he feels they still should be swayed by morality: “If … men are especially tempted to commit certain crimes against women, the implication is that deterrents should be surer and more severe, not that the crimes are somehow less odious.” Pinker further argues that environmental determinism is just as unfruitful. He feels feminists’ stance against discrimination and oppression of women can do without the position that their origin lies in brainwashing of children and youth by media, pornography, and child rearing and educational practices.

 A refreshing aspect of Pinker’s book is that he makes very little claim to explaining free will and sentience. He also places a lot of advanced cultural accomplishments of humans, such as art, humor, and religion in a category of having no likely evolutionary adaptive value. He suspects that these capacities are “along for the ride” and that “human brains evolved by one set of laws, those of natural selection and genetics, and now interact with one another according to another set of laws, those of cognitive and social psychology, human ecology, and history”.
 neuroscience non-fiction philosophy
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 Brad Acker
 17 reviews 16 followers
 May 4, 2010
 This book frequently gets rave reviews. Whenever i sit down to read Pinker, i wish i were drinking again. Here is an example of a typical quotation from this book that i could only follow if i were drunk: "The cobalt 60 nucleus is said to spin counterclockwise if you look down on its north pole, but that description by itself is circular because 'north pole' is simply what we call the end of the axis from which a rotation looks counterclockwise." This is in the middle of a discussion, in which he puts down Richard Feynman, and concludes "God is not ambidextrous after all." I feel that Pinker presents his material in an annoyingly obtuse way and may be drinking when he writes. LOL
 11 likes
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 Lewis Weinstein
 Author 9 books 542 followers
 December 23, 2013
 impenetrable, repetitive, useless ... did I say I was disappointed?
 9 likes
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 Sajid
 445 reviews 91 followers
 July 25, 2021
 Long long book. Overburdened with information,but gives very little to the mind. It is a book about how our minds work. I was wondering while reading, does it really get to the point what it tries to explain? And i found very short amount of words motivated towards its motivation. After keeping me drawn to every opening chapters it deviates from its promise and becomes dull. There are so many things to skip which is because of Pinker's inability to understand what should be included in this book. Besides, so many things were incomprehensible(it was not my inability to comprehend) because Pinker wasn’t interested going with the context. What can i say more about a book where the writer blabbers for most of the part! And wouldn’t it be an irony if i try to blabber about a book because of its blabbering?
 I would just recommend this book to no one. If anybody wants to read regarding this subject matter of mind there are so many great books except this. So if you don't value your time(which i don't as well),read it anyhow.
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 Erwin
 362 reviews 69 followers
 January 9, 2012
 Very interesting. 20-30 years from now, I think most people will understand that there's nothing "magical" about the "mind", the "soul", religion, art, men, women, or any of the other sacred cows that continue to hold back humans from understanding themselves.

 How the Mind Works was published back in 1997, but I didn't encounter any of the points that Pinker made in High School or Collage, up until 2000. Pinker focuses on a "computational theory of mind", saying that the mind is a complex parallel information processing system.

 Of course Pinker doesn't have the "final word" on How the Mind Works, but he provides more evidence, more insight, and more rationality than the "romantics" and their leaders Freud Sigmund 1856-1939 Sigmund and Carl Jung .

 Pinker continues on many of the themes here in The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature .

 Unfortunately for Americans, Political Correctness seems to be a barrier to accurately seeing human nature, as human nature necessarily is different for different groups of people, particularly for men and women.

 My favorite anecdote is about the "Coolidge effect":

 … an old joke about Calvin Coolidge when he was President … The President and Mrs. Coolidge were being shown [separately] around an experimental government farm. When [Mrs. Coolidge] came to the chicken yard she noticed that a rooster was mating very frequently. She asked the attendant how often that happened and was told, “Dozens of times each day.” Mrs. Coolidge said, “Tell that to the President when he comes by.” Upon being told, President asked, “Same hen every time?” The reply was, “Oh, no, Mr. President, a different hen every time.” President: “Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge.”

 Pinker explains the mind by "reverse-engineering" it—figuring out what natural selection designed it to accomplish in the environment in which we evolved. The mind, he writes, is a system of "organs of computation" that allowed our ancestors to understand and outsmart objects, animals, plants, and each other.

 How the Mind Works explains many of the imponderables of everyday life. Why does a face look more attractive with makeup? How do "Magic-Eye" 3-D stereograms work? Why do we feel that a run of heads makes the coin more likely to land tails? Why is the thought of eating worms disgusting? Why do men challenge each other to duels and murder their ex-wives? Why are children bratty? Why do fools fall in love? Why are we soothed by paintings and music? And why do puzzles like the self, free will, and consciousness leave us dizzy?

 This arguments in the book are as bold as its title. Pinker rehabilitates unfashionable ideas, such as that the mind is a computer and that human nature was shaped by natural selection. And he challenges fashionable ones, such as that passionate emotions are irrational, that parents socialize their children, that creativity springs from the unconscious, that nature is good and modern society corrupting, and that art and religion are expressions of our higher spiritual yearnings.
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 Nebuchadnezzar
 39 reviews 388 followers
 April 14, 2010
 The title of the book should have read "How the Mind Works (According to Steven Pinker)." The picture he paints is not wrong, per se, but vastly overestimates the power of current cognitive modeling.

 There is quite a bit of good material here reviewing computational theory of mind, modularity, evolutionary psychology, and related material in cognitive science written in Pinker's usual conversational style. However, I have to hop off the bandwagon at the halfway point on this one. Sure, computational theory of mind has produced a lot of fruitful research. The mind is, to some degree, modular. The brain, like all our other organs, is shaped by evolution. My main problem is in his jump from the modularity at "low-level" cognition (e.g., basic sensory input, certain parts of language) posited by Jerry A. Fodor to "massive modularity." There are some functions that are very localized in the brain that fit with modularity, but we would expect the brain to look very different if massive modularity were true. The brain is actually very plastic with many higher-order functions that aren't strictly localized. The same thing goes for his evolutionary explanations. I will happily agree that many cognitive systems and functions are adaptive -- having eyes and a visual system is obviously beneficial! When it comes to more complex social behaviors, we're in far more speculative territory.

 As an introduction to cognitive science, it does present the material in an accessible way. However, it will be difficult to for the layperson to pick apart where Pinker's description is backed by solid evidence and where it lapses into questionable claims and rank speculation. There's a bit of fluff, too, especially near the end when it begins to cross over into the more overt political rambling characteristic of The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature .

 Fodor's The Mind Doesn't Work That Way: The Scope and Limits of Computational Psychology ( http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/Fodo... ) makes for a decent corrective, though I have problems with it as well. I'm in total agreement on one point with Fodor, though: When it comes to cognitive science, we're just getting started.
 evolutionary-psychology philosophy-of-mind psychology-and-neuroscience
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 Deniz Cem Önduygu
 64 reviews 51 followers
 December 12, 2022
 So many great paragraphs that they make up for a few places where he gets lazy and spells out conventions. As the number of notes I took goes, this book is a winner; in addition to all its original content, it has the best summaries I've encountered of many complex ideas/theories. He is remarkably devastating against standard social sciences and postmodernist thinking.

 The book may get a little monotone in the technical chapters, but it's a must-read for anyone interested in psychology, evolution, nature-nurture debates, or mundane questions like "Why do men and women want different things?".

 I just wish he was more open to the meme theory; then he could be perfect.
 biology favorites mind
 ...more
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 Farha Crystal
 45 reviews 63 followers
 July 3, 2018
 What parts of the brain create awareness? Are we really aware of ourselves? Why has the mind evolved to make decisions in the way it does? why do we really laugh at a joke? Why does a face look more attractive with makeup? Why does our brain drive us to enjoy sex? Why is the thought of eating worms disgusting? Why do paintings and music alleviate the hunger and thurst of mind? Why did we invent religion, music and art? How did these items adapt in the long run if it serves to nothing from an evolutionary perspective?

 ... ... ...

 The book covers the computational theory of mind (mind is the computational product of the brain) and evolutionary psychology. There is a very little discussion about the biology of the brain but it still ponders over human natures to explain them from the biological adaptations and the by-product of evolution perspectives.

 The book was published over 20 years ago but Pinker is an engaging writer. So, at least the connecting experience with a first-rate mind might not be frustrating :)
 steven-pinker
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 Nicholas Whyte
 4,914 reviews 191 followers
 Read
 December 23, 2009
 " http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1289334.html [return][return]I was really disappointed by this book. Pinker starts out by claiming that he will explain the origins of human emotions, aesthetics, and belief in the context of the latest findings of evolutionary and psychological research. He does not really succeed in doing so. It is a succession of moderately interesting research reports, linked together with a glue of neat one-liners (mostly other people's), but without really coming to a killer conclusion and indeed occasionally resorting to sheer polemic (eg on gender). The section on neural networks is particularly dull, especially as Pinker admits that living brains don't actually function that way. [return][return]I found precisely two points of interest in the book, both pretty tangential to the main thrust of the argument. First, of interest only to those who also know her, is that an old family friend is mentioned in passing on the development of children's minds. Second, of more general interest, is the observation that all cultures tend to design ornamental gardens with unconscious reference to the primeval African savannah - lawns and flowerbeds interrupted by carefully placed features. Rather a pleasing thought! This observation is not Pinker's own, but he does give pretty full citations for it which the interested reader can follow up.[return][return]I hear that Pinker's other books are better, so shall continue to look out for them though without particular enthusiasm."
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 Dawn
 421 reviews 4 followers
 August 31, 2009
 Let's be honest. I will probably never pick up this book to finish it. I began reading this because of my book club. But, I didn't think I would finish it to begin with, and due to many circumstances, the book club will not be meeting for this book. So, I have decided to put it down as one of those books I'll never finish.

 I didn't like most of what I read, not due to the subject/topic, but due to the way Pinker writes. His droning on on tangents and his shoving his philosophy, which is oh so right BTW [she said dripping with sarcasm:] was too much for me. I had a hard time staying interested, which was a shame, because most sections began with promise. But Pinker would, more often than not, find a way to make the topic at hand induce heavy eyelids (or eye rolling, depending).

 I wanted this book to be good and thought it would be interesting, being a Bachelor of Psychology graduate myself, but no such luck. Maybe in many years, when I have more time on my hands, or less sense, I will try picking this book up again.
 book-club-selection own
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 Gendou
 605 reviews 311 followers
 December 16, 2014
 This book covers the computational theory of mind and evolutionary psychology. The former asserts that the mind is the computational product of the brain. The later examines how many aspects of human nature can be explained as biological adaptations. Both are crucial to understanding how the mind works. Both are explained in exquisite depth (read: this is a very long book).

 Pinker gets one thing wrong at the end when he asserts what's known as the the "hard problem of consciousness" which his refers to as sentience. He also makes a misstatement about free will.

 "Sentience is not a combination of brain events or computational states."

 "Free will is not a causal chain of events and states by definition."

 This is frustrating because I feel like he ran a 3 minute mile but stopped just shy of the finish line!

 He's wrong on both counts. For more read Freedom Evolves by Daniel Dennett.
 biology non-fiction
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 Rita T
 2 reviews 3 followers
 February 5, 2008
 I read all bio-determinist arguments, no matter how sound their science, as a mandate to return to the 50's - those halcyon days when men schnoockered their secretaries while women bought canned foods and tended the young. Nonetheless, I loved this book. The early chapters, especially on the computational theory of mind, are incredible. Pinker is just unbelievably detailed and the linguistic spin he brings to the discussion of cognitive development is a great dimension. The later chapters are more of the men-like-variety-women-like-providers stuff that one usually hears but nuanced and entertaining nonetheless. I enjoyed this book a lot.
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 Isabelle
 54 reviews
 April 10, 2023
 4.5/5. The minus half star is for the amount of Woody Allan references. Fuck that guy.

 That aside tho, great summary of my cognitive science degree so far. Could've saved me a couple classes tbh.
 Aside from the strictly biological facts / cognitive theories: had some interesting asides about how we can or should combine (or sometimes detach) science from morality and ethics. Don't know where I stand in all of those points yet but good to think about.
 science
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 Joshua Stein
 213 reviews 154 followers
 October 15, 2008
 Pinker's treatise on the naturalist mind looks like a science textbook, but the combination of computer programming and physiology laid on top of sociological metaphors and applicable understandings makes it a fantastic read. His ability to diffuse archaic arguments about the nature of the mind without appearing argumentative is what defines him as a great academic, and his ability to explain things to individuals with only a high school education (like me) is what defines him as a great writer.

 The assaults on the superstitions of Freud are particularly interesting, and his breaking down of the purely linguistic issue of Searle's "Chinese Box" problem leads you to come to the same conclusion that Pinker does as Pinker is unfolding the problem.

 Anyone who likes to study the nature of mind, who enjoys reading authors ranging from Dennett to Proust will like this book, and those who like to discuss the topics will find themselves better informed and far more capable of explaining things with Pinker's metaphors.
 mind philosophy
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 Rakan
 126 reviews 65 followers
 January 29, 2011
 في هذا الكتاب يتحدث ستيفن بنكر أستاذ العلوم الإدراكية وعالم النفس بشكل أساسي عن نظرية العقل الحسابية
 computational theory of the mind

 بالعربي، الرجل يتحدث عن العقل (ليس المخ) من وجهة نظر أخرى غير اعتيادية. وجهة نظر تطورية. فيفسر العمليات الادراكية داخل العقل بقوى تطورية (داروينية) وبقوانين حاسويبة.

 النظريات التي طرحها وتحدث عنها بنكر رائعة وطريقة شرحها أروع
 قد يكون عنوان الكتاب مضلل بعض الشي. لكنه كتاب يستحق القراءة
 science
 4 likes
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 Marcin Milkowski
 Author 5 books 7 followers
 March 3, 2018
 This book is way too long, and the last part (about philosophy) is fairly ill-informed. The most surprising thing is that cognitive psychology is limited to perception and the imagery debate; no discussion of memory, very limited discussion of reasoning, not to mention planning or motor planning. For today's standards, it's outdated by David Buss's text on evolutionary psychology.
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 Kerem Cankocak
 78 reviews 59 followers
 July 16, 2017
 Harika bir kitap. Pinker müthiş bir yazar..
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 Alex
 146 reviews 9 followers
 October 10, 2020
 VALUTAZIONE PERSONALE: 3,4

 How Mind Works é senza dubbio uno dei saggi più lunghi e corposi che mi sia capitato di leggere: ho impiegato moltissimo tempo a terminarlo, un po' a causa dei mille impegni che, purtroppo, riducono sempre più il tempo da dedicare alla lettura, un po' per la sua lunghezza e, perché no, per la noia che alcune sezioni del libro mi hanno trasmesso, in particolar modo i primi capitoli, sebbene, col senno di poi, é risultato evidente che siano quelli più importanti e significativi nell'esporre al lettore la teoria di base dell'autore circa il funzionamento della mente umana.

 Per i suddetti motivi, giunto al termine di questo libro, mi ritrovo senza dubbio in difficoltà nel ricordare tutti i passaggi: posso tuttavia cogliere il nocciolo della questione e sintetizzare dicendo che alla base di tutte le considerazioni che l'autore espone al lettore vi é la teoria computazionale della mente . A cosa si riferisce, nella sostanza? Non mi resta che citare direttamente un passo del libro:

 "Lo speciale status del cervello deriva dalla sua speciale funzione, che ci permette di vedere, pensare, provare sensazioni, scegliere e agire. Questa funzione speciale è l’elaborazione di informazioni, o computazione. Informazione e computazione risiedono in pattern, o configurazioni, di dati e in rapporti di logica che sono indipendenti dal medium fisico che li trasporta. Quando telefono a mia madre in un’altra città, il messaggio rimane lo stesso che va dalle mie labbra alle sue orecchie, anche se cambia forma fisica: da aria in vibrazione a elettricità in un filo, a cariche nel silicio, a luce guizzante in un cavo a fibre ottiche, a onde elettromagnetiche, e ritorno seguendo il percorso inverso. Analogamente, il messaggio rimane lo stesso quando, dopo aver cambiato forma nella sua testa diventando una cascata di neuroni che si attivano e di sostanze chimiche che si diffondono attraverso sinapsi, lei lo ripete a mio padre seduto sul lato opposto del divano. Allo stesso modo, un dato programma può correre su computer fatti di tubi a vuoto, commutatori elettromagnetici, transistor, circuiti integrati, o piccioni viaggiatori ben addestrati, e ottiene gli stessi risultati per le stesse ragioni. Tale intuizione, espressa per la prima volta dal matematico Alan Turing, dagli informatici Allen Newell, Herbert Simon e Marvin Minsky e dai filosofi Hilary Putnam e Jerry Fodor, è ora detta teoria computazionale della mente".

 Altro punto fondamentale é il seguente: l' ingegneria inversa .
 Ancora, per dirla con le sue stesse parole:

 "...la mente è un sistema di organi di computazione designato per selezione naturale a risolvere i problemi posti ai nostri antenati dalla loro condizione di cacciatori-raccoglitori, in particolare come capire e sfruttare oggetti, animali, piante e altre persone. Tale sintesi è scomponibile in più affermazioni. La mente è ciò che il cervello fa; in particolare, il cervello elabora informazioni, e pensare è una sorta di computazione. La mente è organizzata in moduli, o organi mentali, dotati ognuno di una specializzazione che ne fa un esperto in un singolo terreno d’interazione con il mondo. La logica base dei moduli è specificata dal nostro programma genetico. Il loro funzionamento si è modellato per selezione naturale in modo da risolvere i problemi della vita di cacciatori e raccoglitori condotta dai nostri antenati durante la maggior parte della nostra storia evoluzionistica. I vari problemi dei nostri antenati erano sottocompiti di un unico grande problema dei loro geni: massimizzare il numero di copie capaci di giungere alla generazione successiva. In quest’ottica, la psicologia è ingegneria inversa. Nell’ingegneria normale si costruisce una macchina per un certo scopo; nell’ingegneria inversa si cerca di capire per quale scopo una macchina è stata costruita. "

 Posso dunque concludere dicendo che tutti i più grandi aspetti della psicologia umana progressivamente esposti nei vari capitoli vengono affrontati ed elaborati tenendo conto dei due capisaldi precedentemente citati, e non vi sono dubbi che moltissimi passaggi sono estremamente stimolanti per il lettore e che, almeno personalmente, mi hanno "convinto" nella loro semplicità quanto efficacia propositiva.

 Tuttavia, alcune considerazioni mi hanno indotto a mantenere un atteggiamento tiepido, entusiasta ma al contempo sufficientemente distaccato e critico nei confronti di ciò che leggevo:

 1) How Mind Works é un libro estremamente datato (la prima edizione risale ai primi anni Novanta), soprattutto per i temi trattati: campi come la neurobiologia e la neuropsicologia sono in rapida evoluzione. Sebbene nella prefazione a questa edizione l' autore afferma che l'impianto generale del saggio continua ad essere valido, non sono sufficientemente edotto su queste materie e sui suoi più recenti sviluppi per poter credere acriticamente ad una affermazione simile;
 2) l'efficacia divulgativa di Pinker, su temi così opinabili e controversi, mi é parsa piuttosto limitata: non perché non sia capace nell'esporli ai non addetti ai lavori (sebbene alcuni passaggi non sono semplicissimi da capire per chi non ha almeno delle conoscenze basilari in questo campi, mentre altri li ho trovati mortalmente noiosi proprio per il modo in cui erano esposti), ma perché ho avuto l' impressione che l'autore non avesse potuto fare a meno di polemizzare, talvolta anche inopportunamente, con i suoi oppositori, nonché di apparire politically uncorrect ogni qualvolta se ne presentasse l' occasione.
 Insomma, non mi ha fatto impazzire il suo stile divulgativo, per dirla in breve.

 In conclusione, vale davvero la pena cimentarsi nella lettura di questo librone? Le idee proposte sono estremamente interessanti,e vale la pena approfondirle e tenerle in buona considerazione; il lavoro bibliografico é enorme e di certo non si può dire che sia qualitativamente scadente, tutt'altro.
 É "l'anzianità" del libro, nonché lo stile espositivo dell' autore ( sempre secondo il mio umilissimo parere) che fanno pendere la bilancia dal lato opposto: insomma, andrei sicuramente alla ricerca di un testo piú aggiornato e più efficace nell' esposizione di questi argomenti.
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 Христо Блажев
 2,331 reviews 1,581 followers
 December 13, 2011
 “Как работи умът”, чудото на еволюцията без цел според Стивън Пинкър
 http://www.knigolandia.info/2011/12/b...

 На първо място – за какво, по дяволите, се говори в тухлата “Как работи умът”. Всъщност за нещо простичко, както пише той още в началото:
 “…умът e сложна система за невронна обработка на информация, която изгражда мисловни модели на физическия и социалния свят и преследва цели, свързани по същността си с оцеляването и възпроизводството в една предмодерна среда”. Туйто. Пинкър се опира изцяло на еволюцията и математиката и изгражда стройна теория за появата на разума и неговото преимущество за разпространението на нашия вид до доминиращ на планетата. А че още в главите си сме в праисторията, това едва ли може да се отрече.
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 The Kekistani
 321 reviews 51 followers
 March 10, 2017
 Pinker hits the bull's eye in this book debunking the ill arguments of the nurture front in the nature nurture debate, on his way relentlessly takes down feminism, noble savage theory, blank slate and on the side veganism a bit dealing crushing blows with solid arguments and facts. A must read for those interested in behavioral research and debunking the patchouli scented romantic arguments of the left.
 favorites
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 Cassandra Kay Silva
 704 reviews 299 followers
 May 9, 2017
 Language provides a window into the history of society, but this book also helps show how it has both formed and is a part of our consciousness and our own experience. I think a huge range of people would enjoy this book for many many reasons. Perhaps the only genre that would struggle with it would be possibly the very religious. Otherwise pick it up and have a read you are going to love it!
 psychology-sociology science
 5 likes
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 Boris
 454 reviews 186 followers
 May 14, 2019
 2.5/5, много полезна информация, събрана на едно място. Шапки долу за труда да се събере и синтезира.
 Но... много куц писател :) не умее да разказва, но му пиша шест за умението да проучва и синтезира.
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 Rebee
 Author 2 books 3 followers
 February 19, 2018
 This book is out of date. I chose not to waste any more time listening to it when I realized it was written in the mid 1990's.
 abandoned audio-books
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 Xander
 440 reviews 156 followers
 July 30, 2017
 In this book, Steven Pinker describes our mind - more precisely: our mental faculties - as a complex set of algorithms, sculpted by natural selection. Pinker uses two theories - the computational theory of mind and the theory of evolution by natural selection - to accomplish this amazing feat.

 According to the computational theory of mind, our mental organs are composed of algorithms, built up out of simpler subroutines which are in turn built up out of subsubroutines. This goes all the way down to the most basic, simplest algorithms that are digital: yes/no, on/off, etc. What it means, in essence, is that we come equipped with pre-programmed mental software with which we perceive the world. This software works is based on certain assumptions - based on the stability and the continuity of physical laws - and it's in the moments that the assumptions don't hold that we are tricked or fooled by our own mind (i.e. cognitive illusions).

 The other building block of Pinkers story is evolution by natural selection. Evolution shaped all the organisms on this planet, including us. Homo sapiens is unique in its mental capabilities, even though our mind is just one way to solve the natural problems (some others being strong, quick, etc.). I think the theory of evolution by natural selection has been described by excellent writers such as Dawkins, Dennett, Ridley and Zimmer (not to mention Darwin himself, even though his theory of inheritence was flawed), so I will not dwell on it here.

 Now to Pinkers main thesis: to understand our mind, we have to reverse-engineer our mental organs. In other words: for every psychological trait or phenomenon we have to ask the question 'what was its adaptive function in our ancestors' environment?' It is precisely this question that cuts deep through the delusional paradigms of modern day academicians and intellectuals. The mantra is "culture determines who we are". In other words: men rape because they are raised in a culture that's hostile to women. Instead of letting ideology guide science, Pinker approaches the problem from a scientific viewpoint: first describing the facts, then using the simplest theory as possible to explain the data and after this making moral statements. Some examples:

 In the chapter on Family Values, Pinker tackles the conflicts of interests between parents and offspring, husbands and wives, men and women in general and siblings. He explains these conflicts in terms of different evolutionary strategies between men and women. It pays for men to seek out sex as much as possible; it pays for women to be very selective who to mate with. This is a biological truth that even feminists and neo-marxists/blank slaters can't deny. This fundamental difference leads to competition between men for sexual access to women and to the pursuit of looking young and fertile (i.e. beautiful) between women. One of the most overlooked facts that Pinker mentions in this chapter is that a lot of the incentives for war, rape and murder are sexual motives. Maybe the men joining the army are not so crazy after all: throughout history, one of the most important rewards of victorious armies has been the genocide of men and kids and the mass rape of women. Pinkers paradigm offers new insights into our urge for agression.

 But this is not all, Pinkers paradigm also offers new insights into our urge to have friends and seek out honest reputations. Evolutionary speaking, it paid to cooperate. The only problem is that this presupposes cheater-detection mechanisms, which are prone to be exploited. One of the most important parts of our social life is the earning of an honest reputation; this shows others that you are a reliable cooperator.

 A third interesting aspect was the chapter on vision. Pinker analyzes the geometry of paintings and other visual art forms. One of the common threads is the presence of open landscapes with a broad horizon and some places of shelter. This was the environment our ancestors evolved in, it explains our like for these sorts of paintings and surroundings and our dislike for thick forests and deserts.

 A fourth insight is the way how our ideas are formed. We come equipped with mental software to perceive the world - including the other minds in this world - and to make decisions. These algorithms are heuristic in nature. In other words: they are based on assumptions that normally held in our ancestors' environment. Sometimes we encounter situations where these assumptions don't hold and we fall prey to cognitive illusions. For example, it is commonly known that the frame in which a logical problem is placed determines the effectivity of our judgments.

 A final important subject to note is the function of our emotions. Our emotions guide are actions, they are the incentives that lead us to chase pleasure and avoid pain. The objects of pleasure and pain are goals, set by evolution. We enjoy sex because organisms (i.e. our ancestors) that enjoyed sex had more sex and thereby had more offspring than organisms that didn't enjoy sex. We enjoy certain foods because our ancestors enjoyed those foods - and those that didn't had less offspring. In a sense, Hume was right when he wrote "reason is the slave of our passions." Our passions motive us to seek out the things we enjoy and avoid the things we hate.

 To summarize: Pinker tries to show that by looking at our psychology as mental organs, consisting of algorithms, that were sculpted by natural selection in the past eons, we have a new paradigm to understand our mind. A paradigm based on two of the most accepted theories in science and one that excludes ideology. Only a realistic understanding of our mental constitution can lead us to appreciate what is good and what should be changed for the better. An informed ethics presupposes evolutionary psychology.

 Even though I completely agree with Pinker's message and am interested in evolutionary psychology, I can't really recommend this book to laypeople. It would be better, before reading How the Mind Works, to school yourself in evolutionary biology and psychology, because Pinker's style of explaining is not for the faint hearted; he makes use of many terms that presuppose a lot of prior knowledge about the subjects involved. And a thing that annoyed me is the sheer mass of this book: 660 pages. Some chapters contained 90+ pages, which is way too long (in my opinion).

 But I should not end this review on a sour note, this was a pleasant read and value the various insights I gained from this.

 On a sidenote: Pinker's treatment of free will and consciousness is confusing. On the one hand, he makes valuable distinctions. So when he deals with consciousness, he makes a distinction between self knowledge, access to information and sentience and explains that the first to senses are in theory explainable by science. This is helpful. On the other hand, Pinker offers no route to answers himself and seems to retreat in a very un-academic mindset with regard to these topics. So in the example of consciousness, even though the first two aforementioned senses are explainable in scientific terms, sentience is not. Even stronger: our mind has been shaped by natural selection to deal with everyday problems and situations, offering the solution to the riddle of sentience not being one of them. In other words: the problem of consciousness is unsolvable in principle and we should not waste any more intellectual effort on this futile search. A very un-scientific mindset. (In 1542 people thought the earth was the centre of the cosmos; in 1543 Copernicus showed the earth to be just another mass of iron orbiting the sun; in the 20th century we discovered that even our sun is not so special: we live in an increasingly expanding universe in which we are just a temporary spec of dust).
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How the Mind Works
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/835623.How_the_Mind_Works
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5752.The_Blank_Slate
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
2002-01-01
Author
<div><div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/95099-jenn-pellerin"></a></section><section><p>26 reviews29 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/23612056">June 5, 2008</a></section><div><p>I'm an atheist. I've always been and always will be (god willing). When I was a kid, I used to envy the religious folks who seemed to be having such deep meaningful fun all the time. It's not that I hate religion, or the idea of god, it's just that I can't really get my mind around it after a childhood devoid of spirituality. Newsflash: if you don't take a lot for granted, religious theory makes NO SENSE. The only place I've ever found deeper meaning is in biology and physics and neurology. SO...<br />reading this book is as close as I've come to a "religious experience". Reading about the evolution of the human mind, and how our basic drives--and the complex mechanisms we've developed to serve them--manifest themselves within culture, and simultaneously CREATE culture...it's just...positively uplifting. Thinking of human nature in this way makes me appreciate everything "human" in a much deeper sense. Music sounds better, machines are blowing my mind, babies are tiny geniuses! Hell, I may even read some poetry. How about THAT?<br />I would recommend this book to everyone I know. It's just thick enough that some paragraphs warrant a second going over, but just engaging enough that it won't leave you frustrated and bored. </p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/95099?shelf=science-and-brains">science-and-brains</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/3583387-nebuchadnezzar"></a></section><section><p>39 reviews361 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/98412263">March 16, 2012</a></section><div><p>I contend that there are two Steven Pinkers. Pinker 1 is an eloquent, witty, and insightful writer on the issues of cognitive psychology and linguistics who has the rare talent of making his subjects accessible and appealing to academic and lay audiences. Pinker 2 retains the writing ability, but instead uses it for pushing his pet theories, usually political in nature (cf. his most recent Better Angels of Our Nature). This book comes straight from the pen of Pinker 2.<p>There are really two main components of the book: Lengthy rants against his ideological opponents and an extended argument in favor of a watered-down hereditarian view of human nature. Pinker rightly notes that "nature vs. nurture" is a false dichotomy and then goes about ascribing enormous amounts of deterministic power to genes. He relies on a number of controversial and dubious sources as well as his own misinterpretations of some research, such as Bouchard's infamous twin studies.</p><p>Lacking actual examples of those who hold this "blank slate" view, Pinker dredges up some long dead academics to serve as a scarecrow. He rails against J.B. Watson and B.F. Skinner, even though his intellectual hero Noam Chomsky rebutted Skinner and behaviorism in general in the 1960s. Next he'll be telling us Lamarck was wrong about evolution! He also engages in some tired Margaret Mead-bashing typical of sociobiology/evolutionary psychology partisans by citing Derek Freeman's "debunking" of Mead. Pinker missed the memo that Freeman's work was subsequently discredited (see Paul Shankman's <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/7112328.The_Trashing_of_Margaret_Mead_Anatomy_of_an_Anthropological_Controversy">The Trashing of Margaret Mead</a>).</p><p>Pinker astutely points out that proponents of environmental or cultural determinism do not associate these theories with the horrors of communism (Lysenko famously denounced genetics as a "bourgeois pseudoscience"), but they do associate biological theories with eugenics and Nazism. However, in general, Pinker unleashes a firestorm on a field of straw men. Some of his more contemporary "blank slaters" are so-called "gender feminists," whatever those are. (Everyone except Christina Hoff Sommers?) Demonstrating that he's willing to slurp up just about any "finding" in pop evolutionary psychology, he offers an extended defense of Thornhill and Palmer's <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/220535.A_Natural_History_of_Rape_Biological_Bases_of_Sexual_Coercion">A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion</a>. The defense parrots the authors' framing of the controversy, with Thornhill and Palmer as the hard-headed, rational scientists telling the cold hard truths versus the hordes of fluffy-headed, irrational, emotional, and "politically correct" feminists. Any mention of the scathing reviews the book met in the scientific press (see Cheryl Brown Travis's edited volume <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/1646635.Evolution__Gender__and_Rape">Evolution, Gender, and Rape</a>) is omitted or given cursory treatment. Pinker uses pop evo psych in a number of other places as a means to club over the head the bogeywoman of gender feminism. This generally seems to involve projecting modern gender roles and stereotypes back into pre-history based on rank speculation. Simon Blackburn put it best: "Meet the Flintstones." (See, e.g., <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/204893.Cordelia_Fine">Cordelia Fine</a>, <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/83915.Lise_Eliot">Lise Eliot</a> or <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/4063984.Rebecca_M__Jordan_Young">Rebecca M. Jordan-Young</a> for critical overviews of current sex-difference research.)</p><p>I could go on about the technical shortcomings in this book, but Blackburn and H. Allen Orr have already done a much better job of it in their reviews than I could:<br /><a href="http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/~swb24/reviews/Pinker.htm">http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/~swb24/revi...</a><br /><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2003/feb/27/darwinian-storytelling/">http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archi...</a></p><p>Pinker attempts to posture as a defender of science against the demons of unreason, but he is simply defending his own views and pet theories about science. He is pushing stealth hereditarianism under the banner of consilience, to borrow E.O. Wilson's term. "The blank slate" thus becomes an epithet to write off anyone who wants to say, "Hold on a moment, it's much more complicated than that!" </p><p>For those looking to get into evolutionary psychology: Skip this and pick up Laland and Brown's <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/211008.Sense_and_Nonsense_Evolutionary_Perspectives_on_Human_Behaviour">Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behaviour</a> for a scholarly overview of fields studying evolution and human behavior and Buller's <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/1658255.Adapting_Minds_Evolutionary_Psychology_and_the_Persistent_Quest_for_Human_Nature_">Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature</a> for a critical view of evolutionary psychology.</p><p>For those looking to read Pinker: Skip this and pick up something by Pinker 1, like <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/5755.The_Language_Instinct_How_the_Mind_Creates_Language">The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language</a> or <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/373969.The_Stuff_of_Thought_Language_as_a_Window_Into_Human_Nature">The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature</a></p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/3583387?shelf=evolutionary-psychology">evolutionary-psychology</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/3583387?shelf=politics-and-political-philosophy">politics-and-political-philosophy</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/3583387?shelf=psychology-and-neuroscience">psychology-and-neuroscience</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1713956-manny"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>28 books13.4k followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/45281142">September 9, 2009</a></section><div><p>Steven Pinker takes on the old nature/nurture question, and does an excellent job of it. Are we the products of our genes or our upbringing? Pinker tells you in the first few pages what the new consensus is: both, but genes are probably more important.<p>He has some wonderful stories to back up the general points. Here's one that particularly appealed to me. During the 60s and 70s, you often heard that boys and girls are indoctrinated from an early age so as to conform to conventional gender roles. Without that conditioning, girls would e.g. be as likely to want to play with toy guns, or boys with dolls. It was just a theory, but it was one that many people believed.</p><p>So, says Pinker, how could we investigate the question scientifically? It's difficult. What you'd like to do, if you had the chance, would be to take a few dozen boys, castrate them at birth, surgically transform them into girls, and then raise them like other girls without ever telling them what you'd done. At various points in their development, you could compare them with a control group of biologically normal girls, and see if there were any significant differences.</p><p>Needless to say, no one would ever permit such an appallingly wicked experiment. Except that it's actually happened. Every year, it turns out that a small number of male infants do have to be castrated and turned into girls, most often as a result of botched circumcision operations. Historically, they've usually not been told what happened, since this was deemed to be in their best interests.</p><p>Studies on these unfortunate children show that they nearly always feel deeply conflicted, and quite different from other girls. They have all sorts of impulses which they feel are bizarre and wrong, and which can sometimes lead them to suicidal despair. In some cases, they have later been informed that they are actually male, and their reaction has typically been one of relief. They weren't weird after all. They were just male without knowing it.</p><p>Well, if you thought that story was interesting, he's got dozens more that are nearly as good. I loved this book.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1713956?shelf=science">science</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/57810023-guille"></a></section><section><p>728 reviews1,349 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4663551075">April 14, 2022</a></section><div><p><br />Interesantísimo libro con un tema tan polémico como relevante, ¿existe una naturaleza humana?, ¿la existencia precede a la esencia o más bien sucede al contrario? Es imposible resumir aquí los argumentos que aporta Pinker en apoyo de la existencia de una naturaleza humana y de sus implicaciones, por lo que aquí me limitaré a resumir brevemente los temas que trata con la esperanza de que les despierte el gusanillo de la curiosidad.<p>Tras comentar los antecedentes de la idea de tabla rasa, idea atribuida a John Locke, y su relación con otras dos ideas centrales en el ideario colectivo de los últimos siglos, la idea del buen salvaje de Rousseau y la mente libre e independiente del cuerpo de Descartes, el autor da un repaso a los nuevos conocimientos que vienen a poner en tela de juicio a todas estas teorías, la ciencia cognitiva, la neurociencia, la genética de la conducta y la psicología evolutiva. </p><p>Su postura es clara: “la mente está equipada con una batería de sentimientos, impulsos y facultades para razonar y comunicarse, y que tienen una lógica común en todas las culturas, son difíciles de eliminar o de rediseñar a partir de cero, fueron configuradas por la acción de la selección natural en el transcurso de la evolución humana y deben algo de su diseño básico (y algo de su variación) a la información presente en el genoma.” </p><p>Tras ello, dedica una buena parte del libro a responder a aquellos que ven en esta naturaleza humana una idea peligrosa. </p><p>Entre esos peligros es especialmente relevante el hecho de que esa supuesta inmutabilidad de la naturaleza humana eliminaría toda esperanza de reforma, y, como corolario de ello, la falacia de que si supuestamente aceptamos que muchos de los rasgos negativos del comportamiento humano son naturales, y dado que supuestamente todo lo natural es bueno, deberíamos aceptar como bueno todos esos comportamientos infames.</p><p>Otra de las implicaciones polémicas es todo lo que supone que “en última instancia no controlemos nuestras propias decisiones, pues estas están predestinadas por el estado de nuestros cerebros” y, por tanto, hasta donde llega nuestra responsabilidad en los actos. Y junto a ello el peligro del nihilismo, de la imposibilidad de establecer una escala de valores “Si no somos más que máquinas que permiten que los genes hagan copias de sí mismos, si nuestras alegrías y satisfacciones no son otra cosa que sucesos bioquímicos, si la vida no se creó con algún fin elevado ni se dirige hacia alguna noble meta.” </p><p>Pero Pinker no solo se defiende, también ataca destacando las implicaciones perversas que también tendría una mente organizada como tabla rasa, como es el relativismo. Dado que no hay nada previo en el cerebro, lo que percibimos, siempre mediatizado por nuestras teorías previamente adquiridas, simplemente se acumula en nuestro cerebro condicionando a su vez lo que percibiremos a posteriori. Por ejemplo, la ciencia solo sería una forma de ver la realidad como cualquier otra, o cualquier moral y estructura de valores éticos sería igualmente válida.</p><p>Por último hace un repaso a las implicaciones que las dos concepciones de la mente, la tabula rasa y la existencia de una naturaleza innata, tienen sobre una serie de temas polémicos cómo la forma de organizarnos políticamente o qué políticas se deben adoptar frente a problemas sociales como la violencia o el trato a los delincuentes, las implicaciones que tienen el género de las personas en el comportamiento, el papel de la herencia en ese comportamiento…</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/957634-daniel-clausen"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>9 books455 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2263870471">January 19, 2018</a></section><div><p><br />In some ways, this book is both a tragedy and an inspiration. <p>How is it a tragedy? It's a tragedy because the book is responding to very ideologically-based, simple arguments for the Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine that I think don't really need to be addressed. Many of the points in the book I was thoroughly convinced of before reading the book -- I knew that genetics played some role in determining personality and aptitude; I was convinced of the probabilistic approach to human behavior; and I was convinced that versions of "is" do not automatically translate into "ought". On top of that, much of the book is spent rehashing the very petty politics of what happens in university departments and on college campuses -- the politicization and tribalization of knowledge. It's a stark reminder that even in environments where people should be better and do better, they often give in to their worst instincts. </p><p>So, the book is tragic in that much of this material, in a more perfect world, could have just been skipped or ignored. The author could have begun this book from a different starting place where readers have no ideological axes to grind, open-minded examination of evidence and arguments take place, and we are all intellectually and emotionally ready to live in a world of nuance. But no, that is not the world we live in, so that is not the book we get. And that is tragic. </p><p>The book, though, is also an inspiration. Why? Because it attempts to lift the conversation to that place where nuance and evidence are grounded in a humanistic understanding of our role as scholars and thinkers. The author, through his exploration of the various themes and evidence, tries to make us all epistemic creatures -- people who can have beliefs and values but suspend them in order to explore counter-evidence, new theories, and hypotheses, and sharpen our values with our knowledge. As epistemic creatures, we would also be able to ask that all-important question: How do we know something? </p><p>In a moment in history where so much discourse is polluted by vulgarity, that is refreshing...but it's also tragic. Because in a world where we are all trained from a young age to have the epistemic and moral habits of scientists, this might have been a more nuanced and at once infinitely shorter book. </p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/957634?shelf=books-of-2018">books-of-2018</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/957634?shelf=international-relations-classics">international-relations-classics</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/957634?shelf=top-books">top-books</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/220791-lena"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>1 book335 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/33994247">November 20, 2008</a></section><div><p>The Blank Slate is Steven Pinker's ambitious attempt to close the gap between the conventionally accepted dogma that human beings come into this world free of innate characteristics, ready to be molded and shaped by society, and what science has begun to reveal about genetic predisposition. <p>Prior to reading this book, I had no idea that the origin of human nature was such a contentious topic amongst modern intellectuals. Seems that a lot of people think acknowledging that something like violence might have been evolutionarily adaptive is the same thing as condoning violence and excusing those who engage in it, or that admitting that men and women are genetically different justifies discrimination against women. Pinker spends a lot of time in this book carefully addressing these concerns while at the same time making a compelling argument that the current tendency to deny any genetic influence on society's more vexing ills only handicaps our ability to successfully deal with our most serious problems.</p><p>Pinker is not shy about tackling controversial topics as he makes his points. The chapter in which he pointed to evidence showing that a child's intelligence and personality are shaped far more by genes, peers and random influences than they are by parents got him an enormous amount of mail, as did the section in which he discussed genetic influences on our appreciation of the arts. </p><p>Despite the radical nature of many of the theories Pinker presents, I found myself having continuous "ah-ha!" moments as I read this book. At its core, the idea that we are shaped by our genes as well as our experiences fits far better with reality than the idea that we are all nothing but moldable blank slates. Though these theories may not intellectually fashionable, Pinker makes it clear that there are a wealth of benefits to be gained by accepting what science has to tell us about the true origins of human nature. </p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/220791?shelf=how-the-brain-works">how-the-brain-works</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/220791?shelf=non-fiction">non-fiction</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/220791?shelf=skepticism">skepticism</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/109780851-infinite-jen"></a></section><section><p>77 reviews180 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3178378830">August 5, 2022</a></section><div><p>Do you believe that the human mind, at conception, is a Tabula Rasa? Because John Locke was completely out of his depth regarding the architecture of the brain and said something that sounded good? Well, here’s a Hobbesian Hammer to mangle the handsome features of your Rousseaian naïveté. Are you convinced that, despite evolution’s demonstrable power to produce a wide variety of phenotypic delights and inform the instinctual capacities of creatures big and small, it had nothing to say about the scaffolding of the human mind? If this isn’t sophistry in the service of ideology, I’ll eat a live dolphin. This is where I would normally trot out such tired qualifiers as:<p>Yes, of course, the human mind is malleable (to an extent), and the effects of cultural copulation are manifold and obv(invid)ious. No, the shackles of these behaviors are not made of adamantium (what clearer evidence of our power to chuck a spandrel into our deepest evolutionary drives than nutting into latex (or sheep skin, for those with allergies, or a Gatorade bottle for the desperate), or pharmaceutically tinkering with the baby oven, or, more terrible still - exercising abstinence), we have big frontal-loafs for a raisin. Damnit! I’m doing it again!</p><p>Socrates grant me Parrhesia so that I may slow the advance of utopian retrograde reasoning (technically that would mean my foe is receding from me, which puts me in (an) + alogized full nelson. Shit. ((Although, technically, the perceived retrograde motions of heavenly bodies were the result of systemic misunderstanding, so maybe there’s a way out of this. (((Although, if we’re just going by the literal definition, denuded of its historical context, then I suppose it does indicate a backwards motion,[although, specifically a backwards step!] ((((although, in this case, I’m referring to a mode of cognition which starts with a conclusion and reasons backwards from there, and that has little to say about the bodily kinesthetics of the army involved, except a perusal of history and human behavior so selective that the term malnourished would die of malnourishment in seeking to comprehend it. (((((May)(b)e 5(G)(Eye))((h)EAR))(if you (s(L)heep) with a bre(ache)k p(ad: for Colgate) (th)under yo(lk)ur pill(age)ow, it c(an)(tel(l)(lope) h(el(hel)p)elp attenuate these sinister frequencies. Alternatively, there are magnetic bracelets, one of which I just gave a jingle, and look at me, back to normal! So if 5G is indeed the source of your recalcitrant, retrograde-rectitude, you might look into that. Because the idea that we’re Blank Slates is about as goddamn plausible as feng shui’ing the furniture in your house into the shape of the regular convex polytopes using ONLY three dimensions in order to propitiate Azathoth who will then allow you to grow cotton candy in the abundant soil of human stupidity.</p><p>Well, this whole thing started off way more belligerent (and frankly insane) than I expected or wanted it to. But, I’m what you might charitably call a ‘discovery’ writer. Which is why I can’t plot anything, (unless it’s revenge) and chose to major in numerical witchcraft. But I (being careful not to think about the mathematics of infinite sets this time) digress (carefully and without recursion)</p><p>Now this assertion should be uncontroversial to anyone who a.) does not deny the scientific fact of evolution, and b.) can do a perfect cartwheel.</p><p>We are the sum total of our amino acids pitching a fit and erecting a house of carbon capable of sheltering our nucleotide sequences long enough for us to mail them into the future via no holds barred (debatable. See; de Sade) body-karate. We are equipped with a mental lattice work which preferentially captured certain free floating rationale that reliably saved us from bad endings, and through inconceivable stretches of geometric time, crystallized these behaviors, via the non-random selection of random mutations, into sugar and phosphate ladders, twisted just so, that encode instructions for producing brains which have aptitudes calibrated to insure their manifestation in forms such as: Folk Newtonian physics for parabola’ing rocks and plague ridden cattle (catapult non-negotiable). The ease with which children acquire language. The fear of heights. The desire to flee screaming from serpents. The ease with which most of us submit to dominance hierarchies. Disgust reflexes involving poo, disease, creeping crud, mud elementals, kitsch, musicians who can’t properly apply corpse paint, the absence of double-kicks and blast beats in elevator music, imitation Oreos, asymmetrical saggin’ asses, non-anime-incest. And so on. During the interim between awareness, sexual maturity, and Koital Kombat, our data is subject to outside forces which reconfigure it in ways that are bolded, italicized, and hyperlinked. Nature and nurture (as the wise among us say) are perennial fuck buddies.</p><p>This book is amazing.</p><p>Read it you bastards!</p><p>(It occurs to me that, somewhere within this review, I have failed to capture something parenthetically. It is like holding a sneeze in my heart.)</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/11260920-ahmed"></a></section><section><p>909 reviews7,330 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3419018017">October 6, 2020</a></section><div><p>كتاب الصفحة البيضاء لستيفن بنكر دا مستفز فوق الوصف، سلاسة ونعومة وبساطة جميلة جدا، طرح أفكار وتأصيل تاريخي لها مع التركيز على دلالة اللغة واهميتها (النقطة دي كانت مبهرة بشكل خيالي)، وللأسف الكتب الحلوة اللي زي دي بتخليني اتمنى اني كنت اقراه بلغته الأم وفي نفس الوقت بيخليني الاحظ اكتر للفجوة المرعبة بين الترجمات العربي والمقابل لها في الاصول والترجمات الانجليزية مثلا، فارق معرفي مهول في الحجم والتأثير، في حين الترجمات العربي محكومة بمجهودات اغلبها له شروط تجارية او حتى مش مهتم بنقل معرفة ما، والمشاريع الحكومية بتكون ��ير مضمونة الجودة.</p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/272430-daniel"></a></section><section><p>149 reviews8 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/27193179">August 3, 2008</a></section><div><p>Louis Menand has written a typically excellent piece on Pinker's arrogance: <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2002/11/25/021125crbo_books?currentPage=1">http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2002...</a><br />I found this book simultaneously interesting and exasperating, because the author is obviously a highly educated, well-read man who thinks he knows everything about every subject. There is a whole class of these public intellectuals (the late Carl Sagan, Richard Dawins, et al) who play this game: they use the public authority they have gained by virtue of (at least modest) academic accomplishment in one field to pronounce authoritatively on every damn thing under the sun. (Most of his scholarly journal output is in psychology and language, according to his cv; his PhD is in experimental psychology.) And maybe Pinker has figured it all out, but don't you think he could cut those of us a break who still think we exist? "Cognitive neuroscientists have not only exorcised the ghost but have shown that the brain does not even have a part that does exactly what the ghost is supposed to do: review all the facts and make a decision for the rest of the brain to carry out. Each of us there is a single I in control. But that is an illusion the brain works hard to produce..." And with that he dismisses the idea that you and I exist at all; there is no "you" there, only a collection of atoms with some remarkable properties (observable by other lumps of atoms). Wow, I am glad that's all settled. More generally, it's good to know there's no need for a field like philosophy. Pinker has a footnote to support his claim that the brain has no "I," but one of his sources (predictably) is Daniel Dennett, the Tufts philosopher and enemy of the mind (and Anything Else Immaterial). Elsewhere Pinker claims Hitler thought he was doing God's will (footnote to some article in an atheist magazine I looked up -- check out Free Inquiry, Volumbe 19, Issue 2, and judge for yourself whether you would *ever* cite this source in a serious academic inquiry) and that the Catholic Church teaches that 'ensoulment' takes place at the moment of conception. Let me take this last nugget for a moment. I'm guessing Pinker has spent little time in Catholic churches or reading Catholic books or magazines, so I can see why he thinks a statement like "the catholic church teaches ______" is an easy one to make. To those of us who have done some of those things, though, it is not so trivial. Sure, in broad strokes, one can formulate simple statements with confidence (e.g., that God exists or Jesus is the Son of God or even abortion is wrong), but his assertion is packed with some things that are far harder to disentangle. Most importantly, he uses the word "ensoulment" -- and this is central to his argument at this point in the book -- implying that the Church firmly teaches this concept that he is upset about. I do not know that the RCC says much (currently, anyway) dogmatically about the philosophical underpinnings of a word like "ensoulment." What I do know is that I am familiar with the phrase Ghost in the Machine (one of Pinker's bogeymen in this book) from Catholic authors who, like the late JPII, were critical of Cartesian dualism. So, I am being long-winded, but I am trying to get across that Pinker has these convenient cartoon notions of what other people say and because he is so frightfully intelligent he assumes he has it all figured out. If he would just say to himself, "It is possible that there is one thing I think I know that I do not," I believe his tone would be far more congenial and the book much improved. But then again, there is no self for him to say it to, so what's the point? </p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/272430?shelf=general-nonfiction">general-nonfiction</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/8365747-l-e-duncan"><i></i></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>3 books2 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/594220393">April 19, 2013</a></section><div><p>So here's a case where you have a book about how much of our personalities and, well, nature is innate, rather than nurtured into us by our parents or our environment. If The Blank Slate were two hundred pages and focused just on brain science, it'd be one thing. The trouble is that it ends up reading as if Pinker gathered every single study that seemed to support his position and threw it into a blender, and then threw in a number of screeds against groups he has a bone to pick with. The result is a somewhat uneven and contradictory book where one chapter asserts that women don't go into math because they are innately unlikely to like it, and another chapter asserts that no one is innately good at complex math, which is why we have school to pound it into kids' little heads. Pinker's insistence on environment and parenting having minimal influence is sometimes undercut by the studies he presents and his own conclusions. Pinker is quick to say that differences between men and women are innate, whether it's emotional, a difference in a bell curve intelligence spread, or in general interests, but he'll attribute differences between races and ethnic groups to environment or oppression, forces he largely dismisses otherwise. Or we can note that Pinker asserts first that women are better caretakers then men, then secondly asserts that parenting is fairly irrelevant (as long as there's a man to look up to, no comments on where women fall on this influence spectrum), and then thirdly asserts that how well kids get along with parents is predictive of their overall success, which would suggest . . . parenting isn't irrelevant? He also tends to reduce complex issues, such as art or culture or rule of law to biological imperatives, which is a bit odd when he also asserts human individuality and specialness (as long as they also fall within the Norman the Normy Norms that define actual human nature, I suppose). He'll say art has no influence on anyone, really, so everyone hates modernism and post-modernism because it deconstructs art, which no one needs, because everyone knows art isn't real. And by the by, prejudices/stereotypes are often innate and have some good sense and 100% reliable statistics behind them, and these prejudices can't be strongly messed with by media or culture, although of course we should treat everyone with respect, even if they're low IQ and will never amount to anything or. Except that human nature is so violent (at least, if you're a man) and suspicious that of course we will never treat everyone with respect and don't you dare Big Brother us into doing so. <p>... I got carried away. But the book is absolutely exhausting, wheeling from one conclusion to the next in a mixture of hopeless pessimism, wide-eyed futurism, white-knuckled warnings about not screwing up the status quo, and sudden naivete. I also find many of the absolutely-certain-claims somewhat suspect, as if statistics/brain scans from this or that study and some anecdotes and did you know tribal people actually kill each other?? are absolute proof of what a human is. You can't point out that many media reports of "this causes cancer" or "this proves this parenting tactic successful!" often exaggerate or segment the truth without making it impossible not to notice that nothing, even studies or statistics, exists in cold, objective isolation. I'm not being post-modern here. I'm saying that the very fact I know more about Pinker from this book than I do about human nature is par for the course. Does any of this matter? Does it matter to a childless female engineer that she's some kind of biological anomaly (and is she?). Is anything helped by positing that men are naturally violent and competitive, and ignoring the uncountable exceptions, or ignoring that women also compete against other women, for mates and otherwise? Is IQ, like, this magic statistic that determines human worth in society? Are you sure you aren't a supporter of eugenics? Etc, etc, etc. We can all agree that people are not meant to be programmed, that we should not force people who want to be poets to become mathematicians to fill a quota, and we should treat people well even when they're not like us. All right? All right.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/3781470-tristan"></a></section><section><p>112 reviews228 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1663434447">July 25, 2017</a></section><div><p><i>"I'm only human<br />Of flesh and blood I'm made<br />Human<br />Born to make mistakes"</i><p><b>--The Human League, Human</b></p><p>Most of us instinctively feel the acquisition of scientific knowledge follows a linear path, first operating from a solid factual base, and then modifying itself as it goes along in an objective fashion. Ultimately, a common agreeance on a certain topic will be reached, and the findings will translate into well-considered policy. </p><p>Ideally, that is how it <i>should</i> work, with scientists serving as neutral observers, freely informing us, the public, on whatever findings they come across, whatever the implications. This is not always what actually happens, of course. Not by a long shot. Ironically - also tellingly -, when it comes to the in-depth study of the human animal, there is active, hostile opprobrium by (a certain school of) social scientists and ideologically motivated activists alike. Scientists who try to find biological causations for certain human behaviours or perceived inequalities are frequently ostracised, pelted by slurs, and made pariah's in their own fields. The sober truth is that the scientific community is not free at all from anti-intellectualism and bullying tactics.</p><p>It seems nothing much has changed since the 2002 publication of this book, which I'm informed drew out considerable polemical discourse at the time. I'm not surprised. Anno 2016, the social sciences in Western academia are still infested with social constructivist thinking, with no sign of it abating any time soon. In fact, it might even have reached its zenith, having entrenched itself even further. It's not difficult to make an analogy with creationists. This exemplifies how far we still have to go as a species to attain a higher level of rational thinking, which means being willing to demolish some of our most cherished beliefs. Ego investment still is riding high, it seems.</p><p>Biological innateness. Determinism. These terms observably evoke unpleasant feelings in many. However, in order to come face to face with the homo sapiens which, during its brutal evolutionary process, has acquired certain survival - often nasty -instincts, one should let go of such reservations . Funnily enough, it was some of the most prominent Enlightenment thinkers (such as Rousseau) who introduced the blank slate theory. But are we blank slates, almost solely informed by the culture that surrounds us? Hardly, as Pinker shows us -with the aid of a plethora of immensely interesting case studies - in this intellectually dense, yet highly accessible book. Genes and our biological make-up determine our behaviour to a far greater extent than culture or our upbringing ever will. Pinker even goes as far as saying that parental influence on their child(ren)'s formation is pretty much negligible. Peer group interaction is a far more important determining factor. </p><p>However, Pinker deftly reasons that even with the ever-expanding, confronting knowledge of the human coming from the exciting fields of neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, there is no need for us to defeatedly resort to fatalism or nihilism. On the contrary, an intimate, unsentimental understanding of what we are will help us enormously in developing a truly humanistic ethos and thus in crafting a pragmatic society which can be beneficial to all of us. </p><p>The utopian vision, with its aim to 'mould' the human psyche (social constructivism), the 20th century has adequately shown to only lead us into disaster.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/29689360"></a></section><section><p>42 reviews365 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2695604561">January 30, 2019</a></section><div><p>يتحدث ستيفن بينكر –عالم النفس اللغوي في هارفارد- في كتابه (الصفحة البيضاء) عن معتقد شديد الشيوع في القرون الأخيرة، وهو الاعتقاد بأن الإنسان يولد "صفحة بيضاء"، لا يحمل بنية فطرية سابقة، وأن المؤثر الأساسي في تشكيل الإنسان يعود للوالدين، والمجتمع. يهاجم بينكر هذا المعتقد بشدة، وهو يرى أنه يمثّل "الدين العلماني للحياة الثقافية المعاصرة"، وأن هذا المعتقد ساهم في رسم بعض أجندات العلوم الاجتماعية والإنسانية في القرن المنصرم.<br />ابتدأ أولاً بتقصي منابع هذه المعتقد التاريخية، منذ روسو وهوبز وديكارت، ثم شرع في تقويض المعتقد عبر أربعة مجالات: العلوم العقلية الحديثة، وعلوم الأعصاب، والجينات، والأطروحات التطورية. فنّد بينكر المخاوف الثقافية التي تمنع من إثبات بنية فطرية أو طبيعة بشرية سابقة، وهي أن الإقرار بطبيعة بشرية ما يبرّر التمييز العنصري، وأن إثبات ميول غير أخلاقية (كالعنف) يجلب التشاؤم، ويدمر فكرة الإرادة الحرة، ويحطم معنى الحياة. وأخيراً عقد المؤلف فصولاً عديدة لمناقشة الأسس الفطرية/الطبيعة المؤثرة في تشكيل نوازع الإنسان وخياراته في : <br />[1] السياسة، وفي العنف وأثبت أن الإنسان يحمل ميولاً فطرية للعنف، وأشار لدراسة نشرت عام 2000م أثبتت أن نصف الذكور الذين تجاوزا سن الثانية انخرطوا في الضرب والعض والرفس، وقالت الدراسة أن السؤال الصحيح ليس هو: كيف يتعلم الأطفال الاعتداء؟ بل: كيف يتعلم الأطفال عدم الاعتداء؟!. <br />[2] الفروق بين الجنسين، وأثبت فروقاً جوهرية بين الجنسين بيولوجياً وانتقد بعض الأطروحات النسوية التي ترفض الاعتراف بهذه الفروق، وترى بأنها مصنوعة من قبل المجتمع وليس لها أساس عضوي، ودافع عن أطروحة ثرونهيل وبالمر في كتابهما الشهير "التاريخ الطبيعي للاغتصاب" الصادر عام 2000م، الذي ينقض الأطروحة النسوية القائلة بأن الاغتصاب هو جريمة عنف ونتيجة للنظام الأبوي المضطهد للنساء وليس سببه دوافع جنسية راسخة في تكوين الذكر عضوياً/بيولوجياً.<br /> [3] وفيما يتعلق بالأطفال، هاجم بقوة الأفكار التربوية والنفسية والاجتماعية التي ترى بأن الأطفال يمكن تشكيلهم كما يشكّل الطين أو الصلصال، وتلك التي تبالغ في دور الآباء والمعلمين وتحملهم فوق ما يحتملون، وذلك في فصل هام يجدر بالمهتمين بالتربية الاطلاع عليه.<br />كما تحدث في غير ذلك من المجالات كالفنون. <br />فكرة الكتاب الأساسية مهمة جداً، وهي أقرب للتصور الديني من نظرية "الصفحة البيضاء"، فالإنسان في التصور الإسلامي لا يولد صفحة بيضاء بل (كل مولود يولد على الفطرة)، مع ملاحظة أن بينكر ملحد، ولا يؤسس أطروحته على أية مستندات دينية. <br />أما الترجمة فهي ركيكة في العموم، والعناية بالنواحي الفنية والهوامش سيئة جداً. يقع الكتاب في 550 صفحة، وصدر عن دار الفرقد ٢٠١٨. </p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/155663-david-rubenstein"></a></section><section><p>801 reviews2,502 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/81349035">July 17, 2010</a></section><div><p>What an impressive book! I have been reading a number of Steven Pinker's books, and they are all excellent. I was particularly interested in how politics and social activists have worked to slow down the progress of science. The concept of a "blank slate", though socially attractive, has held back science and our understanding of human nature.<p>The chapter on children was especially interesting. Pinker rightly gives much credit to Judith Harris' excellent book <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/633128.The_Nurture_Assumption_Why_Children_Turn_Out_the_Way_They_Do">The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do</a>. The subject is not finished, though. Pinker shows that while 50% of the variance in human nature is due to genetics, the remaining 50% of the variance is still in question. It is NOT correlated with home life or parental upbringing. It seems to be a combination of peer influences, and fickle fate.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/155663?shelf=biology">biology</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/155663?shelf=nonfiction">nonfiction</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/155663?shelf=philosophy">philosophy</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1045774-mehrsa"></a></section><section><p>2,234 reviews3,663 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1984179781">December 15, 2017</a></section><div><p>In which Pinker argues against a bunch of straw men without backing up his overly sweeping claims. I don't disagree with his basic thesis, but I do disagree with his cartoonish characterizations of his opponents, namely, feminists, the left, social scientists, etc. If you're going to write a book in which you are right and everyone else is wrong and stupid, you should at least make sure you support your huge thesis with unassailable facts. He did not. It's one thing to say "we are not a blank slate." Totally fine. But quite another to say parenting and environment make no difference whatsoever, that women are not in fact under-represented in the sciences (that one made me the most mad), and that art is now crap (why is he even qualified to critique modern art?). Anyway, I'm sure it's not his fault--his biology made him that arrogant. </p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/12211094-kianoush-mokhtarpour"></a></section><section><p>105 reviews129 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2399647118">October 5, 2020</a></section><div><p><b><br />چرا ذات انسان را انکار می‌کنیم؟<p>مقدمه</p></b><br />انسان محصول تربیت‌اش است یا محصول طبیعت‌اش؟ آموزش است که خصوصیات انسان‌ها را رقم می‌زند یا سرشت ذاتی‌شان؟ تحیقیقات نشان می‌دهند که هر دوی این عوامل اثرگذار‌اند. اما عموم مردم زمانه‌ی ما سهم طبیعت و سرشت انسان را بسیار کمتر از آنچه هست می‌گیرند. گویی عصر ما با ذات‌باوری، یعنی با این ایده که ذات، سرشت و ژنتیک ما بسیاری از خصوصیاتمان را تعیین می‌کند، سر عناد دارد. دوست داریم همه‌چیز را در تربیت و آموزش خلاصه ببینیم. وقتی بحث تفاوت‌های مردان و زنان می‌شود فورا می‌گوییم نحوه‌ی تربیت باعث این تفاوت‌ها شده است. وقتی کودک با ادبی می‌بینیم شیوه‌ی تربیتی پدر و مادرش را تحسین می‌کنیم. اما آیا امکان ندارد که تفاوت بین زن و مرد ریشه در ذات ما داشته باشد؟ آیا امکان ندارد که علت خوش‌رفتاری یک کودک، ذات سربه‌راهش باشد؟ تحقیقات اخیر تاثیر ذات و ژنتیک را به خوبی اثبات کرده‌اند. مثلاً نشان داده شده که حتی گرایش به بزهکاری تا حد زیادی به سرشت و ژنتیک ما مرتبط است. با این وجود، چرا ما هنوز اثر طبیعت را بی‌درنگ رد می‌کنیم و همه چیز را به پای تربیت می‌نویسیم؟ چرا ذات‌گرایی منفور است و سرشت ذاتی انسان نادیده گرفته می‌شود؟<p><b>یک. برابری خواهی</b><br />یکی از دلایل بی‌اعتنایی به سرشت انسان رواج برابری‌خواهی است. دغدغه‌ی برابری‌خواهی چنان با��ا گرفته و اهمیت یافته که هر سخنی که بوی نابرابری بدهد نشنیده رد می‌شود، از جمله و خصوصاً سخن ذات‌گرایان. ایده‌ی برابری‌ از کلیدی‌ترین باورهای زمانه‌ی ماست؛ پایه و اساس حقوق و ارزش‌های ماست. مثلاً قانون اساسی آمریکا بر شالوده‌ی همین ایده‌ی برابری انسان‌ها بنا شده است. بیرون کشیدن این خشت زیرین همان و فروریختن کل عمارت آمریکا همان. خبر بد آنکه این خشت مدتی‌ است که لق شده. قانون اساسی آمریکا برابری انسان‌ها را به دین گره می‌زند. می‌گوید انسان‌ها برابرند چون خدا آنها را برابر می‌بیند. اما حالا که خدا و دین خود زیر سوال رفته‌اند، ایده‌ی برابری بی‌تکیه‌گا�� مانده، و به تلنگری بند است. با این تفاسیر، این نگرانی که مبادا ذات‌گرایی تلنگر نهایی را وارد کند قابل فهم است</p><p> و فراموش نکنیم که ذات‌باوری، یا بهتر بگوییم فهم غلطی از ذات‌باوری، سابقه‌ی جنایت در پرونده‌اش دارد. نازیسم هیتلر با توصل به برداشت تحریف‌شده‌ای از ذات‌باوری بود که کشتارهای نژادپرستانه‌اش را توجیه می‌کرد. نازیسم این حرف را در دهان ذات‌گرایی گذاشت که نژاد آریایی ذاتاً برتر است و نژادهای یهودی و اسلاو ذاتاً پست‌تر، و به این بهانه خون آنها را حلال کرد. این جنایت‌های نازیسم امروزه به پای ذات‌گرایی نوشته می‌شود. پس جای تعجب نیست که ترس از تکرار شدن این نوع جنایت‌ها باعث شده ایده‌ی سرشت انسان به همراه هیتلر و افکارش در زباله‌دان تاریخ انداخته ‌شود. خصوصاً که در شهرهای چندملیتی امروز، که انسان‌هایی از چندین و چند قوم و نژاد را کنار هم آورده، نژادپرستی می‌تواند فاجعه‌ای به‌مراتب عظیم‌تر بیافریند. این است که ما از بیم آنکه خامی چند نظریات ذات‌باوری را بد بفهمند، یا عده‌ای فرصت‌طلب آن را عامدانه مصادره به مطلوب کنند، نفی حکمت می‌کنیم و درست و غلط ذات‌گرایی را یکجا از صفحات کتاب‌ها و صفحه‌ی ذهن آدم‌ها پاک می‌کنیم. حقیقت را فدای مبارزه با تبعیض نژادی می‌کنیم</p><p>شاخه‌ای از جنبش فمیینیسم هم، مثل جنبش مبارزه با نژاد پرستی، با نیت خیر به میدان آمد اما متاسفانه علیه ذات‌گرایی شمشیر کشید. جنبش فمینیسم برای به دست آوردن حقوق برابر با مردان، نیاز دارد نشان دهد که مردان و زنان برابراند. بنابراین بر شباهت‌های زنان و مردان انگشت تاکید می‌گذارد. اما یک شاخه‌ی افراطی تا آنجا پیش رفته که هر تفاوت سرشتی بین مرد و زن را مطلقاً نفی می‌کند، و وقتی هم که تفاوت‌ها عیان و انکارناپذیر باشند، آنها را یکسره محصول تربیت و محیط می‌داند. مثلاً حتی گرایش جنسی را هم برساخته‌ای اجتماعی، و بی‌تأثیر از سرشت انسان می‌داند و معتقد است دگرجنس‌گرایی یا هم‌جنس‌گرایی را می‌توان با آموزش در افراد نهادینه کرد. از این باور افراطی که بگذریم، باورهای معمولی‌تر اما رایج‌تر مثل نفی خصوصیات و خلقیات زنانه و مردانه، ذات‌گرایی را به حاشیه رانده‌اند. به عنوان مثال دیگر کسی جرأت نمی‌کند بگوید فلان شغل به سرشت زنانه نزدیک‌تر است، یا فلان خصوصیت ذاتاً در مردان پررنگ‌تر است. چنین اظهار نظرهایی—و گویندگانشان—بی‌درنگ انگ تبعیض جنسی می‌خورند و رد می‌شوند</p><p>بی‌مناسبت نیست اشاره کنیم که مقبول افتادن یک اندیشه بیش از آنکه به درستی و قوت‌اش مرتبط باشد، به صد نکته‌ی دیگر وابسته است. خصوصاً به شرایط زمانه. در هر عصری یک دیدگاه کلی حاکم است، و هر ایده‌ی موافق با آن دیدگاه رو می‌آید و هر ایده‌ی مخالف دور انداخته می‌شود. دور از حقیقت نیست اگر بگوییم ایده‌ها نیز مثل لباس‌ها مد می‌شوند و از مد می‌افتند. بعدها که به مدهای امروز نگاه ‌کنیم خنده‌مان می‌گیرد، و تعجب می‌کنیم که چنین چیز بدقواره و زشتی چطور آن‌همه بدیع و زیبا به نظر می‌رسید. اندیشه‌های رایج امروز هم، از جمله ضدیت با ذات‌باوری، چه بسا فردا خنده‌دار و بی‌اساس بنمایند</p><p><b>دو. میل به تسلط</b><br />یکی دیگر از دلایل انکار سرشت انسان میل ما به در دست داشتن کنترل همه‌ی امور است. ما دلمان می‌خواهد دنیا رام ما باشد. این به ما احساس قدرت می‌دهد. از آن طرف، از هر چیزی که به ما احساس ناتوانی بدهد و حقارت و ناچیزی‌مان را به رویمان بیاورد بیزاریم. فراموش نکنیم که قدرت از دغدغه‌های اساسی انسان مدرن است. انسان مدرن پس از شنیدن ندای نیچه که خدا مرده است، کوشید خود به جای خدا بنشیند. و به لطف علم و تکنولوژی تا حد زیادی موفق شد فرمانروای عالم شود. سفر به ماه و درمان بیماری‌های پیشتر لاعلاج و این قبیل دستاوردها انسان را به این باور کشاند که کار نشد ندارد؛ انسان اگر بخواهد می‌تواند از خود خدا بسازد</p><p> اما ذات‌باوری با نشان دادن ویژگی‌های بعضاً پست و اغلب تغییرناپذیر انسانی، تصویر قدرقدرتی که انسان از خود ساخته را ویران می‌کند، و نشان می‌دهد که کنترل ما بر امور خیلی کمتر از آن است که تصور می‌کردیم. ذات‌باوری نشان می‌دهد که خیلی از خصوصیات ما به ژنتیک‌مان وابسته است، و تربیت و آموزش، اگرچه اثرگذارند، به هیچ وجه بازیگر اصلی نیستند. مثلاً دوقلوهایی که در بدو تولد از هم جدا شدند، با اینکه در دو خانواده‌‌ و دو محیط متفاوت بزرگ شده‌اند، شخصیت بسیار مشابهی یافته‌اند. ذات‌باوری نشان می‌دهد که خیلی از علایق و سلایق ما بر خلاف باور رایج حاصل انتخاب شخصی و از سر اختیار نیستند بلکه عمیقاً ریشه در سرشت ژنتیکی ما دارند. مثلاً جهت‌گیری‌های سیاسی ما هم تا حد زیادی به سرشت‌مان مرتبط است. گویا آنقدر هم که فکر می‌کردیم بر خود مسلط نیستیم. این پیام به مذاق ما خوش نمی‌آید. همانطور که شاهان پیک بدخبر را به سیاه‌چاله می‌انداختند، ما هم ذات‌گرایان را که خبر از نقص‌ها و کاستی‌های انسان آورده‌اند به جرم سیاه‌انگاری طرد می‌کنیم. ما نمی‌خواهیم بپذیریم که نه تنها پادشاه جهان نیستیم بلکه سخت در چنگ نیروهای طبیعت که سرشت ما را رقم زده‌اند اسیریم</p><p><b>سه. دین</b><br />ضدیت دین با داروینیسم هم در غفلت از سرشت انسان دخیل بوده است. داروینیسم و ذات‌باوری در هم تنیده‌اند. نمی‌شود از ذات و سرشت انسان صحبت کرد ولی نامی از تکامل نبرد، یا از تکامل گفت ولی اشاره‌ای به سرشت انسان نکرد. دین با کنار گذاشتن بحث داروینیسم و تکامل عملاً نمایندگان ذات‌گرایی را هم خفه کرده است. این نوع سانسور البته در حکومت‌های مذهبی پررنگ‌تر است. اما حتی آنجا که دولت‌ غیر مذهبی است و دست به سانسور نمی‌برد، تعصبات مذهبی خود مردم مانع از پا گرفتن و جا افتادن یافته‌های علم تکامل و سخنان ذات‌گرایان می‌شود. به تعبیر برتراند راسل مردم ترجیج می‌دهند فرشتگانی سقوط کرده باشند تا بوزینگانی تکامل یافته؛ از این جهت به مذهب علاقه‌مندتر‌اند تا به علم</p><p><b>چهار. فلسفه</b><br />مقصر بعدی اتکای بیش از اندازه‌ی ما به فلسفه است. دین با کنار گذاشتن تکامل و بیولوژی و سایر علوم از میزگرد شناخت انسان، صحنه را برای خودنمایی فلسفه خالی کرد، اما فلسفه هم متاسفانه اعتنایی به سرشت انسان نکرد. در واقع تقصیر هم به گردن فلسفه است، و هم به گردن ما. ما مقصریم از این بابت که شناخت انسان را به فلسفه سپردیم. به این بهانه که فلسفه همیشه منزلت و اعتبار فراوان داشته، و چون مرجع دیگری برای پاسخ گویی نمانده بود، به همان تخته‌پاره‌ی فلسفه در اقیانوس نادانی چسبیدیم، و به آن دل بستیم. حال آنکه پرسش از ماهیت انسان پرسشی نیست که فلسفه قادر به پاسخ گفتنش باشد. این پرسش مطالعات آزمایشگاهی و میدانی می‌طلبد. فیلسوف از پشت میز کارش چطور می‌تواند پاسخش را بیابد؟ و فلسفه هم مقصر است از این بابت که در تحلیل انسان و نسخه پیچیدن برای زندگی انسان، بدن را به کلی نادیده گرفت و او را چون روحی خالص تصور کرد. با حذف شدن بدن از صورت مسئله، هر آنچه مربوط به سرشت انسان بود از قلم افتاد</p><p><b>یه منبر هم بریم</b><br />مسلماً اینکه بخواهیم همه چیز را به ذات انسان تقلیل دهیم اشتباه است. اما این تصور که چیزی به نام ذات انسانی اساساً وجود ندارد نیز به همان اندازه غلط است. شاید درست‌تر این باشد که آنچه را طبیعت در ذات ما سرشته بپذیریم، و اختیاراتی را هم که به ما داده بشناسیم. پذیرش سرشت انسان به معنای وادادن به نیروهای طبیعت نیست، بلکه گام نخست برای رشدی واقع‌بینانه است</p><p>پی‌نوشت یک: آنچه آمد تنها یکی از موضوعات کتاب است. ضمناً مطالبی خارج از این کتاب را هم شامل می‌شود<br />پی‌نوشت دو: کتاب مطالب خیلی خوبی رو می‌گه، ولی مطالبش رو خوب نمی‌گه</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/12211094?shelf=evolutionary">evolutionary</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/12211094?shelf=non-fiction">non-fiction</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6132231-owlseyes"></a></section><section><p>1,634 reviews257 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2183806341">June 28, 2020</a></section><div><p><a href="https://imgur.com/9VYvHpn">
 
</a><br />(Steven Pinker in Oporto, on the 11th of November 2017. My photo.)<p><b>"Nature, Mr Allnut , is what we are put in this world to rise above" Katherine Hepburn to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen</b></p><p><b>"Hillary Clinton may have advanced the dumbest explanation in the history of psychobabble, but she does not deserve the charge of trying to excuse the president's [husband] behavior"</b></p><p>Pinker makes the case against a man who gets his formation/make up only from the outer forces of parenting, education, etc. He seems to defend the conception of a man who is not a “blank slate” upon which experience writes on. </p><p><a href="https://imgur.com/xEm9GUd">
 
</a></p><p>He invokes genetic arguments (based on fraternal and identical twins’ studies) to back his thesis. He also approaches brain analysis and anthropological studies to justify the existence of some “universals” (for instance in the art domain). Even the moral sense. Ergo: there are innate responses: man is not devoid of a certain type of make-up at birth.</p><p><a href="https://imgur.com/13XJs5K">
 
</a></p><p>He, sort of, denounces the political appeal of a “blank slate “human being to justify the fears of inequalities and certain types of interventions. Those political fears are meant to be refuted. Thomas Jefferson meant “equality “of rights.</p><p><a href="https://imgur.com/eKZVIID">
 
</a></p><p>Nevertheless, he seems to be a bit cautious about Noam Chomsky’s ideas of an “innate circuitry”, or a universal grammar/plan. He points to the works of Jean Piaget and others, consisting of “personal ideas”.</p><p>As for the fear of machines, thinking machines, running “amok”, Pinker thinks it’s a “waste of energy”. I really don’t agree. The singularity is at hand at any moment. We’ve witnessed one such an episode on Facebook*, quite recently.</p><p>Again, this is truly a case against empiricism, against those like John Stuart Mill and John Watson, who were proponents of a major role of experience in Psychology. The book of Pinker is a huge amalgamation of proof that psychopathology, personality traits, as well as love, consciousness and will, are <b>biologically determined.</b></p><p><a href="https://imgur.com/iImTdYS">
 
</a></p><p><i>Well, I know Pinker is an atheist and a lover of the beauty of Darwin's theory of evolution. He's so hopeful regarding the completion of the Human Genome Project, one which may uncover the roots of the intellect and emotion. </i></p><p><i>I think a few years ago I've bought that Time magazine issue. So much so for a biological determinism, I wonder how would Pinker </i></p><i><s>deny</s> refute a God <s>Gene</s> gene? or a set of them? It's, really, no monkey business. I'm not sure whether Pinker has read the book by Dean Hamer: The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes. Maybe some have it [the gene/s]; maybe some don't. <p>I've got to grab that magazine again.</p></i><p>*<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/tonybradley/2017/07/31/facebook-ai-creates-its-own-language-in-creepy-preview-of-our-potential-future/#2dc44c07292c">https://www.forbes.com/sites/tonybrad...</a></p><p>Interesting review here:<br /><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/11/25/what-comes-naturally-2">https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...</a></p><p>UPDATE</p><p>Pinker on Covid19:</p><p>"With coronavirus, it’s genuinely hard to know whether surfaces are potential vectors, whether six feet is enough or not enough, whether masks help or don’t help” </p><p>Does he wear mask?</p><p>In: <a href="http://m.nautil.us/blog/steven-pinker-on-the-tribal-roots-of-defying-social-distancing?utm_source=RSS_Feed&amp;utm_medium=RSS&amp;utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication&amp;fbclid=IwAR3ZQ30SBXaMr3aq728rfuQyJCF6otfruYMtRZvu8eatDB8Ck13jtQTevtg">http://m.nautil.us/blog/steven-pinker...</a></p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/6132231?shelf=b-f-skinner-was-a-blank-slater">b-f-skinner-was-a-blank-slater</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/6132231?shelf=behavioral-genetics">behavioral-genetics</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/6132231?shelf=case-against-empiricism">case-against-empiricism</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1339246-gendou"></a></section><section><p>574 reviews255 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/803853579">December 29, 2013</a></section><div><p>Pinker argues cleanly and decisively against the theory of the Blank Slate (and its corollary, the Noble Savage). You might say he wipes the Blank Slate clean. Or that he breaks it over his knee.<p>He examines how motivations for wanting to believe in a Blank Slate come from four fears of human nature:</p><p>1. The Fear of Inequality: if people are innately different, oppression and discrimination (like sexism and racism) would be justified. But people are, in fact, different. Ignoring this fact doesn't help address the real cause of discrimination, which is to judge people as a member of their group, instead of as an individual. It also opens up rational against discrimination to attack by any evidence against the blank slate.</p><p>2. The Fear of Imperfectibility: if people are innately immoral, hopes to improve the human condition would be futile. Ignoring human nature doesn't make people any less likely to commit crimes. When they do, it doesn't help us decide when and how harshly to punish them. Ignoring human nature is especially foolish in the case of rape. Denying that rape is a sexual crime, and insisting that it's only a violent crime (which it is, also) isn't going to deter any would-be rapists, who, as it happens, are motivated by sexual urges, not the urge to commit violence.</p><p>3. The Fear of Determinism: if people are products of biology, free will would be a myth and we could no longer hold people responsible for their actions.</p><p>4. The Fear of Nihilism: if people are products of biology, life would have no higher meaning and purpose.</p><p>He attacks proponents of the Blank Slate like Stephen Jay Gould, parts of the political left, some feminists, etc.</p><p>He draws an important distinction between gender and equity feminism.</p><p>He draws an interesting distinction between the Utopian vs. Tragic vision, and how these influence political leanings.</p><p>He even calls out modern and post-modern art for their philosophical denial of human nature!</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1339246?shelf=biology">biology</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1339246?shelf=non-fiction">non-fiction</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1339246?shelf=philosophy">philosophy</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/34203976-sundus"></a></section><section><p>103 reviews56 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1678050266">July 13, 2017</a></section><div><p><b>Wow What an interesting and exquisitely written book!!!</b><p>This is my first read by this author <b>“Steven Pinker”</b>. He is a psychologist and author of several books and articles on cognition and linguistics. In <b>
 <i>The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature</i>
</b> he refuted the widely held belief that the human mind at birth is a tabula rasa /blank slate to which the environment (nurture) gives form and substance. </p><p>He further explained that neither genetics nor environmental conditions are solely responsible for determining a person's behavior instead; individuals are created by a combination of both innate human nature and the conditions of upbringing and environment. </p><p>A must read for those who want to be introduced to the nature-nurture debate by examining scientific evidence.</p><p><b>
 <u>Some of my favorite parts from the book:</u>
</b></p><p>
 <i> There are different kinds of truth for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn’t work.</i>
</p><p>
 <i>As technology accumulates and people in more parts of the planet become interdependent, the hatred between them tends to decrease, for the simple reason that you can't kill someone and trade with him too.</i>
</p><p>
 <i>The Darwin Awards, given annually to “the individuals who ensure the long-term survival of our species by removing themselves from the gene pool in a sublimely idiotic fashion”, almost always go to men.</i>
</p><p>
 <i>Much of what is today called "social criticism" consists of members of the upper classes denouncing the tastes of the lower classes (bawdy entertainment, fast food, plentiful consumer goods) while considering themselves egalitarians.</i>
</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1183419-david-redden"></a></section><section><p>107 reviews10 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/27896150">August 9, 2008</a></section><div><p>The Blank Slate was an informative, thought-provoking and polemic book designed to refute ordinary conceptions and intellectual arguments which cut against a sociobiological understanding of humans and human society. I detected a couple instances in which the author, Stephen Pinker, overstated scientific conclusions, leading me to doubt the accuracy of his other scientific evidence. I also have reservations about the rational-actor lens through which he interprets human nature. On the other hand, the writing is good and many of his points are well taken. In sum, this book amounts to an interesting point of view that, while not entirely accurate, helps us see human society in a different light.<p>First the bad. In the couple areas of social science with which I'm somewhat familiar, he sometimes overstates the scientific research he uses as support. For instance, he briefly qualifies research suggesting inheritable differences between male and female brains but then proceeds to lay it all out as unqualified fact. All of this research was done on adults, which means that some of the differences <i>might</i> be hereditary, but this is far from established fact. The same charge has been laid against his sister Susan, which, interestingly enough, may support some of his other arguments about intra-family similarity in tendencies. His hypothesis about hereditary differences between male and female brains may in fact be true, and it definitely matches up with most peoples' intuitive observations of their own children. In any case I agree with him that it should make no difference when it comes to placing value on males or females, but none of this excuses the fact that he overstates the scientific conclusions.</p><p>In Chapter 12, Pinker similarly runs roughshod over stereotypical associations. He proclaims, “[P]eople’s ability to set aside stereotypes when judging an individual is accomplished by their conscious, deliberate reasoning.” While researchers have shown that thinking carefully about an individual's characteristics can dampen the effect of stereotypical associations, it doesn't reduce their effect to nil. In fact, subsequent studies suggest otherwise, because stereotypical associations effect more than just memory recall; they effect perception, interpretation and memory encoding. Academic social psychologists who profess otherwise are mostly legal defense experts and corporate human resource consultants. I doubt that Pinker cherry-picked or intentionally misrepresented the science, leaving me with the conclusion that he again overstated scientific conclusions.</p><p>As another minor but related point, Pinker might be misusing quotes, taking them out of context or reading too much into them. He quotes several intellectuals and researchers to prove that the philosophical ideas of “the blank slate” and “the noble savage” are broadly represented in academia. This may all be true, but after catching him overstating scientific conclusions I started to notice that many of these quotations could contain different, more nuanced meanings than Pinker squeezes out of them.</p><p>Pinker tips his hand most revealingly in Chapter 18, in which he writes, “In a cutthroat market, any company stupid enough to overlook qualified women or to overpay unqualified men would be driven out of business by a more meritocratic competitor.” This represents a brash oversimplification of history, cognitive science, social psychology; an underestimation of the influence of dumb luck; and an overestimation of humans’ ability to accurately evaluate the merits of other humans. It suggests that while Pinker’s erudition is broad, he makes up for its sometimes lack of depth by looking only as far as required to confirm his preconceived vision of rational actors in a rational society, which he in turn derives from the apparent rationality of evolution. The idea that we inexorably act rationally is not a necessary conclusion from our status as products of a mercilessly rational evolutionary process, but I understand how this can be a reassuring conclusion for people uncomfortable with ambiguity.</p><p>With all these faults, it’s still a compelling read. Pinker presents a great deal of fascinating and oddly intuitive scientific research in very accessible fashion. I’m satisfied by his assertion that we are creatures with inherited tendencies and skills, one of which is the ability to not allow our tendencies to rule tyrannically over us. He made me feel more confident and justified about my loose, respectful, loving relationship with my children, which others might see as too permissive for my children’s good. He carefully defines positions, quoting authorities from multiple disciplines to make his points, so he’s either very well read, has a number of well read research assistants, or perhaps both. His prose was confident like most polemics, but stops short of the patronization that ruins so many of the others.</p><p>Overall, The Blank Slate was entertaining, interesting, and informative, but I strongly recommend that you read it with both an open and critical mind.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1263487-ezra"></a></section><section><p>28 reviews25 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/25609304">June 27, 2008</a></section><div><p>so. steven pinker got a lot of press out of this thing. it is essentially a sustained and detailed case for the predominance of genetic factors in determing human behavior. mr pinker is (if i recall) mainly a developmental neuroscientist (if that's a legitimate description...?). he provides a tremendous and very enjoyable welath of case studies and background for the various psychological, philosophical, sociological and biological problems which he subjects to the peculiar dialectical lens of nature/nurture. if you're like me, this seems sort of arbitrary and anachronistic; thomas hobbes is long dead (ideologically and otherwise), skinnerism is not so popular, etc... my problem with pinker and the rest of the current mature crop of pop-science meega-pundits (thinking kurzweil, dawkins, wolfram...), is that they have all this incredible data, and a good number of intelligent conclusions, but some impulse (hubris? frustration? hunger for fame?) drives them to waaay overstep the bounds of what is interesting or relevant about their research, seeing jingoistc intellectual bogeymen in every pop culture shadow, and turning their work into extended rants about their pet theoretical controversy that no sane person wuld care about. it's good entertainment, i suppose, if entertainment requires epic struggles of will, and this must be motivating the editors... anyays, in pinker's case i was pretty perturbed by his opening statements (declaration of war against all "blank slate" dogmas... i kinda drew a blank myself on that one), and then i procceeded to be thoroughy engrossed for many chapters, in which pinker used his considerable erudition (which seems both fairly deep and fairly broad) to lay out a really intense survey of all kids of topics that might have to do with the "nature/nurture" controversy: lots of great data on twin studies, baby studies, language studies, archeological studies... it's about 70% quotations for a while, and it's great.<br /> then, at some point, for some reason, mr pinker decides to take it upon himself to attack feminism, postmodern philosophy, and experimental art, in the name of genetic determinism. it's an incredibile reversal: this accomplished scientist, high on his case studies, suddenly ripping into minor intellectual figures in disciplines he clearly knows jack shit about. it is presumptuous, elitist, ridiculous. perhaps it is the hidden form of his particular nerd-autism, blinding him to the incredbile, stereotypical flatulence of the harvard neuroscientist confidently and patiently xplaining that humans are not genetically constructed to appreciate non-figural art, that women are unhappy because feminism is forcing them to be away from home too much... THAT kind of crap. naturally, i wanted to rip his smug white face off...<p>so, in conclusion: if i had my own copy of this book, i might rip out the introduction and the last couple chapters and feel okay about it. maybe just keep the bibliography, though....</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/618361-chuck-mccabe"></a></section><section><p>6 reviews2 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/9080659">November 14, 2007</a></section><div><p>Pinker examines the concept of the mind as a blank slate capable of taking any impressions that arose in England and France in the mid-18th century and became the basis for liberal democracy in the 19th and 20th centuries. The "blank slate" underlies the nurture pole of the nature/ nurture debate and looms huge in political and social policies. Drawing on an immense body of research in psychology and other social sciences, linguistics, and evolutionary biology, Pinker makes the case for the nature pole, arguing that it is now apparent that the human brain is not a blank slate, but in fact bears powerful imprints of our evolutionary past that in effect hardwire us to feel, respond, and behave in specific ways. The denial of this human nature is now an impediment to solving many problems that are now plaguing Western democracies. -- This is an exciting read for anyone interested in contemporary social and political issues. It powerfully summarizes a huge body of knowledge that is forcing us to rethink who we are and how we ought to organize our collective behaviors.</p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/14824621-elenabot"></a></section><section><p>39 reviews438 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/461530244">November 12, 2018</a></section><div><p>This book is not without its flaws. As others have pointed out, the picture here might just be a tad bit too simple. However, Pinker accomplishes one important feat in this book, and that is to point out that our theories of justice and morality are not hostage to the empirically falsifiable claim that there are no innate differences between individuals. Our moral commitment to respecting the human dignity, equality, freedom, and human rights of any and all regardless of gender or race is in no way advanced by stifling scientific research that might reveal essential differences between individuals. In fact, Pinker argues that it is quite the contrary. He nicely shows how extreme postmodernist, social constructivist views share a disturbing commonality with totalitarian thinking, in that they both do violence to the natural tendencies and inclinations of individuals by making armchair prescriptions that ignore these. Instead, he argues that to respect individuals implies first and foremost to recognize and nurture their innate tendencies, whether through education, parenting, or through empirically-informed ethical practices and social policies. <p>In contrast, what postmodern views tend to share is this social constructionist view that there are no essential properties that define who people are. Instead, people either:</p><p>1) "make" up their identities, ex-nihilo, (whatever that means, and however that is supposed to work out in practice for embodied human agents who are constrained in the range of possible identities that they can adopt by virtue of their very embodiment), or </p><p>2) are passive receptacles of social "codes" that determine who they are, as well as being pawns of larger institutional forces that lack any agency and standing as responsible, autonomous individuals.</p><p>Ultimately, both views hinge on the notion that there are no innate, natural constraints that might define what it is to be a functional human agent. This can be seen, for instance, in the second- and third-wave feminist dogma that biology is irrelevant to psychology, and that gender is entirely a social construct. Pinker rightly reminds us that this is an empirically falsifiable claim, and that we had better not build our ethical theories about gender equity on a claim that, he says, has been shown to be false by evolutionary neuropsychology. </p><p>Moreover, he argues that this rejection of human nature is actually counterproductive when it comes to advancing the goals of social justice. This is because, by ignoring empirical evidence regarding the conditions that are conducive to human flourishing, it cannot possibly engage in practices that are likely to lead to such flourishing. So if we care about promoting the flourishing of, say, women, then what better guide to understanding what such flourishing might be could we have than a psychology that is as free from ideological policing as possible? </p><p>To deem certain thoughts unthinkable because they are anathema according to our latest ideology (e.g., second- and third-wave feminism's cardinal sin of gender essentialism) is to pit truth against right, which makes us less likely to get the latter, since the former is the only reliable guide we could possibly have to understanding what the latter could be. Thus, he argues that we needn't fear that the scientific approach to understanding human nature will legitimize bigoted, unethical views. He seems to have a pretty firm conviction that the principles of ethics are universal and grounded independently of any kind of empirical considerations. This isn't to say that we can meaningfully apply these universal principles without empirical knowledge. If these principles are to apply to human beings, we had better have empirical data about what human beings are really like. </p><p>Because individuals aren't just abstract, characterless units, but rather have innate characteristics that define them as the individuals that they are, equality cannot be sameness or interchangeability. Thus, for instance, second- and third-wave feminism needn't police biology and psychology in the fear that such sciences might uncover data showing that women on average exhibit cognitive differences from men. Should evidence of such innate differences appear, it would in no way undermine women's claim to equal human rights, since <i>difference</i> doesn't imply <i>inferiority</i>. Just because human individuals exhibit a vast degree of variation in aptitude and natural ability doesn't imply that some are to be accorded rights that others lack. Each one of us has capacities that others lack, while lacking capacities that others possess. Nevertheless, we already accord equal recognition to others despite these everyday, obvious differences. In addition, such ideological policing of science, and such a need to cover up in advance what the science might show, reveals too much about our own fears. We implicitly confess the weak foundations of our ethical principles every time we put restrictions on science ahead of time.</p><p>Moreover, because humans are adapted to living interdependent lives as members of purposive groups, freedom cannot imply that individuals are to be seen as free-floating atoms, while groups are mere aggregates of such atoms. Rather, a great deal of our flourishing and thus of meaningful freedom depends on properly adjusting ourselves to others. Hence, freedom must be tempered with equality if human flourishing can be attained. Finding the right way of mutually constraining freedom and equality is the goal of political thinking, and Pinker argues that it cannot be achieved if we ignore the innate traits of individuals.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/3897817-morgan-blackledge"></a></section><section><p>551 reviews1,857 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/116790280">September 23, 2017</a></section><div><p>I love Steven Pinker and I loved this book.<p>NOTE: What an ironically lame review of a book that is legitimate genius! In retrospect, I must not have had the time/wherewithal to write the review this amazing book deserves. </p><p>It had (and still has) a HUGE influence on my thinking and way of seeing the world. How many books can you say that about? </p><p>Clichés like ‘transformative’ or ‘monumental’ or ‘important’ come to mind when I try to describe it in a quick pass.</p><p>That sounds lame and hyperbolic, but that’s honestly appropriate when describing this work. </p><p>I guess I’m left where I started. </p><p>I love Steven Pinker and I loved this book.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/2499456"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>3 books255 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1148328386">July 24, 2022</a></section><div><p>Преди да прочета тази книга не знаех, че формирането на човешката природа е толкова спорен въпрос в интелектуалните среди. <p>Изгледа, много хора смятат, че например насилието е болестно, несвойствено за човека състояние - и да се каже, че склонността към насилие всъщност е еволюционна адаптация за справяне с определени ситуации е същото, като оправдаване на насилието. Също според тях, откритието, че съществуват известни вродени разлики в начина на мислене и в емоциите на мъжете и жените, породени от различия в мозъка и хормоните им - е подтикване към дискриминация към жените.</p><p>Понеже книгата е изключително обемна и разглежда широк кръг въпроси, позволявам си да преведа част от описанието и от издателството, което според мен успява отлично и накратко да я представи:</p><p>"В книгата си, Пинкър разглежда идеята на т.н. "човешка природа" и нейното морално, емоционално и политическо значение. Той показва как много интелектуалци отричат съществуването на каквито и да е вродени характеристики у човека и вместо това догматично приемат три постулата:<br />- Tabula rasa: човешкият ум няма каквито и да е вродени характеристики, таланти, наклонности и т.н. - всичко това зависи и се формира от средата, в която човек израства;<br />- Благородният дивак: хората се раждат добри и невинни и биват "покварени" от обществото, на което се дължат всякакви лоши техни черти и поведение;<br />- Духовен свят: човек има душа, която мисли и чувства независимо от биологията на тялото, което обитава.</p><p>Всяка от тия три догми носи своя морален и исторически багаж и техните защитници прибягват до понякога отчаяни тактики, за да дискредитират учените, които ги отхвърлят."</p><p>Доста по-интересно е, отколкото успявам да опиша. Сори.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2499456?shelf=%D0%B2%D1%81%D0%B5%D0%BA%D0%B8-%D1%82%D1%80%D1%8F%D0%B1%D0%B2%D0%B0-%D0%B4%D0%B0-%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%BE%D1%87%D0%B5%D1%82%D0%B5">всеки-трябва-да-прочете</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/73077948-alina-lucia"></a></section><section><p>38 reviews18 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2197613853">January 6, 2020</a></section><div><p>Reading this book has been a transformative experience for me, and I just happened to read it at the perfect time, a time where I was having trouble verbalising my moral convictions as a scientist. <p>It was as if Pinker read my mind and listed my ideas, only in a more eloquent, well structured manner. </p><p>He argues that the acceptance of innate differences and tendencies between members of our species, a result of genetic make-up, should not be detrimental to our moral reasoning, but rather the opposite. Acknowledging such truths, and using reason and logic to transcend our innate limitations, would allows us to make more informed decisions within many realms of society, including politics, bioethics and education. </p><p>Pinker's argument resonates well with that of Rakitin in Dostoevsky's "The Karamazov Brothers", when he says: "Humanity will find in itself the power to live for virtue, even without believing in immortality. It will find it in love for freedom, for equality, for fraternity." </p><p>And what a wonderful thought that is.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/7299609-sherif-arafa"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>9 books4,307 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4466535089">January 11, 2022</a></section><div><p><br />يعد ستيفن بينكر واحدا من أهم المفكرين المعاصرين انطلاقا من دراساته النفسية والعصبية وقدرته على تبسيط العلوم. في هذا الكتاب يبرهن بينكر خطأ نظرية (الصفحة الفارغ) والتي تقول بأن الإنسان يأتي لهذه الحياة بريئا كصفحة فارغة، لكن الحياة (بما فيها من تجارب وأحداث وتربية…إلخ) هي ما تملأ هذه الصفحة وتجعله كما هو عليه.. يقول بينكر أن هذا غير صحيح. <br />في هذا الكتاب يستعرض بينكر العديد من النظريات والأبحاث بطريقة شيقة، ليرينا كيف أن الإنسان يأتي للحياة مجهزا مسبقا بالكثير من لآليات الذهنية التي لها دور كبير في صياغة سلوكه.. وأن الفطرة ليست بريئة بالضرورة.. للبيئة دور في تشكيل الإنسان بالطبع، لكنه ليس الوحيد كما كان الفلاسفة يظنون قديما. فعلى الإنسان مغالبة فطرته كثيرا كي يصبح متحضرا... <br />الكتاب مليء بالدراسات الشيقة لدراسة التوائم مثلا، و كذلك من من الممتع متابعة تسلسل أفكار بينكر وطريقة عرضه لأفكاره بشكل سلس.. <br />يستعرض الكتاب حقيقة الرنسان كما هي من منظور بيولوجي ونفسي.. لا ما نتمنى له أن يكون.. لأن هذه أولي خطوات التعامل مع أنفسنا ومغالبة قصورها الطبيعي وبدائية تكوينها النفسي</p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/7668412-andrea"></a></section><section><p>309 reviews37 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/274286347">February 19, 2012</a></section><div><p>How refreshing that S. Pinker abundantly refers to the vast trove of literary works, picking out gems of insight into human nature, in his elegant scientific analysis! Perhaps no surprise from a cognitive psychologist so implicated in the study of linguistics and language acquisition, but welcome all the same.<br />Far from rendering his propos less scientific, his quotes from literary sources (throughout the book, not limited to the chapter on the Arts) give depth and relevance to his arguments, which are anything but "warm and fuzzy." And the opening chapters in Part 1, while perhaps too drawn out for many readers (including myself) provide a very coherent framework for the reasoning (The Blank State, The Ghost in the Machine, and The Noble Savage) behind the denial of human naure by many well-intentioned scientists and politicians.<p>Unfortunately, Pinker has obliged himself to take great pains to explain, again and again throughout the book, that understanding some of the more unpleasant aspects of human nature(selfishness, violence...)does not mean that one condones the behaviour. I would think that most readers already grasp this point without needing to be continually reminded of it, but I suppose he addresses himself to his detractors (and potential deniers).</p><p>I especially enjoyed chapters 8, "The Fear of Inequality" and 11 "The Fear of Nihilism", which are not only convincingly written, but full of humour as well. Ditto for the chapter on children. Any parent who has managed to raise children despite the continuous onslaught of conflicting childrearing advice by the "experts" can attest to Pinker's observations.</p><p>Well-written, meticulously documented, and insightful; a good place to begin reading within the currents of evolutionary psychology and sociobiology. </p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/7668412?shelf=brain-mind-cognition">brain-mind-cognition</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/7668412?shelf=non-fiction">non-fiction</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/7668412?shelf=reviewed">reviewed</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/20051503-kunal-sen"></a></section><section><p>323 reviews45 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/949673621">June 5, 2014</a></section><div><p>Not that I was convinced by all the arguments presented in this book, but it is an incredible joy to discover a single book that echoes so many thoughts that have been percolating in my mind, and to hear the same things I have been trying to say, argued and articulated so well. <p>With age I have come to dislike the idea of an ideology, any ideology. Anything that compels us to think that something is correct or good because it ought to be correct. Reality does not care how any of us feel about it. Also accepting something to be true does not in any way imply that I have to like it or support it. So often we see these things mixed up in our modern intellectual mindset, and if anyone suffers from such distractions then this book is a must read for them.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6243880-gary-beauregard-bottomley"></a></section><section><p>935 reviews556 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/310424515">September 24, 2017</a></section><div><p>"Once again a Pinker book changed my world view."<p>The book really opened my eyes about how we learn and become who we are. I had previously just accepted the various interpretations of the the noble savage, the ghost in the machine and the blank slate. Pinker demolishes and demonstrates why those interpretations are misleading, and you will realize why Pinker is called one of the only linguists who can write in prose.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section></section></article></div></div>||||I|||| * Home
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 Language and Human Nature Tetralogy #3

 The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

 Steven Pinker

 4.09
 23,700 ratings 1,065 reviews
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 In The Blank Slate , Steven Pinker explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings. He shows how many intellectuals have denied the existence of human nature by embracing three linked dogmas: the Blank Slate (the mind has no innate traits), the Noble Savage (people are born good and corrupted by society), and the Ghost in the Machine (each of us has a soul that makes choices free from biology). Each dogma carries a moral burden, so their defenders have engaged in desperate tactics to discredit the scientists who are now challenging them.

 Pinker injects calm and rationality into these debates by showing that equality, progress, responsibility, and purpose have nothing to fear from discoveries about a rich human nature. He disarms even the most menacing threats with clear thinking, common sense, and pertinent facts from science and history.

 Despite its popularity among intellectuals during much of the twentieth century, he argues, the doctrine of the Blank Slate may have done more harm than good. It denies our common humanity and our individual preferences, replaces hardheaded analyses of social problems with feel-good slogans, and distorts our understanding of government, violence, parenting, and the arts.

 Pinker shows that an acknowledgement of human nature that is grounded in science and common sense, far from being dangerous, can complement insights about the human condition made by millennia of artists and philosophers. All this is done in the style that earned his previous books many prizes and worldwide acclaim: wit, lucidity, and insight into matters great and small .
 Genres Psychology Science Nonfiction Philosophy Sociology Biology Politics
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 528 pages, Paperback

 First published January 1, 2002

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 About the author

 Steven Pinker

 67 books 9,341 followers
 Steven Arthur Pinker is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science. Pinker is known for his wide-ranging explorations of human nature and its relevance to language, history, morality, politics, and everyday life. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as the New York Times, Time, and The New Republic, and is the author of numerous books, including The Language Instinct , How the Mind Works , Words and Rules , The Blank Slate , The Stuff of Thought , The Better Angels of Our Nature , The Sense of Style , and most recently, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress .

 He was born in Canada and graduated from Montreal's Dawson College in 1973. He received a bachelor's degree in experimental psychology from McGill University in 1976, and then went on to earn his doctorate in the same discipline at Harvard in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, then became an assistant professor at Harvard and then Stanford University. From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. (Except for a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1995-6.) As of 2008, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard.

 Pinker was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in 2004 and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in 2005. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv, McGill, and the University of Tromsø, Norway. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003. In January 2005, Pinker defended Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, whose comments about the gender gap in mathematics and science angered much of the faculty. On May 13th 2006, Pinker received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.

 In 2007, he was invited on The Colbert Report and asked under pressure to sum up how the brain works in five words – Pinker answered "Brain cells fire in patterns."

 Pinker was born into the English-speaking Jewish community of Montreal. He has said, "I was never religious in the theological sense... I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew." As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969. His father, a trained lawyer, first worked as a traveling salesman, while his mother was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has two younger siblings. His brother is a policy analyst for the Canadian government. His sister, Susan Pinker, is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and the author of The Sexual Paradox and The Village Effect .

 Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too divorced. He is married to the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, the author of 10 books and winner of the National Medal of the Humanities. He has no children.

 His next book will take off from his research on "common knowledge" (knowing that everyone knows something). Its tentative title is: Don't Go There: Common Knowledge and the Science of Civility, Hypocrisy, Outrage, and Taboo .

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 Jenn Pellerin
 26 reviews 29 followers
 June 5, 2008
 I'm an atheist. I've always been and always will be (god willing). When I was a kid, I used to envy the religious folks who seemed to be having such deep meaningful fun all the time. It's not that I hate religion, or the idea of god, it's just that I can't really get my mind around it after a childhood devoid of spirituality. Newsflash: if you don't take a lot for granted, religious theory makes NO SENSE. The only place I've ever found deeper meaning is in biology and physics and neurology. SO...
 reading this book is as close as I've come to a "religious experience". Reading about the evolution of the human mind, and how our basic drives--and the complex mechanisms we've developed to serve them--manifest themselves within culture, and simultaneously CREATE culture...it's just...positively uplifting. Thinking of human nature in this way makes me appreciate everything "human" in a much deeper sense. Music sounds better, machines are blowing my mind, babies are tiny geniuses! Hell, I may even read some poetry. How about THAT?
 I would recommend this book to everyone I know. It's just thick enough that some paragraphs warrant a second going over, but just engaging enough that it won't leave you frustrated and bored.
 science-and-brains
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 Nebuchadnezzar
 39 reviews 361 followers
 March 16, 2012
 I contend that there are two Steven Pinkers. Pinker 1 is an eloquent, witty, and insightful writer on the issues of cognitive psychology and linguistics who has the rare talent of making his subjects accessible and appealing to academic and lay audiences. Pinker 2 retains the writing ability, but instead uses it for pushing his pet theories, usually political in nature (cf. his most recent Better Angels of Our Nature). This book comes straight from the pen of Pinker 2.

 There are really two main components of the book: Lengthy rants against his ideological opponents and an extended argument in favor of a watered-down hereditarian view of human nature. Pinker rightly notes that "nature vs. nurture" is a false dichotomy and then goes about ascribing enormous amounts of deterministic power to genes. He relies on a number of controversial and dubious sources as well as his own misinterpretations of some research, such as Bouchard's infamous twin studies.

 Lacking actual examples of those who hold this "blank slate" view, Pinker dredges up some long dead academics to serve as a scarecrow. He rails against J.B. Watson and B.F. Skinner, even though his intellectual hero Noam Chomsky rebutted Skinner and behaviorism in general in the 1960s. Next he'll be telling us Lamarck was wrong about evolution! He also engages in some tired Margaret Mead-bashing typical of sociobiology/evolutionary psychology partisans by citing Derek Freeman's "debunking" of Mead. Pinker missed the memo that Freeman's work was subsequently discredited (see Paul Shankman's The Trashing of Margaret Mead ).

 Pinker astutely points out that proponents of environmental or cultural determinism do not associate these theories with the horrors of communism (Lysenko famously denounced genetics as a "bourgeois pseudoscience"), but they do associate biological theories with eugenics and Nazism. However, in general, Pinker unleashes a firestorm on a field of straw men. Some of his more contemporary "blank slaters" are so-called "gender feminists," whatever those are. (Everyone except Christina Hoff Sommers?) Demonstrating that he's willing to slurp up just about any "finding" in pop evolutionary psychology, he offers an extended defense of Thornhill and Palmer's A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion . The defense parrots the authors' framing of the controversy, with Thornhill and Palmer as the hard-headed, rational scientists telling the cold hard truths versus the hordes of fluffy-headed, irrational, emotional, and "politically correct" feminists. Any mention of the scathing reviews the book met in the scientific press (see Cheryl Brown Travis's edited volume Evolution, Gender, and Rape ) is omitted or given cursory treatment. Pinker uses pop evo psych in a number of other places as a means to club over the head the bogeywoman of gender feminism. This generally seems to involve projecting modern gender roles and stereotypes back into pre-history based on rank speculation. Simon Blackburn put it best: "Meet the Flintstones." (See, e.g., Cordelia Fine , Lise Eliot or Rebecca M. Jordan-Young for critical overviews of current sex-difference research.)

 I could go on about the technical shortcomings in this book, but Blackburn and H. Allen Orr have already done a much better job of it in their reviews than I could:
 http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/~swb24/revi...
 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archi...

 Pinker attempts to posture as a defender of science against the demons of unreason, but he is simply defending his own views and pet theories about science. He is pushing stealth hereditarianism under the banner of consilience, to borrow E.O. Wilson's term. "The blank slate" thus becomes an epithet to write off anyone who wants to say, "Hold on a moment, it's much more complicated than that!"

 For those looking to get into evolutionary psychology: Skip this and pick up Laland and Brown's Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behaviour for a scholarly overview of fields studying evolution and human behavior and Buller's Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature for a critical view of evolutionary psychology.

 For those looking to read Pinker: Skip this and pick up something by Pinker 1, like The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language or The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature
 evolutionary-psychology politics-and-political-philosophy psychology-and-neuroscience
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 Manny
 Author 28 books 13.4k followers
 September 9, 2009
 Steven Pinker takes on the old nature/nurture question, and does an excellent job of it. Are we the products of our genes or our upbringing? Pinker tells you in the first few pages what the new consensus is: both, but genes are probably more important.

 He has some wonderful stories to back up the general points. Here's one that particularly appealed to me. During the 60s and 70s, you often heard that boys and girls are indoctrinated from an early age so as to conform to conventional gender roles. Without that conditioning, girls would e.g. be as likely to want to play with toy guns, or boys with dolls. It was just a theory, but it was one that many people believed.

 So, says Pinker, how could we investigate the question scientifically? It's difficult. What you'd like to do, if you had the chance, would be to take a few dozen boys, castrate them at birth, surgically transform them into girls, and then raise them like other girls without ever telling them what you'd done. At various points in their development, you could compare them with a control group of biologically normal girls, and see if there were any significant differences.

 Needless to say, no one would ever permit such an appallingly wicked experiment. Except that it's actually happened. Every year, it turns out that a small number of male infants do have to be castrated and turned into girls, most often as a result of botched circumcision operations. Historically, they've usually not been told what happened, since this was deemed to be in their best interests.

 Studies on these unfortunate children show that they nearly always feel deeply conflicted, and quite different from other girls. They have all sorts of impulses which they feel are bizarre and wrong, and which can sometimes lead them to suicidal despair. In some cases, they have later been informed that they are actually male, and their reaction has typically been one of relief. They weren't weird after all. They were just male without knowing it.

 Well, if you thought that story was interesting, he's got dozens more that are nearly as good. I loved this book.


 science
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 Guille
 728 reviews 1,349 followers
 April 14, 2022

 Interesantísimo libro con un tema tan polémico como relevante, ¿existe una naturaleza humana?, ¿la existencia precede a la esencia o más bien sucede al contrario? Es imposible resumir aquí los argumentos que aporta Pinker en apoyo de la existencia de una naturaleza humana y de sus implicaciones, por lo que aquí me limitaré a resumir brevemente los temas que trata con la esperanza de que les despierte el gusanillo de la curiosidad.

 Tras comentar los antecedentes de la idea de tabla rasa, idea atribuida a John Locke, y su relación con otras dos ideas centrales en el ideario colectivo de los últimos siglos, la idea del buen salvaje de Rousseau y la mente libre e independiente del cuerpo de Descartes, el autor da un repaso a los nuevos conocimientos que vienen a poner en tela de juicio a todas estas teorías, la ciencia cognitiva, la neurociencia, la genética de la conducta y la psicología evolutiva.

 Su postura es clara: “la mente está equipada con una batería de sentimientos, impulsos y facultades para razonar y comunicarse, y que tienen una lógica común en todas las culturas, son difíciles de eliminar o de rediseñar a partir de cero, fueron configuradas por la acción de la selección natural en el transcurso de la evolución humana y deben algo de su diseño básico (y algo de su variación) a la información presente en el genoma.”

 Tras ello, dedica una buena parte del libro a responder a aquellos que ven en esta naturaleza humana una idea peligrosa.

 Entre esos peligros es especialmente relevante el hecho de que esa supuesta inmutabilidad de la naturaleza humana eliminaría toda esperanza de reforma, y, como corolario de ello, la falacia de que si supuestamente aceptamos que muchos de los rasgos negativos del comportamiento humano son naturales, y dado que supuestamente todo lo natural es bueno, deberíamos aceptar como bueno todos esos comportamientos infames.

 Otra de las implicaciones polémicas es todo lo que supone que “en última instancia no controlemos nuestras propias decisiones, pues estas están predestinadas por el estado de nuestros cerebros” y, por tanto, hasta donde llega nuestra responsabilidad en los actos. Y junto a ello el peligro del nihilismo, de la imposibilidad de establecer una escala de valores “Si no somos más que máquinas que permiten que los genes hagan copias de sí mismos, si nuestras alegrías y satisfacciones no son otra cosa que sucesos bioquímicos, si la vida no se creó con algún fin elevado ni se dirige hacia alguna noble meta.”

 Pero Pinker no solo se defiende, también ataca destacando las implicaciones perversas que también tendría una mente organizada como tabla rasa, como es el relativismo. Dado que no hay nada previo en el cerebro, lo que percibimos, siempre mediatizado por nuestras teorías previamente adquiridas, simplemente se acumula en nuestro cerebro condicionando a su vez lo que percibiremos a posteriori. Por ejemplo, la ciencia solo sería una forma de ver la realidad como cualquier otra, o cualquier moral y estructura de valores éticos sería igualmente válida.

 Por último hace un repaso a las implicaciones que las dos concepciones de la mente, la tabula rasa y la existencia de una naturaleza innata, tienen sobre una serie de temas polémicos cómo la forma de organizarnos políticamente o qué políticas se deben adoptar frente a problemas sociales como la violencia o el trato a los delincuentes, las implicaciones que tienen el género de las personas en el comportamiento, el papel de la herencia en ese comportamiento…
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 Daniel Clausen
 Author 9 books 455 followers
 January 19, 2018

 In some ways, this book is both a tragedy and an inspiration.

 How is it a tragedy? It's a tragedy because the book is responding to very ideologically-based, simple arguments for the Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine that I think don't really need to be addressed. Many of the points in the book I was thoroughly convinced of before reading the book -- I knew that genetics played some role in determining personality and aptitude; I was convinced of the probabilistic approach to human behavior; and I was convinced that versions of "is" do not automatically translate into "ought". On top of that, much of the book is spent rehashing the very petty politics of what happens in university departments and on college campuses -- the politicization and tribalization of knowledge. It's a stark reminder that even in environments where people should be better and do better, they often give in to their worst instincts.

 So, the book is tragic in that much of this material, in a more perfect world, could have just been skipped or ignored. The author could have begun this book from a different starting place where readers have no ideological axes to grind, open-minded examination of evidence and arguments take place, and we are all intellectually and emotionally ready to live in a world of nuance. But no, that is not the world we live in, so that is not the book we get. And that is tragic.

 The book, though, is also an inspiration. Why? Because it attempts to lift the conversation to that place where nuance and evidence are grounded in a humanistic understanding of our role as scholars and thinkers. The author, through his exploration of the various themes and evidence, tries to make us all epistemic creatures -- people who can have beliefs and values but suspend them in order to explore counter-evidence, new theories, and hypotheses, and sharpen our values with our knowledge. As epistemic creatures, we would also be able to ask that all-important question: How do we know something?

 In a moment in history where so much discourse is polluted by vulgarity, that is refreshing...but it's also tragic. Because in a world where we are all trained from a young age to have the epistemic and moral habits of scientists, this might have been a more nuanced and at once infinitely shorter book.
 books-of-2018 international-relations-classics top-books
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 Lena
 Author 1 book 335 followers
 November 20, 2008
 The Blank Slate is Steven Pinker's ambitious attempt to close the gap between the conventionally accepted dogma that human beings come into this world free of innate characteristics, ready to be molded and shaped by society, and what science has begun to reveal about genetic predisposition.

 Prior to reading this book, I had no idea that the origin of human nature was such a contentious topic amongst modern intellectuals. Seems that a lot of people think acknowledging that something like violence might have been evolutionarily adaptive is the same thing as condoning violence and excusing those who engage in it, or that admitting that men and women are genetically different justifies discrimination against women. Pinker spends a lot of time in this book carefully addressing these concerns while at the same time making a compelling argument that the current tendency to deny any genetic influence on society's more vexing ills only handicaps our ability to successfully deal with our most serious problems.

 Pinker is not shy about tackling controversial topics as he makes his points. The chapter in which he pointed to evidence showing that a child's intelligence and personality are shaped far more by genes, peers and random influences than they are by parents got him an enormous amount of mail, as did the section in which he discussed genetic influences on our appreciation of the arts.

 Despite the radical nature of many of the theories Pinker presents, I found myself having continuous "ah-ha!" moments as I read this book. At its core, the idea that we are shaped by our genes as well as our experiences fits far better with reality than the idea that we are all nothing but moldable blank slates. Though these theories may not intellectually fashionable, Pinker makes it clear that there are a wealth of benefits to be gained by accepting what science has to tell us about the true origins of human nature.
 how-the-brain-works non-fiction skepticism
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 Infinite Jen
 77 reviews 180 followers
 August 5, 2022
 Do you believe that the human mind, at conception, is a Tabula Rasa? Because John Locke was completely out of his depth regarding the architecture of the brain and said something that sounded good? Well, here’s a Hobbesian Hammer to mangle the handsome features of your Rousseaian naïveté. Are you convinced that, despite evolution’s demonstrable power to produce a wide variety of phenotypic delights and inform the instinctual capacities of creatures big and small, it had nothing to say about the scaffolding of the human mind? If this isn’t sophistry in the service of ideology, I’ll eat a live dolphin. This is where I would normally trot out such tired qualifiers as:

 Yes, of course, the human mind is malleable (to an extent), and the effects of cultural copulation are manifold and obv(invid)ious. No, the shackles of these behaviors are not made of adamantium (what clearer evidence of our power to chuck a spandrel into our deepest evolutionary drives than nutting into latex (or sheep skin, for those with allergies, or a Gatorade bottle for the desperate), or pharmaceutically tinkering with the baby oven, or, more terrible still - exercising abstinence), we have big frontal-loafs for a raisin. Damnit! I’m doing it again!

 Socrates grant me Parrhesia so that I may slow the advance of utopian retrograde reasoning (technically that would mean my foe is receding from me, which puts me in (an) + alogized full nelson. Shit. ((Although, technically, the perceived retrograde motions of heavenly bodies were the result of systemic misunderstanding, so maybe there’s a way out of this. (((Although, if we’re just going by the literal definition, denuded of its historical context, then I suppose it does indicate a backwards motion,[although, specifically a backwards step!] ((((although, in this case, I’m referring to a mode of cognition which starts with a conclusion and reasons backwards from there, and that has little to say about the bodily kinesthetics of the army involved, except a perusal of history and human behavior so selective that the term malnourished would die of malnourishment in seeking to comprehend it. (((((May)(b)e 5(G)(Eye))((h)EAR))(if you (s(L)heep) with a bre(ache)k p(ad: for Colgate) (th)under yo(lk)ur pill(age)ow, it c(an)(tel(l)(lope) h(el(hel)p)elp attenuate these sinister frequencies. Alternatively, there are magnetic bracelets, one of which I just gave a jingle, and look at me, back to normal! So if 5G is indeed the source of your recalcitrant, retrograde-rectitude, you might look into that. Because the idea that we’re Blank Slates is about as goddamn plausible as feng shui’ing the furniture in your house into the shape of the regular convex polytopes using ONLY three dimensions in order to propitiate Azathoth who will then allow you to grow cotton candy in the abundant soil of human stupidity.

 Well, this whole thing started off way more belligerent (and frankly insane) than I expected or wanted it to. But, I’m what you might charitably call a ‘discovery’ writer. Which is why I can’t plot anything, (unless it’s revenge) and chose to major in numerical witchcraft. But I (being careful not to think about the mathematics of infinite sets this time) digress (carefully and without recursion)

 Now this assertion should be uncontroversial to anyone who a.) does not deny the scientific fact of evolution, and b.) can do a perfect cartwheel.

 We are the sum total of our amino acids pitching a fit and erecting a house of carbon capable of sheltering our nucleotide sequences long enough for us to mail them into the future via no holds barred (debatable. See; de Sade) body-karate. We are equipped with a mental lattice work which preferentially captured certain free floating rationale that reliably saved us from bad endings, and through inconceivable stretches of geometric time, crystallized these behaviors, via the non-random selection of random mutations, into sugar and phosphate ladders, twisted just so, that encode instructions for producing brains which have aptitudes calibrated to insure their manifestation in forms such as: Folk Newtonian physics for parabola’ing rocks and plague ridden cattle (catapult non-negotiable). The ease with which children acquire language. The fear of heights. The desire to flee screaming from serpents. The ease with which most of us submit to dominance hierarchies. Disgust reflexes involving poo, disease, creeping crud, mud elementals, kitsch, musicians who can’t properly apply corpse paint, the absence of double-kicks and blast beats in elevator music, imitation Oreos, asymmetrical saggin’ asses, non-anime-incest. And so on. During the interim between awareness, sexual maturity, and Koital Kombat, our data is subject to outside forces which reconfigure it in ways that are bolded, italicized, and hyperlinked. Nature and nurture (as the wise among us say) are perennial fuck buddies.

 This book is amazing.

 Read it you bastards!

 (It occurs to me that, somewhere within this review, I have failed to capture something parenthetically. It is like holding a sneeze in my heart.)
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 Ahmed
 909 reviews 7,330 followers
 October 6, 2020
 كتاب الصفحة البيضاء لستيفن بنكر دا مستفز فوق الوصف، سلاسة ونعومة وبساطة جميلة جدا، طرح أفكار وتأصيل تاريخي لها مع التركيز على دلالة اللغة واهميتها (النقطة دي كانت مبهرة بشكل خيالي)، وللأسف الكتب الحلوة اللي زي دي بتخليني اتمنى اني كنت اقراه بلغته الأم وفي نفس الوقت بيخليني الاحظ اكتر للفجوة المرعبة بين الترجمات العربي والمقابل لها في الاصول والترجمات الانجليزية مثلا، فارق معرفي مهول في الحجم والتأثير، في حين الترجمات العربي محكومة بمجهودات اغلبها له شروط تجارية او حتى مش مهتم بنقل معرفة ما، والمشاريع الحكومية بتكون ��ير مضمونة الجودة.
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 Daniel
 149 reviews 8 followers
 August 3, 2008
 Louis Menand has written a typically excellent piece on Pinker's arrogance: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2002...
 I found this book simultaneously interesting and exasperating, because the author is obviously a highly educated, well-read man who thinks he knows everything about every subject. There is a whole class of these public intellectuals (the late Carl Sagan, Richard Dawins, et al) who play this game: they use the public authority they have gained by virtue of (at least modest) academic accomplishment in one field to pronounce authoritatively on every damn thing under the sun. (Most of his scholarly journal output is in psychology and language, according to his cv; his PhD is in experimental psychology.) And maybe Pinker has figured it all out, but don't you think he could cut those of us a break who still think we exist? "Cognitive neuroscientists have not only exorcised the ghost but have shown that the brain does not even have a part that does exactly what the ghost is supposed to do: review all the facts and make a decision for the rest of the brain to carry out. Each of us there is a single I in control. But that is an illusion the brain works hard to produce..." And with that he dismisses the idea that you and I exist at all; there is no "you" there, only a collection of atoms with some remarkable properties (observable by other lumps of atoms). Wow, I am glad that's all settled. More generally, it's good to know there's no need for a field like philosophy. Pinker has a footnote to support his claim that the brain has no "I," but one of his sources (predictably) is Daniel Dennett, the Tufts philosopher and enemy of the mind (and Anything Else Immaterial). Elsewhere Pinker claims Hitler thought he was doing God's will (footnote to some article in an atheist magazine I looked up -- check out Free Inquiry, Volumbe 19, Issue 2, and judge for yourself whether you would *ever* cite this source in a serious academic inquiry) and that the Catholic Church teaches that 'ensoulment' takes place at the moment of conception. Let me take this last nugget for a moment. I'm guessing Pinker has spent little time in Catholic churches or reading Catholic books or magazines, so I can see why he thinks a statement like "the catholic church teaches ______" is an easy one to make. To those of us who have done some of those things, though, it is not so trivial. Sure, in broad strokes, one can formulate simple statements with confidence (e.g., that God exists or Jesus is the Son of God or even abortion is wrong), but his assertion is packed with some things that are far harder to disentangle. Most importantly, he uses the word "ensoulment" -- and this is central to his argument at this point in the book -- implying that the Church firmly teaches this concept that he is upset about. I do not know that the RCC says much (currently, anyway) dogmatically about the philosophical underpinnings of a word like "ensoulment." What I do know is that I am familiar with the phrase Ghost in the Machine (one of Pinker's bogeymen in this book) from Catholic authors who, like the late JPII, were critical of Cartesian dualism. So, I am being long-winded, but I am trying to get across that Pinker has these convenient cartoon notions of what other people say and because he is so frightfully intelligent he assumes he has it all figured out. If he would just say to himself, "It is possible that there is one thing I think I know that I do not," I believe his tone would be far more congenial and the book much improved. But then again, there is no self for him to say it to, so what's the point?
 general-nonfiction
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 L.E. Duncan
 Author 3 books 2 followers
 April 19, 2013
 So here's a case where you have a book about how much of our personalities and, well, nature is innate, rather than nurtured into us by our parents or our environment. If The Blank Slate were two hundred pages and focused just on brain science, it'd be one thing. The trouble is that it ends up reading as if Pinker gathered every single study that seemed to support his position and threw it into a blender, and then threw in a number of screeds against groups he has a bone to pick with. The result is a somewhat uneven and contradictory book where one chapter asserts that women don't go into math because they are innately unlikely to like it, and another chapter asserts that no one is innately good at complex math, which is why we have school to pound it into kids' little heads. Pinker's insistence on environment and parenting having minimal influence is sometimes undercut by the studies he presents and his own conclusions. Pinker is quick to say that differences between men and women are innate, whether it's emotional, a difference in a bell curve intelligence spread, or in general interests, but he'll attribute differences between races and ethnic groups to environment or oppression, forces he largely dismisses otherwise. Or we can note that Pinker asserts first that women are better caretakers then men, then secondly asserts that parenting is fairly irrelevant (as long as there's a man to look up to, no comments on where women fall on this influence spectrum), and then thirdly asserts that how well kids get along with parents is predictive of their overall success, which would suggest . . . parenting isn't irrelevant? He also tends to reduce complex issues, such as art or culture or rule of law to biological imperatives, which is a bit odd when he also asserts human individuality and specialness (as long as they also fall within the Norman the Normy Norms that define actual human nature, I suppose). He'll say art has no influence on anyone, really, so everyone hates modernism and post-modernism because it deconstructs art, which no one needs, because everyone knows art isn't real. And by the by, prejudices/stereotypes are often innate and have some good sense and 100% reliable statistics behind them, and these prejudices can't be strongly messed with by media or culture, although of course we should treat everyone with respect, even if they're low IQ and will never amount to anything or. Except that human nature is so violent (at least, if you're a man) and suspicious that of course we will never treat everyone with respect and don't you dare Big Brother us into doing so.

 ... I got carried away. But the book is absolutely exhausting, wheeling from one conclusion to the next in a mixture of hopeless pessimism, wide-eyed futurism, white-knuckled warnings about not screwing up the status quo, and sudden naivete. I also find many of the absolutely-certain-claims somewhat suspect, as if statistics/brain scans from this or that study and some anecdotes and did you know tribal people actually kill each other?? are absolute proof of what a human is. You can't point out that many media reports of "this causes cancer" or "this proves this parenting tactic successful!" often exaggerate or segment the truth without making it impossible not to notice that nothing, even studies or statistics, exists in cold, objective isolation. I'm not being post-modern here. I'm saying that the very fact I know more about Pinker from this book than I do about human nature is par for the course. Does any of this matter? Does it matter to a childless female engineer that she's some kind of biological anomaly (and is she?). Is anything helped by positing that men are naturally violent and competitive, and ignoring the uncountable exceptions, or ignoring that women also compete against other women, for mates and otherwise? Is IQ, like, this magic statistic that determines human worth in society? Are you sure you aren't a supporter of eugenics? Etc, etc, etc. We can all agree that people are not meant to be programmed, that we should not force people who want to be poets to become mathematicians to fill a quota, and we should treat people well even when they're not like us. All right? All right.
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 Tristan
 112 reviews 228 followers
 July 25, 2017
 "I'm only human
 Of flesh and blood I'm made
 Human
 Born to make mistakes"

 --The Human League, Human


 Most of us instinctively feel the acquisition of scientific knowledge follows a linear path, first operating from a solid factual base, and then modifying itself as it goes along in an objective fashion. Ultimately, a common agreeance on a certain topic will be reached, and the findings will translate into well-considered policy.

 Ideally, that is how it should work, with scientists serving as neutral observers, freely informing us, the public, on whatever findings they come across, whatever the implications. This is not always what actually happens, of course. Not by a long shot. Ironically - also tellingly -, when it comes to the in-depth study of the human animal, there is active, hostile opprobrium by (a certain school of) social scientists and ideologically motivated activists alike. Scientists who try to find biological causations for certain human behaviours or perceived inequalities are frequently ostracised, pelted by slurs, and made pariah's in their own fields. The sober truth is that the scientific community is not free at all from anti-intellectualism and bullying tactics.

 It seems nothing much has changed since the 2002 publication of this book, which I'm informed drew out considerable polemical discourse at the time. I'm not surprised. Anno 2016, the social sciences in Western academia are still infested with social constructivist thinking, with no sign of it abating any time soon. In fact, it might even have reached its zenith, having entrenched itself even further. It's not difficult to make an analogy with creationists. This exemplifies how far we still have to go as a species to attain a higher level of rational thinking, which means being willing to demolish some of our most cherished beliefs. Ego investment still is riding high, it seems.

 Biological innateness. Determinism. These terms observably evoke unpleasant feelings in many. However, in order to come face to face with the homo sapiens which, during its brutal evolutionary process, has acquired certain survival - often nasty -instincts, one should let go of such reservations . Funnily enough, it was some of the most prominent Enlightenment thinkers (such as Rousseau) who introduced the blank slate theory. But are we blank slates, almost solely informed by the culture that surrounds us? Hardly, as Pinker shows us -with the aid of a plethora of immensely interesting case studies - in this intellectually dense, yet highly accessible book. Genes and our biological make-up determine our behaviour to a far greater extent than culture or our upbringing ever will. Pinker even goes as far as saying that parental influence on their child(ren)'s formation is pretty much negligible. Peer group interaction is a far more important determining factor.

 However, Pinker deftly reasons that even with the ever-expanding, confronting knowledge of the human coming from the exciting fields of neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, there is no need for us to defeatedly resort to fatalism or nihilism. On the contrary, an intimate, unsentimental understanding of what we are will help us enormously in developing a truly humanistic ethos and thus in crafting a pragmatic society which can be beneficial to all of us.

 The utopian vision, with its aim to 'mould' the human psyche (social constructivism), the 20th century has adequately shown to only lead us into disaster.
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 عبدالله الوهيبي
 42 reviews 365 followers
 January 30, 2019
 يتحدث ستيفن بينكر –عالم النفس اللغوي في هارفارد- في كتابه (الصفحة البيضاء) عن معتقد شديد الشيوع في القرون الأخيرة، وهو الاعتقاد بأن الإنسان يولد "صفحة بيضاء"، لا يحمل بنية فطرية سابقة، وأن المؤثر الأساسي في تشكيل الإنسان يعود للوالدين، والمجتمع. يهاجم بينكر هذا المعتقد بشدة، وهو يرى أنه يمثّل "الدين العلماني للحياة الثقافية المعاصرة"، وأن هذا المعتقد ساهم في رسم بعض أجندات العلوم الاجتماعية والإنسانية في القرن المنصرم.
 ابتدأ أولاً بتقصي منابع هذه المعتقد التاريخية، منذ روسو وهوبز وديكارت، ثم شرع في تقويض المعتقد عبر أربعة مجالات: العلوم العقلية الحديثة، وعلوم الأعصاب، والجينات، والأطروحات التطورية. فنّد بينكر المخاوف الثقافية التي تمنع من إثبات بنية فطرية أو طبيعة بشرية سابقة، وهي أن الإقرار بطبيعة بشرية ما يبرّر التمييز العنصري، وأن إثبات ميول غير أخلاقية (كالعنف) يجلب التشاؤم، ويدمر فكرة الإرادة الحرة، ويحطم معنى الحياة. وأخيراً عقد المؤلف فصولاً عديدة لمناقشة الأسس الفطرية/الطبيعة المؤثرة في تشكيل نوازع الإنسان وخياراته في :
 [1] السياسة، وفي العنف وأثبت أن الإنسان يحمل ميولاً فطرية للعنف، وأشار لدراسة نشرت عام 2000م أثبتت أن نصف الذكور الذين تجاوزا سن الثانية انخرطوا في الضرب والعض والرفس، وقالت الدراسة أن السؤال الصحيح ليس هو: كيف يتعلم الأطفال الاعتداء؟ بل: كيف يتعلم الأطفال عدم الاعتداء؟!.
 [2] الفروق بين الجنسين، وأثبت فروقاً جوهرية بين الجنسين بيولوجياً وانتقد بعض الأطروحات النسوية التي ترفض الاعتراف بهذه الفروق، وترى بأنها مصنوعة من قبل المجتمع وليس لها أساس عضوي، ودافع عن أطروحة ثرونهيل وبالمر في كتابهما الشهير "التاريخ الطبيعي للاغتصاب" الصادر عام 2000م، الذي ينقض الأطروحة النسوية القائلة بأن الاغتصاب هو جريمة عنف ونتيجة للنظام الأبوي المضطهد للنساء وليس سببه دوافع جنسية راسخة في تكوين الذكر عضوياً/بيولوجياً.
 [3] وفيما يتعلق بالأطفال، هاجم بقوة الأفكار التربوية والنفسية والاجتماعية التي ترى بأن الأطفال يمكن تشكيلهم كما يشكّل الطين أو الصلصال، وتلك التي تبالغ في دور الآباء والمعلمين وتحملهم فوق ما يحتملون، وذلك في فصل هام يجدر بالمهتمين بالتربية الاطلاع عليه.
 كما تحدث في غير ذلك من المجالات كالفنون.
 فكرة الكتاب الأساسية مهمة جداً، وهي أقرب للتصور الديني من نظرية "الصفحة البيضاء"، فالإنسان في التصور الإسلامي لا يولد صفحة بيضاء بل (كل مولود يولد على الفطرة)، مع ملاحظة أن بينكر ملحد، ولا يؤسس أطروحته على أية مستندات دينية.
 أما الترجمة فهي ركيكة في العموم، والعناية بالنواحي الفنية والهوامش سيئة جداً. يقع الكتاب في 550 صفحة، وصدر عن دار الفرقد ٢٠١٨.
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 David Rubenstein
 801 reviews 2,502 followers
 July 17, 2010
 What an impressive book! I have been reading a number of Steven Pinker's books, and they are all excellent. I was particularly interested in how politics and social activists have worked to slow down the progress of science. The concept of a "blank slate", though socially attractive, has held back science and our understanding of human nature.

 The chapter on children was especially interesting. Pinker rightly gives much credit to Judith Harris' excellent book The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do . The subject is not finished, though. Pinker shows that while 50% of the variance in human nature is due to genetics, the remaining 50% of the variance is still in question. It is NOT correlated with home life or parental upbringing. It seems to be a combination of peer influences, and fickle fate.
 biology nonfiction philosophy
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 Mehrsa
 2,234 reviews 3,663 followers
 December 15, 2017
 In which Pinker argues against a bunch of straw men without backing up his overly sweeping claims. I don't disagree with his basic thesis, but I do disagree with his cartoonish characterizations of his opponents, namely, feminists, the left, social scientists, etc. If you're going to write a book in which you are right and everyone else is wrong and stupid, you should at least make sure you support your huge thesis with unassailable facts. He did not. It's one thing to say "we are not a blank slate." Totally fine. But quite another to say parenting and environment make no difference whatsoever, that women are not in fact under-represented in the sciences (that one made me the most mad), and that art is now crap (why is he even qualified to critique modern art?). Anyway, I'm sure it's not his fault--his biology made him that arrogant.
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 Kianoush Mokhtarpour
 105 reviews 129 followers
 October 5, 2020

 چرا ذات انسان را انکار می‌کنیم؟

 مقدمه
 انسان محصول تربیت‌اش است یا محصول طبیعت‌اش؟ آموزش است که خصوصیات انسان‌ها را رقم می‌زند یا سرشت ذاتی‌شان؟ تحیقیقات نشان می‌دهند که هر دوی این عوامل اثرگذار‌اند. اما عموم مردم زمانه‌ی ما سهم طبیعت و سرشت انسان را بسیار کمتر از آنچه هست می‌گیرند. گویی عصر ما با ذات‌باوری، یعنی با این ایده که ذات، سرشت و ژنتیک ما بسیاری از خصوصیاتمان را تعیین می‌کند، سر عناد دارد. دوست داریم همه‌چیز را در تربیت و آموزش خلاصه ببینیم. وقتی بحث تفاوت‌های مردان و زنان می‌شود فورا می‌گوییم نحوه‌ی تربیت باعث این تفاوت‌ها شده است. وقتی کودک با ادبی می‌بینیم شیوه‌ی تربیتی پدر و مادرش را تحسین می‌کنیم. اما آیا امکان ندارد که تفاوت بین زن و مرد ریشه در ذات ما داشته باشد؟ آیا امکان ندارد که علت خوش‌رفتاری یک کودک، ذات سربه‌راهش باشد؟ تحقیقات اخیر تاثیر ذات و ژنتیک را به خوبی اثبات کرده‌اند. مثلاً نشان داده شده که حتی گرایش به بزهکاری تا حد زیادی به سرشت و ژنتیک ما مرتبط است. با این وجود، چرا ما هنوز اثر طبیعت را بی‌درنگ رد می‌کنیم و همه چیز را به پای تربیت می‌نویسیم؟ چرا ذات‌گرایی منفور است و سرشت ذاتی انسان نادیده گرفته می‌شود؟

 یک. برابری خواهی
 یکی از دلایل بی‌اعتنایی به سرشت انسان رواج برابری‌خواهی است. دغدغه‌ی برابری‌خواهی چنان با��ا گرفته و اهمیت یافته که هر سخنی که بوی نابرابری بدهد نشنیده رد می‌شود، از جمله و خصوصاً سخن ذات‌گرایان. ایده‌ی برابری‌ از کلیدی‌ترین باورهای زمانه‌ی ماست؛ پایه و اساس حقوق و ارزش‌های ماست. مثلاً قانون اساسی آمریکا بر شالوده‌ی همین ایده‌ی برابری انسان‌ها بنا شده است. بیرون کشیدن این خشت زیرین همان و فروریختن کل عمارت آمریکا همان. خبر بد آنکه این خشت مدتی‌ است که لق شده. قانون اساسی آمریکا برابری انسان‌ها را به دین گره می‌زند. می‌گوید انسان‌ها برابرند چون خدا آنها را برابر می‌بیند. اما حالا که خدا و دین خود زیر سوال رفته‌اند، ایده‌ی برابری بی‌تکیه‌گا�� مانده، و به تلنگری بند است. با این تفاسیر، این نگرانی که مبادا ذات‌گرایی تلنگر نهایی را وارد کند قابل فهم است

 و فراموش نکنیم که ذات‌باوری، یا بهتر بگوییم فهم غلطی از ذات‌باوری، سابقه‌ی جنایت در پرونده‌اش دارد. نازیسم هیتلر با توصل به برداشت تحریف‌شده‌ای از ذات‌باوری بود که کشتارهای نژادپرستانه‌اش را توجیه می‌کرد. نازیسم این حرف را در دهان ذات‌گرایی گذاشت که نژاد آریایی ذاتاً برتر است و نژادهای یهودی و اسلاو ذاتاً پست‌تر، و به این بهانه خون آنها را حلال کرد. این جنایت‌های نازیسم امروزه به پای ذات‌گرایی نوشته می‌شود. پس جای تعجب نیست که ترس از تکرار شدن این نوع جنایت‌ها باعث شده ایده‌ی سرشت انسان به همراه هیتلر و افکارش در زباله‌دان تاریخ انداخته ‌شود. خصوصاً که در شهرهای چندملیتی امروز، که انسان‌هایی از چندین و چند قوم و نژاد را کنار هم آورده، نژادپرستی می‌تواند فاجعه‌ای به‌مراتب عظیم‌تر بیافریند. این است که ما از بیم آنکه خامی چند نظریات ذات‌باوری را بد بفهمند، یا عده‌ای فرصت‌طلب آن را عامدانه مصادره به مطلوب کنند، نفی حکمت می‌کنیم و درست و غلط ذات‌گرایی را یکجا از صفحات کتاب‌ها و صفحه‌ی ذهن آدم‌ها پاک می‌کنیم. حقیقت را فدای مبارزه با تبعیض نژادی می‌کنیم

 شاخه‌ای از جنبش فمیینیسم هم، مثل جنبش مبارزه با نژاد پرستی، با نیت خیر به میدان آمد اما متاسفانه علیه ذات‌گرایی شمشیر کشید. جنبش فمینیسم برای به دست آوردن حقوق برابر با مردان، نیاز دارد نشان دهد که مردان و زنان برابراند. بنابراین بر شباهت‌های زنان و مردان انگشت تاکید می‌گذارد. اما یک شاخه‌ی افراطی تا آنجا پیش رفته که هر تفاوت سرشتی بین مرد و زن را مطلقاً نفی می‌کند، و وقتی هم که تفاوت‌ها عیان و انکارناپذیر باشند، آنها را یکسره محصول تربیت و محیط می‌داند. مثلاً حتی گرایش جنسی را هم برساخته‌ای اجتماعی، و بی‌تأثیر از سرشت انسان می‌داند و معتقد است دگرجنس‌گرایی یا هم‌جنس‌گرایی را می‌توان با آموزش در افراد نهادینه کرد. از این باور افراطی که بگذریم، باورهای معمولی‌تر اما رایج‌تر مثل نفی خصوصیات و خلقیات زنانه و مردانه، ذات‌گرایی را به حاشیه رانده‌اند. به عنوان مثال دیگر کسی جرأت نمی‌کند بگوید فلان شغل به سرشت زنانه نزدیک‌تر است، یا فلان خصوصیت ذاتاً در مردان پررنگ‌تر است. چنین اظهار نظرهایی—و گویندگانشان—بی‌درنگ انگ تبعیض جنسی می‌خورند و رد می‌شوند

 بی‌مناسبت نیست اشاره کنیم که مقبول افتادن یک اندیشه بیش از آنکه به درستی و قوت‌اش مرتبط باشد، به صد نکته‌ی دیگر وابسته است. خصوصاً به شرایط زمانه. در هر عصری یک دیدگاه کلی حاکم است، و هر ایده‌ی موافق با آن دیدگاه رو می‌آید و هر ایده‌ی مخالف دور انداخته می‌شود. دور از حقیقت نیست اگر بگوییم ایده‌ها نیز مثل لباس‌ها مد می‌شوند و از مد می‌افتند. بعدها که به مدهای امروز نگاه ‌کنیم خنده‌مان می‌گیرد، و تعجب می‌کنیم که چنین چیز بدقواره و زشتی چطور آن‌همه بدیع و زیبا به نظر می‌رسید. اندیشه‌های رایج امروز هم، از جمله ضدیت با ذات‌باوری، چه بسا فردا خنده‌دار و بی‌اساس بنمایند

 دو. میل به تسلط
 یکی دیگر از دلایل انکار سرشت انسان میل ما به در دست داشتن کنترل همه‌ی امور است. ما دلمان می‌خواهد دنیا رام ما باشد. این به ما احساس قدرت می‌دهد. از آن طرف، از هر چیزی که به ما احساس ناتوانی بدهد و حقارت و ناچیزی‌مان را به رویمان بیاورد بیزاریم. فراموش نکنیم که قدرت از دغدغه‌های اساسی انسان مدرن است. انسان مدرن پس از شنیدن ندای نیچه که خدا مرده است، کوشید خود به جای خدا بنشیند. و به لطف علم و تکنولوژی تا حد زیادی موفق شد فرمانروای عالم شود. سفر به ماه و درمان بیماری‌های پیشتر لاعلاج و این قبیل دستاوردها انسان را به این باور کشاند که کار نشد ندارد؛ انسان اگر بخواهد می‌تواند از خود خدا بسازد

 اما ذات‌باوری با نشان دادن ویژگی‌های بعضاً پست و اغلب تغییرناپذیر انسانی، تصویر قدرقدرتی که انسان از خود ساخته را ویران می‌کند، و نشان می‌دهد که کنترل ما بر امور خیلی کمتر از آن است که تصور می‌کردیم. ذات‌باوری نشان می‌دهد که خیلی از خصوصیات ما به ژنتیک‌مان وابسته است، و تربیت و آموزش، اگرچه اثرگذارند، به هیچ وجه بازیگر اصلی نیستند. مثلاً دوقلوهایی که در بدو تولد از هم جدا شدند، با اینکه در دو خانواده‌‌ و دو محیط متفاوت بزرگ شده‌اند، شخصیت بسیار مشابهی یافته‌اند. ذات‌باوری نشان می‌دهد که خیلی از علایق و سلایق ما بر خلاف باور رایج حاصل انتخاب شخصی و از سر اختیار نیستند بلکه عمیقاً ریشه در سرشت ژنتیکی ما دارند. مثلاً جهت‌گیری‌های سیاسی ما هم تا حد زیادی به سرشت‌مان مرتبط است. گویا آنقدر هم که فکر می‌کردیم بر خود مسلط نیستیم. این پیام به مذاق ما خوش نمی‌آید. همانطور که شاهان پیک بدخبر را به سیاه‌چاله می‌انداختند، ما هم ذات‌گرایان را که خبر از نقص‌ها و کاستی‌های انسان آورده‌اند به جرم سیاه‌انگاری طرد می‌کنیم. ما نمی‌خواهیم بپذیریم که نه تنها پادشاه جهان نیستیم بلکه سخت در چنگ نیروهای طبیعت که سرشت ما را رقم زده‌اند اسیریم

 سه. دین
 ضدیت دین با داروینیسم هم در غفلت از سرشت انسان دخیل بوده است. داروینیسم و ذات‌باوری در هم تنیده‌اند. نمی‌شود از ذات و سرشت انسان صحبت کرد ولی نامی از تکامل نبرد، یا از تکامل گفت ولی اشاره‌ای به سرشت انسان نکرد. دین با کنار گذاشتن بحث داروینیسم و تکامل عملاً نمایندگان ذات‌گرایی را هم خفه کرده است. این نوع سانسور البته در حکومت‌های مذهبی پررنگ‌تر است. اما حتی آنجا که دولت‌ غیر مذهبی است و دست به سانسور نمی‌برد، تعصبات مذهبی خود مردم مانع از پا گرفتن و جا افتادن یافته‌های علم تکامل و سخنان ذات‌گرایان می‌شود. به تعبیر برتراند راسل مردم ترجیج می‌دهند فرشتگانی سقوط کرده باشند تا بوزینگانی تکامل یافته؛ از این جهت به مذهب علاقه‌مندتر‌اند تا به علم

 چهار. فلسفه
 مقصر بعدی اتکای بیش از اندازه‌ی ما به فلسفه است. دین با کنار گذاشتن تکامل و بیولوژی و سایر علوم از میزگرد شناخت انسان، صحنه را برای خودنمایی فلسفه خالی کرد، اما فلسفه هم متاسفانه اعتنایی به سرشت انسان نکرد. در واقع تقصیر هم به گردن فلسفه است، و هم به گردن ما. ما مقصریم از این بابت که شناخت انسان را به فلسفه سپردیم. به این بهانه که فلسفه همیشه منزلت و اعتبار فراوان داشته، و چون مرجع دیگری برای پاسخ گویی نمانده بود، به همان تخته‌پاره‌ی فلسفه در اقیانوس نادانی چسبیدیم، و به آن دل بستیم. حال آنکه پرسش از ماهیت انسان پرسشی نیست که فلسفه قادر به پاسخ گفتنش باشد. این پرسش مطالعات آزمایشگاهی و میدانی می‌طلبد. فیلسوف از پشت میز کارش چطور می‌تواند پاسخش را بیابد؟ و فلسفه هم مقصر است از این بابت که در تحلیل انسان و نسخه پیچیدن برای زندگی انسان، بدن را به کلی نادیده گرفت و او را چون روحی خالص تصور کرد. با حذف شدن بدن از صورت مسئله، هر آنچه مربوط به سرشت انسان بود از قلم افتاد

 یه منبر هم بریم
 مسلماً اینکه بخواهیم همه چیز را به ذات انسان تقلیل دهیم اشتباه است. اما این تصور که چیزی به نام ذات انسانی اساساً وجود ندارد نیز به همان اندازه غلط است. شاید درست‌تر این باشد که آنچه را طبیعت در ذات ما سرشته بپذیریم، و اختیاراتی را هم که به ما داده بشناسیم. پذیرش سرشت انسان به معنای وادادن به نیروهای طبیعت نیست، بلکه گام نخست برای رشدی واقع‌بینانه است

 پی‌نوشت یک: آنچه آمد تنها یکی از موضوعات کتاب است. ضمناً مطالبی خارج از این کتاب را هم شامل می‌شود
 پی‌نوشت دو: کتاب مطالب خیلی خوبی رو می‌گه، ولی مطالبش رو خوب نمی‌گه
 evolutionary non-fiction
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 Owlseyes
 1,634 reviews 257 followers
 June 28, 2020

 (Steven Pinker in Oporto, on the 11th of November 2017. My photo.)

 "Nature, Mr Allnut , is what we are put in this world to rise above" Katherine Hepburn to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen

 "Hillary Clinton may have advanced the dumbest explanation in the history of psychobabble, but she does not deserve the charge of trying to excuse the president's [husband] behavior"

 Pinker makes the case against a man who gets his formation/make up only from the outer forces of parenting, education, etc. He seems to defend the conception of a man who is not a “blank slate” upon which experience writes on.



 He invokes genetic arguments (based on fraternal and identical twins’ studies) to back his thesis. He also approaches brain analysis and anthropological studies to justify the existence of some “universals” (for instance in the art domain). Even the moral sense. Ergo: there are innate responses: man is not devoid of a certain type of make-up at birth.



 He, sort of, denounces the political appeal of a “blank slate “human being to justify the fears of inequalities and certain types of interventions. Those political fears are meant to be refuted. Thomas Jefferson meant “equality “of rights.



 Nevertheless, he seems to be a bit cautious about Noam Chomsky’s ideas of an “innate circuitry”, or a universal grammar/plan. He points to the works of Jean Piaget and others, consisting of “personal ideas”.

 As for the fear of machines, thinking machines, running “amok”, Pinker thinks it’s a “waste of energy”. I really don’t agree. The singularity is at hand at any moment. We’ve witnessed one such an episode on Facebook*, quite recently.

 Again, this is truly a case against empiricism, against those like John Stuart Mill and John Watson, who were proponents of a major role of experience in Psychology. The book of Pinker is a huge amalgamation of proof that psychopathology, personality traits, as well as love, consciousness and will, are biologically determined.



 Well, I know Pinker is an atheist and a lover of the beauty of Darwin's theory of evolution. He's so hopeful regarding the completion of the Human Genome Project, one which may uncover the roots of the intellect and emotion.

 I think a few years ago I've bought that Time magazine issue. So much so for a biological determinism, I wonder how would Pinker deny refute a God Gene gene? or a set of them? It's, really, no monkey business. I'm not sure whether Pinker has read the book by Dean Hamer: The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes. Maybe some have it [the gene/s]; maybe some don't.

 I've got to grab that magazine again.

 * https://www.forbes.com/sites/tonybrad...

 Interesting review here:
 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...


 UPDATE

 Pinker on Covid19:

 "With coronavirus, it’s genuinely hard to know whether surfaces are potential vectors, whether six feet is enough or not enough, whether masks help or don’t help”

 Does he wear mask?

 In: http://m.nautil.us/blog/steven-pinker...
 b-f-skinner-was-a-blank-slater behavioral-genetics case-against-empiricism
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 Gendou
 574 reviews 255 followers
 December 29, 2013
 Pinker argues cleanly and decisively against the theory of the Blank Slate (and its corollary, the Noble Savage). You might say he wipes the Blank Slate clean. Or that he breaks it over his knee.

 He examines how motivations for wanting to believe in a Blank Slate come from four fears of human nature:

 1. The Fear of Inequality: if people are innately different, oppression and discrimination (like sexism and racism) would be justified. But people are, in fact, different. Ignoring this fact doesn't help address the real cause of discrimination, which is to judge people as a member of their group, instead of as an individual. It also opens up rational against discrimination to attack by any evidence against the blank slate.

 2. The Fear of Imperfectibility: if people are innately immoral, hopes to improve the human condition would be futile. Ignoring human nature doesn't make people any less likely to commit crimes. When they do, it doesn't help us decide when and how harshly to punish them. Ignoring human nature is especially foolish in the case of rape. Denying that rape is a sexual crime, and insisting that it's only a violent crime (which it is, also) isn't going to deter any would-be rapists, who, as it happens, are motivated by sexual urges, not the urge to commit violence.

 3. The Fear of Determinism: if people are products of biology, free will would be a myth and we could no longer hold people responsible for their actions.

 4. The Fear of Nihilism: if people are products of biology, life would have no higher meaning and purpose.

 He attacks proponents of the Blank Slate like Stephen Jay Gould, parts of the political left, some feminists, etc.

 He draws an important distinction between gender and equity feminism.

 He draws an interesting distinction between the Utopian vs. Tragic vision, and how these influence political leanings.

 He even calls out modern and post-modern art for their philosophical denial of human nature!
 biology non-fiction philosophy
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 Sundus
 103 reviews 56 followers
 July 13, 2017
 Wow What an interesting and exquisitely written book!!!

 This is my first read by this author “Steven Pinker” . He is a psychologist and author of several books and articles on cognition and linguistics. In The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature he refuted the widely held belief that the human mind at birth is a tabula rasa /blank slate to which the environment (nurture) gives form and substance.

 He further explained that neither genetics nor environmental conditions are solely responsible for determining a person's behavior instead; individuals are created by a combination of both innate human nature and the conditions of upbringing and environment.

 A must read for those who want to be introduced to the nature-nurture debate by examining scientific evidence.

 Some of my favorite parts from the book:


 There are different kinds of truth for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn’t work.



 As technology accumulates and people in more parts of the planet become interdependent, the hatred between them tends to decrease, for the simple reason that you can't kill someone and trade with him too.



 The Darwin Awards, given annually to “the individuals who ensure the long-term survival of our species by removing themselves from the gene pool in a sublimely idiotic fashion”, almost always go to men.



 Much of what is today called "social criticism" consists of members of the upper classes denouncing the tastes of the lower classes (bawdy entertainment, fast food, plentiful consumer goods) while considering themselves egalitarians.

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 David Redden
 107 reviews 10 followers
 August 9, 2008
 The Blank Slate was an informative, thought-provoking and polemic book designed to refute ordinary conceptions and intellectual arguments which cut against a sociobiological understanding of humans and human society. I detected a couple instances in which the author, Stephen Pinker, overstated scientific conclusions, leading me to doubt the accuracy of his other scientific evidence. I also have reservations about the rational-actor lens through which he interprets human nature. On the other hand, the writing is good and many of his points are well taken. In sum, this book amounts to an interesting point of view that, while not entirely accurate, helps us see human society in a different light.

 First the bad. In the couple areas of social science with which I'm somewhat familiar, he sometimes overstates the scientific research he uses as support. For instance, he briefly qualifies research suggesting inheritable differences between male and female brains but then proceeds to lay it all out as unqualified fact. All of this research was done on adults, which means that some of the differences might be hereditary, but this is far from established fact. The same charge has been laid against his sister Susan, which, interestingly enough, may support some of his other arguments about intra-family similarity in tendencies. His hypothesis about hereditary differences between male and female brains may in fact be true, and it definitely matches up with most peoples' intuitive observations of their own children. In any case I agree with him that it should make no difference when it comes to placing value on males or females, but none of this excuses the fact that he overstates the scientific conclusions.

 In Chapter 12, Pinker similarly runs roughshod over stereotypical associations. He proclaims, “[P]eople’s ability to set aside stereotypes when judging an individual is accomplished by their conscious, deliberate reasoning.” While researchers have shown that thinking carefully about an individual's characteristics can dampen the effect of stereotypical associations, it doesn't reduce their effect to nil. In fact, subsequent studies suggest otherwise, because stereotypical associations effect more than just memory recall; they effect perception, interpretation and memory encoding. Academic social psychologists who profess otherwise are mostly legal defense experts and corporate human resource consultants. I doubt that Pinker cherry-picked or intentionally misrepresented the science, leaving me with the conclusion that he again overstated scientific conclusions.

 As another minor but related point, Pinker might be misusing quotes, taking them out of context or reading too much into them. He quotes several intellectuals and researchers to prove that the philosophical ideas of “the blank slate” and “the noble savage” are broadly represented in academia. This may all be true, but after catching him overstating scientific conclusions I started to notice that many of these quotations could contain different, more nuanced meanings than Pinker squeezes out of them.

 Pinker tips his hand most revealingly in Chapter 18, in which he writes, “In a cutthroat market, any company stupid enough to overlook qualified women or to overpay unqualified men would be driven out of business by a more meritocratic competitor.” This represents a brash oversimplification of history, cognitive science, social psychology; an underestimation of the influence of dumb luck; and an overestimation of humans’ ability to accurately evaluate the merits of other humans. It suggests that while Pinker’s erudition is broad, he makes up for its sometimes lack of depth by looking only as far as required to confirm his preconceived vision of rational actors in a rational society, which he in turn derives from the apparent rationality of evolution. The idea that we inexorably act rationally is not a necessary conclusion from our status as products of a mercilessly rational evolutionary process, but I understand how this can be a reassuring conclusion for people uncomfortable with ambiguity.

 With all these faults, it’s still a compelling read. Pinker presents a great deal of fascinating and oddly intuitive scientific research in very accessible fashion. I’m satisfied by his assertion that we are creatures with inherited tendencies and skills, one of which is the ability to not allow our tendencies to rule tyrannically over us. He made me feel more confident and justified about my loose, respectful, loving relationship with my children, which others might see as too permissive for my children’s good. He carefully defines positions, quoting authorities from multiple disciplines to make his points, so he’s either very well read, has a number of well read research assistants, or perhaps both. His prose was confident like most polemics, but stops short of the patronization that ruins so many of the others.

 Overall, The Blank Slate was entertaining, interesting, and informative, but I strongly recommend that you read it with both an open and critical mind.
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 Ezra
 28 reviews 25 followers
 June 27, 2008
 so. steven pinker got a lot of press out of this thing. it is essentially a sustained and detailed case for the predominance of genetic factors in determing human behavior. mr pinker is (if i recall) mainly a developmental neuroscientist (if that's a legitimate description...?). he provides a tremendous and very enjoyable welath of case studies and background for the various psychological, philosophical, sociological and biological problems which he subjects to the peculiar dialectical lens of nature/nurture. if you're like me, this seems sort of arbitrary and anachronistic; thomas hobbes is long dead (ideologically and otherwise), skinnerism is not so popular, etc... my problem with pinker and the rest of the current mature crop of pop-science meega-pundits (thinking kurzweil, dawkins, wolfram...), is that they have all this incredible data, and a good number of intelligent conclusions, but some impulse (hubris? frustration? hunger for fame?) drives them to waaay overstep the bounds of what is interesting or relevant about their research, seeing jingoistc intellectual bogeymen in every pop culture shadow, and turning their work into extended rants about their pet theoretical controversy that no sane person wuld care about. it's good entertainment, i suppose, if entertainment requires epic struggles of will, and this must be motivating the editors... anyays, in pinker's case i was pretty perturbed by his opening statements (declaration of war against all "blank slate" dogmas... i kinda drew a blank myself on that one), and then i procceeded to be thoroughy engrossed for many chapters, in which pinker used his considerable erudition (which seems both fairly deep and fairly broad) to lay out a really intense survey of all kids of topics that might have to do with the "nature/nurture" controversy: lots of great data on twin studies, baby studies, language studies, archeological studies... it's about 70% quotations for a while, and it's great.
 then, at some point, for some reason, mr pinker decides to take it upon himself to attack feminism, postmodern philosophy, and experimental art, in the name of genetic determinism. it's an incredibile reversal: this accomplished scientist, high on his case studies, suddenly ripping into minor intellectual figures in disciplines he clearly knows jack shit about. it is presumptuous, elitist, ridiculous. perhaps it is the hidden form of his particular nerd-autism, blinding him to the incredbile, stereotypical flatulence of the harvard neuroscientist confidently and patiently xplaining that humans are not genetically constructed to appreciate non-figural art, that women are unhappy because feminism is forcing them to be away from home too much... THAT kind of crap. naturally, i wanted to rip his smug white face off...

 so, in conclusion: if i had my own copy of this book, i might rip out the introduction and the last couple chapters and feel okay about it. maybe just keep the bibliography, though....
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 Chuck McCabe
 6 reviews 2 followers
 November 14, 2007
 Pinker examines the concept of the mind as a blank slate capable of taking any impressions that arose in England and France in the mid-18th century and became the basis for liberal democracy in the 19th and 20th centuries. The "blank slate" underlies the nurture pole of the nature/ nurture debate and looms huge in political and social policies. Drawing on an immense body of research in psychology and other social sciences, linguistics, and evolutionary biology, Pinker makes the case for the nature pole, arguing that it is now apparent that the human brain is not a blank slate, but in fact bears powerful imprints of our evolutionary past that in effect hardwire us to feel, respond, and behave in specific ways. The denial of this human nature is now an impediment to solving many problems that are now plaguing Western democracies. -- This is an exciting read for anyone interested in contemporary social and political issues. It powerfully summarizes a huge body of knowledge that is forcing us to rethink who we are and how we ought to organize our collective behaviors.
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 William2
 729 reviews 2,824 followers
 April 10, 2017
 Second reading.
 21-ce biology psychology
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 Elenabot
 39 reviews 438 followers
 November 12, 2018
 This book is not without its flaws. As others have pointed out, the picture here might just be a tad bit too simple. However, Pinker accomplishes one important feat in this book, and that is to point out that our theories of justice and morality are not hostage to the empirically falsifiable claim that there are no innate differences between individuals. Our moral commitment to respecting the human dignity, equality, freedom, and human rights of any and all regardless of gender or race is in no way advanced by stifling scientific research that might reveal essential differences between individuals. In fact, Pinker argues that it is quite the contrary. He nicely shows how extreme postmodernist, social constructivist views share a disturbing commonality with totalitarian thinking, in that they both do violence to the natural tendencies and inclinations of individuals by making armchair prescriptions that ignore these. Instead, he argues that to respect individuals implies first and foremost to recognize and nurture their innate tendencies, whether through education, parenting, or through empirically-informed ethical practices and social policies.

 In contrast, what postmodern views tend to share is this social constructionist view that there are no essential properties that define who people are. Instead, people either:

 1) "make" up their identities, ex-nihilo, (whatever that means, and however that is supposed to work out in practice for embodied human agents who are constrained in the range of possible identities that they can adopt by virtue of their very embodiment), or

 2) are passive receptacles of social "codes" that determine who they are, as well as being pawns of larger institutional forces that lack any agency and standing as responsible, autonomous individuals.

 Ultimately, both views hinge on the notion that there are no innate, natural constraints that might define what it is to be a functional human agent. This can be seen, for instance, in the second- and third-wave feminist dogma that biology is irrelevant to psychology, and that gender is entirely a social construct. Pinker rightly reminds us that this is an empirically falsifiable claim, and that we had better not build our ethical theories about gender equity on a claim that, he says, has been shown to be false by evolutionary neuropsychology.

 Moreover, he argues that this rejection of human nature is actually counterproductive when it comes to advancing the goals of social justice. This is because, by ignoring empirical evidence regarding the conditions that are conducive to human flourishing, it cannot possibly engage in practices that are likely to lead to such flourishing. So if we care about promoting the flourishing of, say, women, then what better guide to understanding what such flourishing might be could we have than a psychology that is as free from ideological policing as possible?

 To deem certain thoughts unthinkable because they are anathema according to our latest ideology (e.g., second- and third-wave feminism's cardinal sin of gender essentialism) is to pit truth against right, which makes us less likely to get the latter, since the former is the only reliable guide we could possibly have to understanding what the latter could be. Thus, he argues that we needn't fear that the scientific approach to understanding human nature will legitimize bigoted, unethical views. He seems to have a pretty firm conviction that the principles of ethics are universal and grounded independently of any kind of empirical considerations. This isn't to say that we can meaningfully apply these universal principles without empirical knowledge. If these principles are to apply to human beings, we had better have empirical data about what human beings are really like.

 Because individuals aren't just abstract, characterless units, but rather have innate characteristics that define them as the individuals that they are, equality cannot be sameness or interchangeability. Thus, for instance, second- and third-wave feminism needn't police biology and psychology in the fear that such sciences might uncover data showing that women on average exhibit cognitive differences from men. Should evidence of such innate differences appear, it would in no way undermine women's claim to equal human rights, since difference doesn't imply inferiority . Just because human individuals exhibit a vast degree of variation in aptitude and natural ability doesn't imply that some are to be accorded rights that others lack. Each one of us has capacities that others lack, while lacking capacities that others possess. Nevertheless, we already accord equal recognition to others despite these everyday, obvious differences. In addition, such ideological policing of science, and such a need to cover up in advance what the science might show, reveals too much about our own fears. We implicitly confess the weak foundations of our ethical principles every time we put restrictions on science ahead of time.

 Moreover, because humans are adapted to living interdependent lives as members of purposive groups, freedom cannot imply that individuals are to be seen as free-floating atoms, while groups are mere aggregates of such atoms. Rather, a great deal of our flourishing and thus of meaningful freedom depends on properly adjusting ourselves to others. Hence, freedom must be tempered with equality if human flourishing can be attained. Finding the right way of mutually constraining freedom and equality is the goal of political thinking, and Pinker argues that it cannot be achieved if we ignore the innate traits of individuals.
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 Morgan Blackledge
 551 reviews 1,857 followers
 September 23, 2017
 I love Steven Pinker and I loved this book.


 NOTE: What an ironically lame review of a book that is legitimate genius! In retrospect, I must not have had the time/wherewithal to write the review this amazing book deserves.

 It had (and still has) a HUGE influence on my thinking and way of seeing the world. How many books can you say that about?

 Clichés like ‘transformative’ or ‘monumental’ or ‘important’ come to mind when I try to describe it in a quick pass.

 That sounds lame and hyperbolic, but that’s honestly appropriate when describing this work.

 I guess I’m left where I started.

 I love Steven Pinker and I loved this book.
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 Петър Стойков
 Author 3 books 255 followers
 July 24, 2022
 Преди да прочета тази книга не знаех, че формирането на човешката природа е толкова спорен въпрос в интелектуалните среди.

 Изгледа, много хора смятат, че например насилието е болестно, несвойствено за човека състояние - и да се каже, че склонността към насилие всъщност е еволюционна адаптация за справяне с определени ситуации е същото, като оправдаване на насилието. Също според тях, откритието, че съществуват известни вродени разлики в начина на мислене и в емоциите на мъжете и жените, породени от различия в мозъка и хормоните им - е подтикване към дискриминация към жените.

 Понеже книгата е изключително обемна и разглежда широк кръг въпроси, позволявам си да преведа част от описанието и от издателството, което според мен успява отлично и накратко да я представи:

 "В книгата си, Пинкър разглежда идеята на т.н. "човешка природа" и нейното морално, емоционално и политическо значение. Той показва как много интелектуалци отричат съществуването на каквито и да е вродени характеристики у човека и вместо това догматично приемат три постулата:
 - Tabula rasa: човешкият ум няма каквито и да е вродени характеристики, таланти, наклонности и т.н. - всичко това зависи и се формира от средата, в която човек израства;
 - Благородният дивак: хората се раждат добри и невинни и биват "покварени" от обществото, на което се дължат всякакви лоши техни черти и поведение;
 - Духовен свят: човек има душа, която мисли и чувства независимо от биологията на тялото, което обитава.

 Всяка от тия три догми носи своя морален и исторически багаж и техните защитници прибягват до понякога отчаяни тактики, за да дискредитират учените, които ги отхвърлят."

 Доста по-интересно е, отколкото успявам да опиша. Сори.
 всеки-трябва-да-прочете
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 Alina Lucia
 38 reviews 18 followers
 January 6, 2020
 Reading this book has been a transformative experience for me, and I just happened to read it at the perfect time, a time where I was having trouble verbalising my moral convictions as a scientist.

 It was as if Pinker read my mind and listed my ideas, only in a more eloquent, well structured manner.

 He argues that the acceptance of innate differences and tendencies between members of our species, a result of genetic make-up, should not be detrimental to our moral reasoning, but rather the opposite. Acknowledging such truths, and using reason and logic to transcend our innate limitations, would allows us to make more informed decisions within many realms of society, including politics, bioethics and education.

 Pinker's argument resonates well with that of Rakitin in Dostoevsky's "The Karamazov Brothers", when he says: "Humanity will find in itself the power to live for virtue, even without believing in immortality. It will find it in love for freedom, for equality, for fraternity."

 And what a wonderful thought that is.
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 Sherif Arafa
 Author 9 books 4,307 followers
 January 11, 2022

 يعد ستيفن بينكر واحدا من أهم المفكرين المعاصرين انطلاقا من دراساته النفسية والعصبية وقدرته على تبسيط العلوم. في هذا الكتاب يبرهن بينكر خطأ نظرية (الصفحة الفارغ) والتي تقول بأن الإنسان يأتي لهذه الحياة بريئا كصفحة فارغة، لكن الحياة (بما فيها من تجارب وأحداث وتربية…إلخ) هي ما تملأ هذه الصفحة وتجعله كما هو عليه.. يقول بينكر أن هذا غير صحيح.
 في هذا الكتاب يستعرض بينكر العديد من النظريات والأبحاث بطريقة شيقة، ليرينا كيف أن الإنسان يأتي للحياة مجهزا مسبقا بالكثير من لآليات الذهنية التي لها دور كبير في صياغة سلوكه.. وأن الفطرة ليست بريئة بالضرورة.. للبيئة دور في تشكيل الإنسان بالطبع، لكنه ليس الوحيد كما كان الفلاسفة يظنون قديما. فعلى الإنسان مغالبة فطرته كثيرا كي يصبح متحضرا...
 الكتاب مليء بالدراسات الشيقة لدراسة التوائم مثلا، و كذلك من من الممتع متابعة تسلسل أفكار بينكر وطريقة عرضه لأفكاره بشكل سلس..
 يستعرض الكتاب حقيقة الرنسان كما هي من منظور بيولوجي ونفسي.. لا ما نتمنى له أن يكون.. لأن هذه أولي خطوات التعامل مع أنفسنا ومغالبة قصورها الطبيعي وبدائية تكوينها النفسي
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 Andrea
 309 reviews 37 followers
 February 19, 2012
 How refreshing that S. Pinker abundantly refers to the vast trove of literary works, picking out gems of insight into human nature, in his elegant scientific analysis! Perhaps no surprise from a cognitive psychologist so implicated in the study of linguistics and language acquisition, but welcome all the same.
 Far from rendering his propos less scientific, his quotes from literary sources (throughout the book, not limited to the chapter on the Arts) give depth and relevance to his arguments, which are anything but "warm and fuzzy." And the opening chapters in Part 1, while perhaps too drawn out for many readers (including myself) provide a very coherent framework for the reasoning (The Blank State, The Ghost in the Machine, and The Noble Savage) behind the denial of human naure by many well-intentioned scientists and politicians.

 Unfortunately, Pinker has obliged himself to take great pains to explain, again and again throughout the book, that understanding some of the more unpleasant aspects of human nature(selfishness, violence...)does not mean that one condones the behaviour. I would think that most readers already grasp this point without needing to be continually reminded of it, but I suppose he addresses himself to his detractors (and potential deniers).

 I especially enjoyed chapters 8, "The Fear of Inequality" and 11 "The Fear of Nihilism", which are not only convincingly written, but full of humour as well. Ditto for the chapter on children. Any parent who has managed to raise children despite the continuous onslaught of conflicting childrearing advice by the "experts" can attest to Pinker's observations.

 Well-written, meticulously documented, and insightful; a good place to begin reading within the currents of evolutionary psychology and sociobiology.
 brain-mind-cognition non-fiction reviewed
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 Kunal Sen
 323 reviews 45 followers
 June 5, 2014
 Not that I was convinced by all the arguments presented in this book, but it is an incredible joy to discover a single book that echoes so many thoughts that have been percolating in my mind, and to hear the same things I have been trying to say, argued and articulated so well.

 With age I have come to dislike the idea of an ideology, any ideology. Anything that compels us to think that something is correct or good because it ought to be correct. Reality does not care how any of us feel about it. Also accepting something to be true does not in any way imply that I have to like it or support it. So often we see these things mixed up in our modern intellectual mindset, and if anyone suffers from such distractions then this book is a must read for them.
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 Gary Beauregard Bottomley
 935 reviews 556 followers
 September 24, 2017
 "Once again a Pinker book changed my world view."

 The book really opened my eyes about how we learn and become who we are. I had previously just accepted the various interpretations of the the noble savage, the ghost in the machine and the blank slate. Pinker demolishes and demonstrates why those interpretations are misleading, and you will realize why Pinker is called one of the only linguists who can write in prose.
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26 reviews29 followers     June 5, 2008   I'm an atheist. I've always been and always will be (god willing). When I was a kid, I used to envy the religious folks who seemed to be having such deep meaningful fun all the time. It's not that I hate religion, or the idea of god, it's just that I can't really get my mind around it after a childhood devoid of spirituality. Newsflash: if you don't take a lot for granted, religious theory makes NO SENSE. The only place I've ever found deeper meaning is in biology and physics and neurology. SO...reading this book is as close as I've come to a "religious experience". Reading about the evolution of the human mind, and how our basic drives--and the complex mechanisms we've developed to serve them--manifest themselves within culture, and simultaneously CREATE culture...it's just...positively uplifting. Thinking of human nature in this way makes me appreciate everything "human" in a much deeper sense. Music sounds better, machines are blowing my mind, babies are tiny geniuses! Hell, I may even read some poetry. How about THAT?I would recommend this book to everyone I know. It's just thick enough that some paragraphs warrant a second going over, but just engaging enough that it won't leave you frustrated and bored.     science-and-brains               39 reviews361 followers     March 16, 2012   I contend that there are two Steven Pinkers. Pinker 1 is an eloquent, witty, and insightful writer on the issues of cognitive psychology and linguistics who has the rare talent of making his subjects accessible and appealing to academic and lay audiences. Pinker 2 retains the writing ability, but instead uses it for pushing his pet theories, usually political in nature (cf. his most recent Better Angels of Our Nature). This book comes straight from the pen of Pinker 2.There are really two main components of the book: Lengthy rants against his ideological opponents and an extended argument in favor of a watered-down hereditarian view of human nature. Pinker rightly notes that "nature vs. nurture" is a false dichotomy and then goes about ascribing enormous amounts of deterministic power to genes. He relies on a number of controversial and dubious sources as well as his own misinterpretations of some research, such as Bouchard's infamous twin studies. Lacking actual examples of those who hold this "blank slate" view, Pinker dredges up some long dead academics to serve as a scarecrow. He rails against J.B. Watson and B.F. Skinner, even though his intellectual hero Noam Chomsky rebutted Skinner and behaviorism in general in the 1960s. Next he'll be telling us Lamarck was wrong about evolution! He also engages in some tired Margaret Mead-bashing typical of sociobiology/evolutionary psychology partisans by citing Derek Freeman's "debunking" of Mead. Pinker missed the memo that Freeman's work was subsequently discredited (see Paul Shankman's The Trashing of Margaret Mead). Pinker astutely points out that proponents of environmental or cultural determinism do not associate these theories with the horrors of communism (Lysenko famously denounced genetics as a "bourgeois pseudoscience"), but they do associate biological theories with eugenics and Nazism. However, in general, Pinker unleashes a firestorm on a field of straw men. Some of his more contemporary "blank slaters" are so-called "gender feminists," whatever those are. (Everyone except Christina Hoff Sommers?) Demonstrating that he's willing to slurp up just about any "finding" in pop evolutionary psychology, he offers an extended defense of Thornhill and Palmer's A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion. The defense parrots the authors' framing of the controversy, with Thornhill and Palmer as the hard-headed, rational scientists telling the cold hard truths versus the hordes of fluffy-headed, irrational, emotional, and "politically correct" feminists. Any mention of the scathing reviews the book met in the scientific press (see Cheryl Brown Travis's edited volume Evolution, Gender, and Rape) is omitted or given cursory treatment. Pinker uses pop evo psych in a number of other places as a means to club over the head the bogeywoman of gender feminism. This generally seems to involve projecting modern gender roles and stereotypes back into pre-history based on rank speculation. Simon Blackburn put it best: "Meet the Flintstones." (See, e.g., Cordelia Fine, Lise Eliot or Rebecca M. Jordan-Young for critical overviews of current sex-difference research.) I could go on about the technical shortcomings in this book, but Blackburn and H. Allen Orr have already done a much better job of it in their reviews than I could: http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/~swb24/revi...  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archi...  Pinker attempts to posture as a defender of science against the demons of unreason, but he is simply defending his own views and pet theories about science. He is pushing stealth hereditarianism under the banner of consilience, to borrow E.O. Wilson's term. "The blank slate" thus becomes an epithet to write off anyone who wants to say, "Hold on a moment, it's much more complicated than that!"  For those looking to get into evolutionary psychology: Skip this and pick up Laland and Brown's Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behaviour for a scholarly overview of fields studying evolution and human behavior and Buller's Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature for a critical view of evolutionary psychology. For those looking to read Pinker: Skip this and pick up something by Pinker 1, like The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language or The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature      evolutionary-psychology politics-and-political-philosophy psychology-and-neuroscience               Author  28 books13.4k followers     September 9, 2009   Steven Pinker takes on the old nature/nurture question, and does an excellent job of it. Are we the products of our genes or our upbringing? Pinker tells you in the first few pages what the new consensus is: both, but genes are probably more important.He has some wonderful stories to back up the general points. Here's one that particularly appealed to me. During the 60s and 70s, you often heard that boys and girls are indoctrinated from an early age so as to conform to conventional gender roles. Without that conditioning, girls would e.g. be as likely to want to play with toy guns, or boys with dolls. It was just a theory, but it was one that many people believed. So, says Pinker, how could we investigate the question scientifically? It's difficult. What you'd like to do, if you had the chance, would be to take a few dozen boys, castrate them at birth, surgically transform them into girls, and then raise them like other girls without ever telling them what you'd done. At various points in their development, you could compare them with a control group of biologically normal girls, and see if there were any significant differences. Needless to say, no one would ever permit such an appallingly wicked experiment. Except that it's actually happened. Every year, it turns out that a small number of male infants do have to be castrated and turned into girls, most often as a result of botched circumcision operations. Historically, they've usually not been told what happened, since this was deemed to be in their best interests. Studies on these unfortunate children show that they nearly always feel deeply conflicted, and quite different from other girls. They have all sorts of impulses which they feel are bizarre and wrong, and which can sometimes lead them to suicidal despair. In some cases, they have later been informed that they are actually male, and their reaction has typically been one of relief. They weren't weird after all. They were just male without knowing it. Well, if you thought that story was interesting, he's got dozens more that are nearly as good. I loved this book.     science               728 reviews1,349 followers     April 14, 2022    Interesantísimo libro con un tema tan polémico como relevante, ¿existe una naturaleza humana?, ¿la existencia precede a la esencia o más bien sucede al contrario? Es imposible resumir aquí los argumentos que aporta Pinker en apoyo de la existencia de una naturaleza humana y de sus implicaciones, por lo que aquí me limitaré a resumir brevemente los temas que trata con la esperanza de que les despierte el gusanillo de la curiosidad.Tras comentar los antecedentes de la idea de tabla rasa, idea atribuida a John Locke, y su relación con otras dos ideas centrales en el ideario colectivo de los últimos siglos, la idea del buen salvaje de Rousseau y la mente libre e independiente del cuerpo de Descartes, el autor da un repaso a los nuevos conocimientos que vienen a poner en tela de juicio a todas estas teorías, la ciencia cognitiva, la neurociencia, la genética de la conducta y la psicología evolutiva.  Su postura es clara: “la mente está equipada con una batería de sentimientos, impulsos y facultades para razonar y comunicarse, y que tienen una lógica común en todas las culturas, son difíciles de eliminar o de rediseñar a partir de cero, fueron configuradas por la acción de la selección natural en el transcurso de la evolución humana y deben algo de su diseño básico (y algo de su variación) a la información presente en el genoma.”  Tras ello, dedica una buena parte del libro a responder a aquellos que ven en esta naturaleza humana una idea peligrosa.  Entre esos peligros es especialmente relevante el hecho de que esa supuesta inmutabilidad de la naturaleza humana eliminaría toda esperanza de reforma, y, como corolario de ello, la falacia de que si supuestamente aceptamos que muchos de los rasgos negativos del comportamiento humano son naturales, y dado que supuestamente todo lo natural es bueno, deberíamos aceptar como bueno todos esos comportamientos infames. Otra de las implicaciones polémicas es todo lo que supone que “en última instancia no controlemos nuestras propias decisiones, pues estas están predestinadas por el estado de nuestros cerebros” y, por tanto, hasta donde llega nuestra responsabilidad en los actos. Y junto a ello el peligro del nihilismo, de la imposibilidad de establecer una escala de valores “Si no somos más que máquinas que permiten que los genes hagan copias de sí mismos, si nuestras alegrías y satisfacciones no son otra cosa que sucesos bioquímicos, si la vida no se creó con algún fin elevado ni se dirige hacia alguna noble meta.”  Pero Pinker no solo se defiende, también ataca destacando las implicaciones perversas que también tendría una mente organizada como tabla rasa, como es el relativismo. Dado que no hay nada previo en el cerebro, lo que percibimos, siempre mediatizado por nuestras teorías previamente adquiridas, simplemente se acumula en nuestro cerebro condicionando a su vez lo que percibiremos a posteriori. Por ejemplo, la ciencia solo sería una forma de ver la realidad como cualquier otra, o cualquier moral y estructura de valores éticos sería igualmente válida. Por último hace un repaso a las implicaciones que las dos concepciones de la mente, la tabula rasa y la existencia de una naturaleza innata, tienen sobre una serie de temas polémicos cómo la forma de organizarnos políticamente o qué políticas se deben adoptar frente a problemas sociales como la violencia o el trato a los delincuentes, las implicaciones que tienen el género de las personas en el comportamiento, el papel de la herencia en ese comportamiento…                   Author  9 books455 followers     January 19, 2018    In some ways, this book is both a tragedy and an inspiration. How is it a tragedy? It's a tragedy because the book is responding to very ideologically-based, simple arguments for the Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine that I think don't really need to be addressed. Many of the points in the book I was thoroughly convinced of before reading the book -- I knew that genetics played some role in determining personality and aptitude; I was convinced of the probabilistic approach to human behavior; and I was convinced that versions of "is" do not automatically translate into "ought". On top of that, much of the book is spent rehashing the very petty politics of what happens in university departments and on college campuses -- the politicization and tribalization of knowledge. It's a stark reminder that even in environments where people should be better and do better, they often give in to their worst instincts.  So, the book is tragic in that much of this material, in a more perfect world, could have just been skipped or ignored. The author could have begun this book from a different starting place where readers have no ideological axes to grind, open-minded examination of evidence and arguments take place, and we are all intellectually and emotionally ready to live in a world of nuance. But no, that is not the world we live in, so that is not the book we get. And that is tragic.  The book, though, is also an inspiration. Why? Because it attempts to lift the conversation to that place where nuance and evidence are grounded in a humanistic understanding of our role as scholars and thinkers. The author, through his exploration of the various themes and evidence, tries to make us all epistemic creatures -- people who can have beliefs and values but suspend them in order to explore counter-evidence, new theories, and hypotheses, and sharpen our values with our knowledge. As epistemic creatures, we would also be able to ask that all-important question: How do we know something?  In a moment in history where so much discourse is polluted by vulgarity, that is refreshing...but it's also tragic. Because in a world where we are all trained from a young age to have the epistemic and moral habits of scientists, this might have been a more nuanced and at once infinitely shorter book.      books-of-2018 international-relations-classics top-books               Author  1 book335 followers     November 20, 2008   The Blank Slate is Steven Pinker's ambitious attempt to close the gap between the conventionally accepted dogma that human beings come into this world free of innate characteristics, ready to be molded and shaped by society, and what science has begun to reveal about genetic predisposition. Prior to reading this book, I had no idea that the origin of human nature was such a contentious topic amongst modern intellectuals. Seems that a lot of people think acknowledging that something like violence might have been evolutionarily adaptive is the same thing as condoning violence and excusing those who engage in it, or that admitting that men and women are genetically different justifies discrimination against women. Pinker spends a lot of time in this book carefully addressing these concerns while at the same time making a compelling argument that the current tendency to deny any genetic influence on society's more vexing ills only handicaps our ability to successfully deal with our most serious problems. Pinker is not shy about tackling controversial topics as he makes his points. The chapter in which he pointed to evidence showing that a child's intelligence and personality are shaped far more by genes, peers and random influences than they are by parents got him an enormous amount of mail, as did the section in which he discussed genetic influences on our appreciation of the arts.  Despite the radical nature of many of the theories Pinker presents, I found myself having continuous "ah-ha!" moments as I read this book. At its core, the idea that we are shaped by our genes as well as our experiences fits far better with reality than the idea that we are all nothing but moldable blank slates. Though these theories may not intellectually fashionable, Pinker makes it clear that there are a wealth of benefits to be gained by accepting what science has to tell us about the true origins of human nature.      how-the-brain-works non-fiction skepticism               77 reviews180 followers     August 5, 2022   Do you believe that the human mind, at conception, is a Tabula Rasa? Because John Locke was completely out of his depth regarding the architecture of the brain and said something that sounded good? Well, here’s a Hobbesian Hammer to mangle the handsome features of your Rousseaian naïveté. Are you convinced that, despite evolution’s demonstrable power to produce a wide variety of phenotypic delights and inform the instinctual capacities of creatures big and small, it had nothing to say about the scaffolding of the human mind? If this isn’t sophistry in the service of ideology, I’ll eat a live dolphin. This is where I would normally trot out such tired qualifiers as:Yes, of course, the human mind is malleable (to an extent), and the effects of cultural copulation are manifold and obv(invid)ious. No, the shackles of these behaviors are not made of adamantium (what clearer evidence of our power to chuck a spandrel into our deepest evolutionary drives than nutting into latex (or sheep skin, for those with allergies, or a Gatorade bottle for the desperate), or pharmaceutically tinkering with the baby oven, or, more terrible still - exercising abstinence), we have big frontal-loafs for a raisin. Damnit! I’m doing it again! Socrates grant me Parrhesia so that I may slow the advance of utopian retrograde reasoning (technically that would mean my foe is receding from me, which puts me in (an) + alogized full nelson. Shit. ((Although, technically, the perceived retrograde motions of heavenly bodies were the result of systemic misunderstanding, so maybe there’s a way out of this. (((Although, if we’re just going by the literal definition, denuded of its historical context, then I suppose it does indicate a backwards motion,[although, specifically a backwards step!] ((((although, in this case, I’m referring to a mode of cognition which starts with a conclusion and reasons backwards from there, and that has little to say about the bodily kinesthetics of the army involved, except a perusal of history and human behavior so selective that the term malnourished would die of malnourishment in seeking to comprehend it. (((((May)(b)e 5(G)(Eye))((h)EAR))(if you (s(L)heep) with a bre(ache)k p(ad: for Colgate) (th)under yo(lk)ur pill(age)ow, it c(an)(tel(l)(lope) h(el(hel)p)elp attenuate these sinister frequencies. Alternatively, there are magnetic bracelets, one of which I just gave a jingle, and look at me, back to normal! So if 5G is indeed the source of your recalcitrant, retrograde-rectitude, you might look into that. Because the idea that we’re Blank Slates is about as goddamn plausible as feng shui’ing the furniture in your house into the shape of the regular convex polytopes using ONLY three dimensions in order to propitiate Azathoth who will then allow you to grow cotton candy in the abundant soil of human stupidity. Well, this whole thing started off way more belligerent (and frankly insane) than I expected or wanted it to. But, I’m what you might charitably call a ‘discovery’ writer. Which is why I can’t plot anything, (unless it’s revenge) and chose to major in numerical witchcraft. But I (being careful not to think about the mathematics of infinite sets this time) digress (carefully and without recursion) Now this assertion should be uncontroversial to anyone who a.) does not deny the scientific fact of evolution, and b.) can do a perfect cartwheel. We are the sum total of our amino acids pitching a fit and erecting a house of carbon capable of sheltering our nucleotide sequences long enough for us to mail them into the future via no holds barred (debatable. See; de Sade) body-karate. We are equipped with a mental lattice work which preferentially captured certain free floating rationale that reliably saved us from bad endings, and through inconceivable stretches of geometric time, crystallized these behaviors, via the non-random selection of random mutations, into sugar and phosphate ladders, twisted just so, that encode instructions for producing brains which have aptitudes calibrated to insure their manifestation in forms such as: Folk Newtonian physics for parabola’ing rocks and plague ridden cattle (catapult non-negotiable). The ease with which children acquire language. The fear of heights. The desire to flee screaming from serpents. The ease with which most of us submit to dominance hierarchies. Disgust reflexes involving poo, disease, creeping crud, mud elementals, kitsch, musicians who can’t properly apply corpse paint, the absence of double-kicks and blast beats in elevator music, imitation Oreos, asymmetrical saggin’ asses, non-anime-incest. And so on. During the interim between awareness, sexual maturity, and Koital Kombat, our data is subject to outside forces which reconfigure it in ways that are bolded, italicized, and hyperlinked. Nature and nurture (as the wise among us say) are perennial fuck buddies. This book is amazing. Read it you bastards! (It occurs to me that, somewhere within this review, I have failed to capture something parenthetically. It is like holding a sneeze in my heart.)                   909 reviews7,330 followers     October 6, 2020   كتاب الصفحة البيضاء لستيفن بنكر دا مستفز فوق الوصف، سلاسة ونعومة وبساطة جميلة جدا، طرح أفكار وتأصيل تاريخي لها مع التركيز على دلالة اللغة واهميتها (النقطة دي كانت مبهرة بشكل خيالي)، وللأسف الكتب الحلوة اللي زي دي بتخليني اتمنى اني كنت اقراه بلغته الأم وفي نفس الوقت بيخليني الاحظ اكتر للفجوة المرعبة بين الترجمات العربي والمقابل لها في الاصول والترجمات الانجليزية مثلا، فارق معرفي مهول في الحجم والتأثير، في حين الترجمات العربي محكومة بمجهودات اغلبها له شروط تجارية او حتى مش مهتم بنقل معرفة ما، والمشاريع الحكومية بتكون ��ير مضمونة الجودة.                  149 reviews8 followers     August 3, 2008   Louis Menand has written a typically excellent piece on Pinker's arrogance: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2002... I found this book simultaneously interesting and exasperating, because the author is obviously a highly educated, well-read man who thinks he knows everything about every subject. There is a whole class of these public intellectuals (the late Carl Sagan, Richard Dawins, et al) who play this game: they use the public authority they have gained by virtue of (at least modest) academic accomplishment in one field to pronounce authoritatively on every damn thing under the sun. (Most of his scholarly journal output is in psychology and language, according to his cv; his PhD is in experimental psychology.) And maybe Pinker has figured it all out, but don't you think he could cut those of us a break who still think we exist? "Cognitive neuroscientists have not only exorcised the ghost but have shown that the brain does not even have a part that does exactly what the ghost is supposed to do: review all the facts and make a decision for the rest of the brain to carry out. Each of us there is a single I in control. But that is an illusion the brain works hard to produce..." And with that he dismisses the idea that you and I exist at all; there is no "you" there, only a collection of atoms with some remarkable properties (observable by other lumps of atoms). Wow, I am glad that's all settled. More generally, it's good to know there's no need for a field like philosophy. Pinker has a footnote to support his claim that the brain has no "I," but one of his sources (predictably) is Daniel Dennett, the Tufts philosopher and enemy of the mind (and Anything Else Immaterial). Elsewhere Pinker claims Hitler thought he was doing God's will (footnote to some article in an atheist magazine I looked up -- check out Free Inquiry, Volumbe 19, Issue 2, and judge for yourself whether you would *ever* cite this source in a serious academic inquiry) and that the Catholic Church teaches that 'ensoulment' takes place at the moment of conception. Let me take this last nugget for a moment. I'm guessing Pinker has spent little time in Catholic churches or reading Catholic books or magazines, so I can see why he thinks a statement like "the catholic church teaches ______" is an easy one to make. To those of us who have done some of those things, though, it is not so trivial. Sure, in broad strokes, one can formulate simple statements with confidence (e.g., that God exists or Jesus is the Son of God or even abortion is wrong), but his assertion is packed with some things that are far harder to disentangle. Most importantly, he uses the word "ensoulment" -- and this is central to his argument at this point in the book -- implying that the Church firmly teaches this concept that he is upset about. I do not know that the RCC says much (currently, anyway) dogmatically about the philosophical underpinnings of a word like "ensoulment." What I do know is that I am familiar with the phrase Ghost in the Machine (one of Pinker's bogeymen in this book) from Catholic authors who, like the late JPII, were critical of Cartesian dualism. So, I am being long-winded, but I am trying to get across that Pinker has these convenient cartoon notions of what other people say and because he is so frightfully intelligent he assumes he has it all figured out. If he would just say to himself, "It is possible that there is one thing I think I know that I do not," I believe his tone would be far more congenial and the book much improved. But then again, there is no self for him to say it to, so what's the point?     general-nonfiction                 Author  3 books2 followers     April 19, 2013   So here's a case where you have a book about how much of our personalities and, well, nature is innate, rather than nurtured into us by our parents or our environment. If The Blank Slate were two hundred pages and focused just on brain science, it'd be one thing. The trouble is that it ends up reading as if Pinker gathered every single study that seemed to support his position and threw it into a blender, and then threw in a number of screeds against groups he has a bone to pick with. The result is a somewhat uneven and contradictory book where one chapter asserts that women don't go into math because they are innately unlikely to like it, and another chapter asserts that no one is innately good at complex math, which is why we have school to pound it into kids' little heads. Pinker's insistence on environment and parenting having minimal influence is sometimes undercut by the studies he presents and his own conclusions. Pinker is quick to say that differences between men and women are innate, whether it's emotional, a difference in a bell curve intelligence spread, or in general interests, but he'll attribute differences between races and ethnic groups to environment or oppression, forces he largely dismisses otherwise. Or we can note that Pinker asserts first that women are better caretakers then men, then secondly asserts that parenting is fairly irrelevant (as long as there's a man to look up to, no comments on where women fall on this influence spectrum), and then thirdly asserts that how well kids get along with parents is predictive of their overall success, which would suggest . . . parenting isn't irrelevant? He also tends to reduce complex issues, such as art or culture or rule of law to biological imperatives, which is a bit odd when he also asserts human individuality and specialness (as long as they also fall within the Norman the Normy Norms that define actual human nature, I suppose). He'll say art has no influence on anyone, really, so everyone hates modernism and post-modernism because it deconstructs art, which no one needs, because everyone knows art isn't real. And by the by, prejudices/stereotypes are often innate and have some good sense and 100% reliable statistics behind them, and these prejudices can't be strongly messed with by media or culture, although of course we should treat everyone with respect, even if they're low IQ and will never amount to anything or. Except that human nature is so violent (at least, if you're a man) and suspicious that of course we will never treat everyone with respect and don't you dare Big Brother us into doing so. ... I got carried away. But the book is absolutely exhausting, wheeling from one conclusion to the next in a mixture of hopeless pessimism, wide-eyed futurism, white-knuckled warnings about not screwing up the status quo, and sudden naivete. I also find many of the absolutely-certain-claims somewhat suspect, as if statistics/brain scans from this or that study and some anecdotes and did you know tribal people actually kill each other?? are absolute proof of what a human is. You can't point out that many media reports of "this causes cancer" or "this proves this parenting tactic successful!" often exaggerate or segment the truth without making it impossible not to notice that nothing, even studies or statistics, exists in cold, objective isolation. I'm not being post-modern here. I'm saying that the very fact I know more about Pinker from this book than I do about human nature is par for the course. Does any of this matter? Does it matter to a childless female engineer that she's some kind of biological anomaly (and is she?). Is anything helped by positing that men are naturally violent and competitive, and ignoring the uncountable exceptions, or ignoring that women also compete against other women, for mates and otherwise? Is IQ, like, this magic statistic that determines human worth in society? Are you sure you aren't a supporter of eugenics? Etc, etc, etc. We can all agree that people are not meant to be programmed, that we should not force people who want to be poets to become mathematicians to fill a quota, and we should treat people well even when they're not like us. All right? All right.                   112 reviews228 followers     July 25, 2017    "I'm only humanOf flesh and blood I'm madeHumanBorn to make mistakes"  --The Human League, Human  Most of us instinctively feel the acquisition of scientific knowledge follows a linear path, first operating from a solid factual base, and then modifying itself as it goes along in an objective fashion. Ultimately, a common agreeance on a certain topic will be reached, and the findings will translate into well-considered policy.  Ideally, that is how it should work, with scientists serving as neutral observers, freely informing us, the public, on whatever findings they come across, whatever the implications. This is not always what actually happens, of course. Not by a long shot. Ironically - also tellingly -, when it comes to the in-depth study of the human animal, there is active, hostile opprobrium by (a certain school of) social scientists and ideologically motivated activists alike. Scientists who try to find biological causations for certain human behaviours or perceived inequalities are frequently ostracised, pelted by slurs, and made pariah's in their own fields. The sober truth is that the scientific community is not free at all from anti-intellectualism and bullying tactics. It seems nothing much has changed since the 2002 publication of this book, which I'm informed drew out considerable polemical discourse at the time. I'm not surprised. Anno 2016, the social sciences in Western academia are still infested with social constructivist thinking, with no sign of it abating any time soon. In fact, it might even have reached its zenith, having entrenched itself even further. It's not difficult to make an analogy with creationists. This exemplifies how far we still have to go as a species to attain a higher level of rational thinking, which means being willing to demolish some of our most cherished beliefs. Ego investment still is riding high, it seems. Biological innateness. Determinism. These terms observably evoke unpleasant feelings in many. However, in order to come face to face with the homo sapiens which, during its brutal evolutionary process, has acquired certain survival - often nasty -instincts, one should let go of such reservations . Funnily enough, it was some of the most prominent Enlightenment thinkers (such as Rousseau) who introduced the blank slate theory. But are we blank slates, almost solely informed by the culture that surrounds us? Hardly, as Pinker shows us -with the aid of a plethora of immensely interesting case studies - in this intellectually dense, yet highly accessible book. Genes and our biological make-up determine our behaviour to a far greater extent than culture or our upbringing ever will. Pinker even goes as far as saying that parental influence on their child(ren)'s formation is pretty much negligible. Peer group interaction is a far more important determining factor.  However, Pinker deftly reasons that even with the ever-expanding, confronting knowledge of the human coming from the exciting fields of neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, there is no need for us to defeatedly resort to fatalism or nihilism. On the contrary, an intimate, unsentimental understanding of what we are will help us enormously in developing a truly humanistic ethos and thus in crafting a pragmatic society which can be beneficial to all of us.  The utopian vision, with its aim to 'mould' the human psyche (social constructivism), the 20th century has adequately shown to only lead us into disaster.                   42 reviews365 followers     January 30, 2019   يتحدث ستيفن بينكر –عالم النفس اللغوي في هارفارد- في كتابه (الصفحة البيضاء) عن معتقد شديد الشيوع في القرون الأخيرة، وهو الاعتقاد بأن الإنسان يولد "صفحة بيضاء"، لا يحمل بنية فطرية سابقة، وأن المؤثر الأساسي في تشكيل الإنسان يعود للوالدين، والمجتمع. يهاجم بينكر هذا المعتقد بشدة، وهو يرى أنه يمثّل "الدين العلماني للحياة الثقافية المعاصرة"، وأن هذا المعتقد ساهم في رسم بعض أجندات العلوم الاجتماعية والإنسانية في القرن المنصرم.ابتدأ أولاً بتقصي منابع هذه المعتقد التاريخية، منذ روسو وهوبز وديكارت، ثم شرع في تقويض المعتقد عبر أربعة مجالات: العلوم العقلية الحديثة، وعلوم الأعصاب، والجينات، والأطروحات التطورية. فنّد بينكر المخاوف الثقافية التي تمنع من إثبات بنية فطرية أو طبيعة بشرية سابقة، وهي أن الإقرار بطبيعة بشرية ما يبرّر التمييز العنصري، وأن إثبات ميول غير أخلاقية (كالعنف) يجلب التشاؤم، ويدمر فكرة الإرادة الحرة، ويحطم معنى الحياة. وأخيراً عقد المؤلف فصولاً عديدة لمناقشة الأسس الفطرية/الطبيعة المؤثرة في تشكيل نوازع الإنسان وخياراته في : [1] السياسة، وفي العنف وأثبت أن الإنسان يحمل ميولاً فطرية للعنف، وأشار لدراسة نشرت عام 2000م أثبتت أن نصف الذكور الذين تجاوزا سن الثانية انخرطوا في الضرب والعض والرفس، وقالت الدراسة أن السؤال الصحيح ليس هو: كيف يتعلم الأطفال الاعتداء؟ بل: كيف يتعلم الأطفال عدم الاعتداء؟!. [2] الفروق بين الجنسين، وأثبت فروقاً جوهرية بين الجنسين بيولوجياً وانتقد بعض الأطروحات النسوية التي ترفض الاعتراف بهذه الفروق، وترى بأنها مصنوعة من قبل المجتمع وليس لها أساس عضوي، ودافع عن أطروحة ثرونهيل وبالمر في كتابهما الشهير "التاريخ الطبيعي للاغتصاب" الصادر عام 2000م، الذي ينقض الأطروحة النسوية القائلة بأن الاغتصاب هو جريمة عنف ونتيجة للنظام الأبوي المضطهد للنساء وليس سببه دوافع جنسية راسخة في تكوين الذكر عضوياً/بيولوجياً. [3] وفيما يتعلق بالأطفال، هاجم بقوة الأفكار التربوية والنفسية والاجتماعية التي ترى بأن الأطفال يمكن تشكيلهم كما يشكّل الطين أو الصلصال، وتلك التي تبالغ في دور الآباء والمعلمين وتحملهم فوق ما يحتملون، وذلك في فصل هام يجدر بالمهتمين بالتربية الاطلاع عليه.كما تحدث في غير ذلك من المجالات كالفنون. فكرة الكتاب الأساسية مهمة جداً، وهي أقرب للتصور الديني من نظرية "الصفحة البيضاء"، فالإنسان في التصور الإسلامي لا يولد صفحة بيضاء بل (كل مولود يولد على الفطرة)، مع ملاحظة أن بينكر ملحد، ولا يؤسس أطروحته على أية مستندات دينية. أما الترجمة فهي ركيكة في العموم، والعناية بالنواحي الفنية والهوامش سيئة جداً. يقع الكتاب في 550 صفحة، وصدر عن دار الفرقد ٢٠١٨.                   801 reviews2,502 followers     July 17, 2010   What an impressive book! I have been reading a number of Steven Pinker's books, and they are all excellent. I was particularly interested in how politics and social activists have worked to slow down the progress of science. The concept of a "blank slate", though socially attractive, has held back science and our understanding of human nature.The chapter on children was especially interesting. Pinker rightly gives much credit to Judith Harris' excellent book The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do. The subject is not finished, though. Pinker shows that while 50% of the variance in human nature is due to genetics, the remaining 50% of the variance is still in question. It is NOT correlated with home life or parental upbringing. It seems to be a combination of peer influences, and fickle fate.     biology nonfiction philosophy               2,234 reviews3,663 followers     December 15, 2017   In which Pinker argues against a bunch of straw men without backing up his overly sweeping claims. I don't disagree with his basic thesis, but I do disagree with his cartoonish characterizations of his opponents, namely, feminists, the left, social scientists, etc. If you're going to write a book in which you are right and everyone else is wrong and stupid, you should at least make sure you support your huge thesis with unassailable facts. He did not. It's one thing to say "we are not a blank slate." Totally fine. But quite another to say parenting and environment make no difference whatsoever, that women are not in fact under-represented in the sciences (that one made me the most mad), and that art is now crap (why is he even qualified to critique modern art?). Anyway, I'm sure it's not his fault--his biology made him that arrogant.                   105 reviews129 followers     October 5, 2020     چرا ذات انسان را انکار می‌کنیم؟مقدمه  انسان محصول تربیت‌اش است یا محصول طبیعت‌اش؟ آموزش است که خصوصیات انسان‌ها را رقم می‌زند یا سرشت ذاتی‌شان؟ تحیقیقات نشان می‌دهند که هر دوی این عوامل اثرگذار‌اند. اما عموم مردم زمانه‌ی ما سهم طبیعت و سرشت انسان را بسیار کمتر از آنچه هست می‌گیرند. گویی عصر ما با ذات‌باوری، یعنی با این ایده که ذات، سرشت و ژنتیک ما بسیاری از خصوصیاتمان را تعیین می‌کند، سر عناد دارد. دوست داریم همه‌چیز را در تربیت و آموزش خلاصه ببینیم. وقتی بحث تفاوت‌های مردان و زنان می‌شود فورا می‌گوییم نحوه‌ی تربیت باعث این تفاوت‌ها شده است. وقتی کودک با ادبی می‌بینیم شیوه‌ی تربیتی پدر و مادرش را تحسین می‌کنیم. اما آیا امکان ندارد که تفاوت بین زن و مرد ریشه در ذات ما داشته باشد؟ آیا امکان ندارد که علت خوش‌رفتاری یک کودک، ذات سربه‌راهش باشد؟ تحقیقات اخیر تاثیر ذات و ژنتیک را به خوبی اثبات کرده‌اند. مثلاً نشان داده شده که حتی گرایش به بزهکاری تا حد زیادی به سرشت و ژنتیک ما مرتبط است. با این وجود، چرا ما هنوز اثر طبیعت را بی‌درنگ رد می‌کنیم و همه چیز را به پای تربیت می‌نویسیم؟ چرا ذات‌گرایی منفور است و سرشت ذاتی انسان نادیده گرفته می‌شود؟ یک. برابری خواهی یکی از دلایل بی‌اعتنایی به سرشت انسان رواج برابری‌خواهی است. دغدغه‌ی برابری‌خواهی چنان با��ا گرفته و اهمیت یافته که هر سخنی که بوی نابرابری بدهد نشنیده رد می‌شود، از جمله و خصوصاً سخن ذات‌گرایان. ایده‌ی برابری‌ از کلیدی‌ترین باورهای زمانه‌ی ماست؛ پایه و اساس حقوق و ارزش‌های ماست. مثلاً قانون اساسی آمریکا بر شالوده‌ی همین ایده‌ی برابری انسان‌ها بنا شده است. بیرون کشیدن این خشت زیرین همان و فروریختن کل عمارت آمریکا همان. خبر بد آنکه این خشت مدتی‌ است که لق شده. قانون اساسی آمریکا برابری انسان‌ها را به دین گره می‌زند. می‌گوید انسان‌ها برابرند چون خدا آنها را برابر می‌بیند. اما حالا که خدا و دین خود زیر سوال رفته‌اند، ایده‌ی برابری بی‌تکیه‌گا�� مانده، و به تلنگری بند است. با این تفاسیر، این نگرانی که مبادا ذات‌گرایی تلنگر نهایی را وارد کند قابل فهم است  و فراموش نکنیم که ذات‌باوری، یا بهتر بگوییم فهم غلطی از ذات‌باوری، سابقه‌ی جنایت در پرونده‌اش دارد. نازیسم هیتلر با توصل به برداشت تحریف‌شده‌ای از ذات‌باوری بود که کشتارهای نژادپرستانه‌اش را توجیه می‌کرد. نازیسم این حرف را در دهان ذات‌گرایی گذاشت که نژاد آریایی ذاتاً برتر است و نژادهای یهودی و اسلاو ذاتاً پست‌تر، و به این بهانه خون آنها را حلال کرد. این جنایت‌های نازیسم امروزه به پای ذات‌گرایی نوشته می‌شود. پس جای تعجب نیست که ترس از تکرار شدن این نوع جنایت‌ها باعث شده ایده‌ی سرشت انسان به همراه هیتلر و افکارش در زباله‌دان تاریخ انداخته ‌شود. خصوصاً که در شهرهای چندملیتی امروز، که انسان‌هایی از چندین و چند قوم و نژاد را کنار هم آورده، نژادپرستی می‌تواند فاجعه‌ای به‌مراتب عظیم‌تر بیافریند. این است که ما از بیم آنکه خامی چند نظریات ذات‌باوری را بد بفهمند، یا عده‌ای فرصت‌طلب آن را عامدانه مصادره به مطلوب کنند، نفی حکمت می‌کنیم و درست و غلط ذات‌گرایی را یکجا از صفحات کتاب‌ها و صفحه‌ی ذهن آدم‌ها پاک می‌کنیم. حقیقت را فدای مبارزه با تبعیض نژادی می‌کنیم شاخه‌ای از جنبش فمیینیسم هم، مثل جنبش مبارزه با نژاد پرستی، با نیت خیر به میدان آمد اما متاسفانه علیه ذات‌گرایی شمشیر کشید. جنبش فمینیسم برای به دست آوردن حقوق برابر با مردان، نیاز دارد نشان دهد که مردان و زنان برابراند. بنابراین بر شباهت‌های زنان و مردان انگشت تاکید می‌گذارد. اما یک شاخه‌ی افراطی تا آنجا پیش رفته که هر تفاوت سرشتی بین مرد و زن را مطلقاً نفی می‌کند، و وقتی هم که تفاوت‌ها عیان و انکارناپذیر باشند، آنها را یکسره محصول تربیت و محیط می‌داند. مثلاً حتی گرایش جنسی را هم برساخته‌ای اجتماعی، و بی‌تأثیر از سرشت انسان می‌داند و معتقد است دگرجنس‌گرایی یا هم‌جنس‌گرایی را می‌توان با آموزش در افراد نهادینه کرد. از این باور افراطی که بگذریم، باورهای معمولی‌تر اما رایج‌تر مثل نفی خصوصیات و خلقیات زنانه و مردانه، ذات‌گرایی را به حاشیه رانده‌اند. به عنوان مثال دیگر کسی جرأت نمی‌کند بگوید فلان شغل به سرشت زنانه نزدیک‌تر است، یا فلان خصوصیت ذاتاً در مردان پررنگ‌تر است. چنین اظهار نظرهایی—و گویندگانشان—بی‌درنگ انگ تبعیض جنسی می‌خورند و رد می‌شوند بی‌مناسبت نیست اشاره کنیم که مقبول افتادن یک اندیشه بیش از آنکه به درستی و قوت‌اش مرتبط باشد، به صد نکته‌ی دیگر وابسته است. خصوصاً به شرایط زمانه. در هر عصری یک دیدگاه کلی حاکم است، و هر ایده‌ی موافق با آن دیدگاه رو می‌آید و هر ایده‌ی مخالف دور انداخته می‌شود. دور از حقیقت نیست اگر بگوییم ایده‌ها نیز مثل لباس‌ها مد می‌شوند و از مد می‌افتند. بعدها که به مدهای امروز نگاه ‌کنیم خنده‌مان می‌گیرد، و تعجب می‌کنیم که چنین چیز بدقواره و زشتی چطور آن‌همه بدیع و زیبا به نظر می‌رسید. اندیشه‌های رایج امروز هم، از جمله ضدیت با ذات‌باوری، چه بسا فردا خنده‌دار و بی‌اساس بنمایند  دو. میل به تسلط یکی دیگر از دلایل انکار سرشت انسان میل ما به در دست داشتن کنترل همه‌ی امور است. ما دلمان می‌خواهد دنیا رام ما باشد. این به ما احساس قدرت می‌دهد. از آن طرف، از هر چیزی که به ما احساس ناتوانی بدهد و حقارت و ناچیزی‌مان را به رویمان بیاورد بیزاریم. فراموش نکنیم که قدرت از دغدغه‌های اساسی انسان مدرن است. انسان مدرن پس از شنیدن ندای نیچه که خدا مرده است، کوشید خود به جای خدا بنشیند. و به لطف علم و تکنولوژی تا حد زیادی موفق شد فرمانروای عالم شود. سفر به ماه و درمان بیماری‌های پیشتر لاعلاج و این قبیل دستاوردها انسان را به این باور کشاند که کار نشد ندارد؛ انسان اگر بخواهد می‌تواند از خود خدا بسازد  اما ذات‌باوری با نشان دادن ویژگی‌های بعضاً پست و اغلب تغییرناپذیر انسانی، تصویر قدرقدرتی که انسان از خود ساخته را ویران می‌کند، و نشان می‌دهد که کنترل ما بر امور خیلی کمتر از آن است که تصور می‌کردیم. ذات‌باوری نشان می‌دهد که خیلی از خصوصیات ما به ژنتیک‌مان وابسته است، و تربیت و آموزش، اگرچه اثرگذارند، به هیچ وجه بازیگر اصلی نیستند. مثلاً دوقلوهایی که در بدو تولد از هم جدا شدند، با اینکه در دو خانواده‌‌ و دو محیط متفاوت بزرگ شده‌اند، شخصیت بسیار مشابهی یافته‌اند. ذات‌باوری نشان می‌دهد که خیلی از علایق و سلایق ما بر خلاف باور رایج حاصل انتخاب شخصی و از سر اختیار نیستند بلکه عمیقاً ریشه در سرشت ژنتیکی ما دارند. مثلاً جهت‌گیری‌های سیاسی ما هم تا حد زیادی به سرشت‌مان مرتبط است. گویا آنقدر هم که فکر می‌کردیم بر خود مسلط نیستیم. این پیام به مذاق ما خوش نمی‌آید. همانطور که شاهان پیک بدخبر را به سیاه‌چاله می‌انداختند، ما هم ذات‌گرایان را که خبر از نقص‌ها و کاستی‌های انسان آورده‌اند به جرم سیاه‌انگاری طرد می‌کنیم. ما نمی‌خواهیم بپذیریم که نه تنها پادشاه جهان نیستیم بلکه سخت در چنگ نیروهای طبیعت که سرشت ما را رقم زده‌اند اسیریم  سه. دین ضدیت دین با داروینیسم هم در غفلت از سرشت انسان دخیل بوده است. داروینیسم و ذات‌باوری در هم تنیده‌اند. نمی‌شود از ذات و سرشت انسان صحبت کرد ولی نامی از تکامل نبرد، یا از تکامل گفت ولی اشاره‌ای به سرشت انسان نکرد. دین با کنار گذاشتن بحث داروینیسم و تکامل عملاً نمایندگان ذات‌گرایی را هم خفه کرده است. این نوع سانسور البته در حکومت‌های مذهبی پررنگ‌تر است. اما حتی آنجا که دولت‌ غیر مذهبی است و دست به سانسور نمی‌برد، تعصبات مذهبی خود مردم مانع از پا گرفتن و جا افتادن یافته‌های علم تکامل و سخنان ذات‌گرایان می‌شود. به تعبیر برتراند راسل مردم ترجیج می‌دهند فرشتگانی سقوط کرده باشند تا بوزینگانی تکامل یافته؛ از این جهت به مذهب علاقه‌مندتر‌اند تا به علم  چهار. فلسفه مقصر بعدی اتکای بیش از اندازه‌ی ما به فلسفه است. دین با کنار گذاشتن تکامل و بیولوژی و سایر علوم از میزگرد شناخت انسان، صحنه را برای خودنمایی فلسفه خالی کرد، اما فلسفه هم متاسفانه اعتنایی به سرشت انسان نکرد. در واقع تقصیر هم به گردن فلسفه است، و هم به گردن ما. ما مقصریم از این بابت که شناخت انسان را به فلسفه سپردیم. به این بهانه که فلسفه همیشه منزلت و اعتبار فراوان داشته، و چون مرجع دیگری برای پاسخ گویی نمانده بود، به همان تخته‌پاره‌ی فلسفه در اقیانوس نادانی چسبیدیم، و به آن دل بستیم. حال آنکه پرسش از ماهیت انسان پرسشی نیست که فلسفه قادر به پاسخ گفتنش باشد. این پرسش مطالعات آزمایشگاهی و میدانی می‌طلبد. فیلسوف از پشت میز کارش چطور می‌تواند پاسخش را بیابد؟ و فلسفه هم مقصر است از این بابت که در تحلیل انسان و نسخه پیچیدن برای زندگی انسان، بدن را به کلی نادیده گرفت و او را چون روحی خالص تصور کرد. با حذف شدن بدن از صورت مسئله، هر آنچه مربوط به سرشت انسان بود از قلم افتاد  یه منبر هم بریم مسلماً اینکه بخواهیم همه چیز را به ذات انسان تقلیل دهیم اشتباه است. اما این تصور که چیزی به نام ذات انسانی اساساً وجود ندارد نیز به همان اندازه غلط است. شاید درست‌تر این باشد که آنچه را طبیعت در ذات ما سرشته بپذیریم، و اختیاراتی را هم که به ما داده بشناسیم. پذیرش سرشت انسان به معنای وادادن به نیروهای طبیعت نیست، بلکه گام نخست برای رشدی واقع‌بینانه است پی‌نوشت یک: آنچه آمد تنها یکی از موضوعات کتاب است. ضمناً مطالبی خارج از این کتاب را هم شامل می‌شودپی‌نوشت دو: کتاب مطالب خیلی خوبی رو می‌گه، ولی مطالبش رو خوب نمی‌گه     evolutionary non-fiction               1,634 reviews257 followers     June 28, 2020    
 
 (Steven Pinker in Oporto, on the 11th of November 2017. My photo.) "Nature, Mr Allnut , is what we are put in this world to rise above" Katherine Hepburn to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen   "Hillary Clinton may have advanced the dumbest explanation in the history of psychobabble, but she does not deserve the charge of trying to excuse the president's [husband] behavior"  Pinker makes the case against a man who gets his formation/make up only from the outer forces of parenting, education, etc. He seems to defend the conception of a man who is not a “blank slate” upon which experience writes on.   
 
  He invokes genetic arguments (based on fraternal and identical twins’ studies) to back his thesis. He also approaches brain analysis and anthropological studies to justify the existence of some “universals” (for instance in the art domain). Even the moral sense. Ergo: there are innate responses: man is not devoid of a certain type of make-up at birth.  
 
  He, sort of, denounces the political appeal of a “blank slate “human being to justify the fears of inequalities and certain types of interventions. Those political fears are meant to be refuted. Thomas Jefferson meant “equality “of rights.  
 
  Nevertheless, he seems to be a bit cautious about Noam Chomsky’s ideas of an “innate circuitry”, or a universal grammar/plan. He points to the works of Jean Piaget and others, consisting of “personal ideas”. As for the fear of machines, thinking machines, running “amok”, Pinker thinks it’s a “waste of energy”. I really don’t agree. The singularity is at hand at any moment. We’ve witnessed one such an episode on Facebook*, quite recently. Again, this is truly a case against empiricism, against those like John Stuart Mill and John Watson, who were proponents of a major role of experience in Psychology. The book of Pinker is a huge amalgamation of proof that psychopathology, personality traits, as well as love, consciousness and will, are biologically determined.   
 
   Well, I know Pinker is an atheist and a lover of the beauty of Darwin's theory of evolution. He's so hopeful regarding the completion of the Human Genome Project, one which may uncover the roots of the intellect and emotion.    I think a few years ago I've bought that Time magazine issue. So much so for a biological determinism, I wonder how would Pinker    deny refute a God Gene gene? or a set of them? It's, really, no monkey business. I'm not sure whether Pinker has read the book by Dean Hamer: The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes. Maybe some have it [the gene/s]; maybe some don't. I've got to grab that magazine again.  *https://www.forbes.com/sites/tonybrad...  Interesting review here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...  UPDATE Pinker on Covid19: "With coronavirus, it’s genuinely hard to know whether surfaces are potential vectors, whether six feet is enough or not enough, whether masks help or don’t help”  Does he wear mask? In: http://m.nautil.us/blog/steven-pinker...      b-f-skinner-was-a-blank-slater behavioral-genetics case-against-empiricism               574 reviews255 followers     December 29, 2013   Pinker argues cleanly and decisively against the theory of the Blank Slate (and its corollary, the Noble Savage). You might say he wipes the Blank Slate clean. Or that he breaks it over his knee.He examines how motivations for wanting to believe in a Blank Slate come from four fears of human nature: 1. The Fear of Inequality: if people are innately different, oppression and discrimination (like sexism and racism) would be justified. But people are, in fact, different. Ignoring this fact doesn't help address the real cause of discrimination, which is to judge people as a member of their group, instead of as an individual. It also opens up rational against discrimination to attack by any evidence against the blank slate. 2. The Fear of Imperfectibility: if people are innately immoral, hopes to improve the human condition would be futile. Ignoring human nature doesn't make people any less likely to commit crimes. When they do, it doesn't help us decide when and how harshly to punish them. Ignoring human nature is especially foolish in the case of rape. Denying that rape is a sexual crime, and insisting that it's only a violent crime (which it is, also) isn't going to deter any would-be rapists, who, as it happens, are motivated by sexual urges, not the urge to commit violence. 3. The Fear of Determinism: if people are products of biology, free will would be a myth and we could no longer hold people responsible for their actions. 4. The Fear of Nihilism: if people are products of biology, life would have no higher meaning and purpose. He attacks proponents of the Blank Slate like Stephen Jay Gould, parts of the political left, some feminists, etc. He draws an important distinction between gender and equity feminism. He draws an interesting distinction between the Utopian vs. Tragic vision, and how these influence political leanings. He even calls out modern and post-modern art for their philosophical denial of human nature!     biology non-fiction philosophy               103 reviews56 followers     July 13, 2017    Wow What an interesting and exquisitely written book!!! This is my first read by this author “Steven Pinker”. He is a psychologist and author of several books and articles on cognition and linguistics. In 
 The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
 he refuted the widely held belief that the human mind at birth is a tabula rasa /blank slate to which the environment (nurture) gives form and substance.  He further explained that neither genetics nor environmental conditions are solely responsible for determining a person's behavior instead; individuals are created by a combination of both innate human nature and the conditions of upbringing and environment.  A must read for those who want to be introduced to the nature-nurture debate by examining scientific evidence.  
 Some of my favorite parts from the book:
  
  There are different kinds of truth for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn’t work.
 
 As technology accumulates and people in more parts of the planet become interdependent, the hatred between them tends to decrease, for the simple reason that you can't kill someone and trade with him too.
 
 The Darwin Awards, given annually to “the individuals who ensure the long-term survival of our species by removing themselves from the gene pool in a sublimely idiotic fashion”, almost always go to men.
 
 Much of what is today called "social criticism" consists of members of the upper classes denouncing the tastes of the lower classes (bawdy entertainment, fast food, plentiful consumer goods) while considering themselves egalitarians.
                   107 reviews10 followers     August 9, 2008   The Blank Slate was an informative, thought-provoking and polemic book designed to refute ordinary conceptions and intellectual arguments which cut against a sociobiological understanding of humans and human society. I detected a couple instances in which the author, Stephen Pinker, overstated scientific conclusions, leading me to doubt the accuracy of his other scientific evidence. I also have reservations about the rational-actor lens through which he interprets human nature. On the other hand, the writing is good and many of his points are well taken. In sum, this book amounts to an interesting point of view that, while not entirely accurate, helps us see human society in a different light.First the bad. In the couple areas of social science with which I'm somewhat familiar, he sometimes overstates the scientific research he uses as support. For instance, he briefly qualifies research suggesting inheritable differences between male and female brains but then proceeds to lay it all out as unqualified fact. All of this research was done on adults, which means that some of the differences might be hereditary, but this is far from established fact. The same charge has been laid against his sister Susan, which, interestingly enough, may support some of his other arguments about intra-family similarity in tendencies. His hypothesis about hereditary differences between male and female brains may in fact be true, and it definitely matches up with most peoples' intuitive observations of their own children. In any case I agree with him that it should make no difference when it comes to placing value on males or females, but none of this excuses the fact that he overstates the scientific conclusions. In Chapter 12, Pinker similarly runs roughshod over stereotypical associations. He proclaims, “[P]eople’s ability to set aside stereotypes when judging an individual is accomplished by their conscious, deliberate reasoning.” While researchers have shown that thinking carefully about an individual's characteristics can dampen the effect of stereotypical associations, it doesn't reduce their effect to nil. In fact, subsequent studies suggest otherwise, because stereotypical associations effect more than just memory recall; they effect perception, interpretation and memory encoding. Academic social psychologists who profess otherwise are mostly legal defense experts and corporate human resource consultants. I doubt that Pinker cherry-picked or intentionally misrepresented the science, leaving me with the conclusion that he again overstated scientific conclusions. As another minor but related point, Pinker might be misusing quotes, taking them out of context or reading too much into them. He quotes several intellectuals and researchers to prove that the philosophical ideas of “the blank slate” and “the noble savage” are broadly represented in academia. This may all be true, but after catching him overstating scientific conclusions I started to notice that many of these quotations could contain different, more nuanced meanings than Pinker squeezes out of them. Pinker tips his hand most revealingly in Chapter 18, in which he writes, “In a cutthroat market, any company stupid enough to overlook qualified women or to overpay unqualified men would be driven out of business by a more meritocratic competitor.” This represents a brash oversimplification of history, cognitive science, social psychology; an underestimation of the influence of dumb luck; and an overestimation of humans’ ability to accurately evaluate the merits of other humans. It suggests that while Pinker’s erudition is broad, he makes up for its sometimes lack of depth by looking only as far as required to confirm his preconceived vision of rational actors in a rational society, which he in turn derives from the apparent rationality of evolution. The idea that we inexorably act rationally is not a necessary conclusion from our status as products of a mercilessly rational evolutionary process, but I understand how this can be a reassuring conclusion for people uncomfortable with ambiguity. With all these faults, it’s still a compelling read. Pinker presents a great deal of fascinating and oddly intuitive scientific research in very accessible fashion. I’m satisfied by his assertion that we are creatures with inherited tendencies and skills, one of which is the ability to not allow our tendencies to rule tyrannically over us. He made me feel more confident and justified about my loose, respectful, loving relationship with my children, which others might see as too permissive for my children’s good. He carefully defines positions, quoting authorities from multiple disciplines to make his points, so he’s either very well read, has a number of well read research assistants, or perhaps both. His prose was confident like most polemics, but stops short of the patronization that ruins so many of the others. Overall, The Blank Slate was entertaining, interesting, and informative, but I strongly recommend that you read it with both an open and critical mind.                   28 reviews25 followers     June 27, 2008   so. steven pinker got a lot of press out of this thing. it is essentially a sustained and detailed case for the predominance of genetic factors in determing human behavior. mr pinker is (if i recall) mainly a developmental neuroscientist (if that's a legitimate description...?). he provides a tremendous and very enjoyable welath of case studies and background for the various psychological, philosophical, sociological and biological problems which he subjects to the peculiar dialectical lens of nature/nurture. if you're like me, this seems sort of arbitrary and anachronistic; thomas hobbes is long dead (ideologically and otherwise), skinnerism is not so popular, etc... my problem with pinker and the rest of the current mature crop of pop-science meega-pundits (thinking kurzweil, dawkins, wolfram...), is that they have all this incredible data, and a good number of intelligent conclusions, but some impulse (hubris? frustration? hunger for fame?) drives them to waaay overstep the bounds of what is interesting or relevant about their research, seeing jingoistc intellectual bogeymen in every pop culture shadow, and turning their work into extended rants about their pet theoretical controversy that no sane person wuld care about. it's good entertainment, i suppose, if entertainment requires epic struggles of will, and this must be motivating the editors... anyays, in pinker's case i was pretty perturbed by his opening statements (declaration of war against all "blank slate" dogmas... i kinda drew a blank myself on that one), and then i procceeded to be thoroughy engrossed for many chapters, in which pinker used his considerable erudition (which seems both fairly deep and fairly broad) to lay out a really intense survey of all kids of topics that might have to do with the "nature/nurture" controversy: lots of great data on twin studies, baby studies, language studies, archeological studies... it's about 70% quotations for a while, and it's great. then, at some point, for some reason, mr pinker decides to take it upon himself to attack feminism, postmodern philosophy, and experimental art, in the name of genetic determinism. it's an incredibile reversal: this accomplished scientist, high on his case studies, suddenly ripping into minor intellectual figures in disciplines he clearly knows jack shit about. it is presumptuous, elitist, ridiculous. perhaps it is the hidden form of his particular nerd-autism, blinding him to the incredbile, stereotypical flatulence of the harvard neuroscientist confidently and patiently xplaining that humans are not genetically constructed to appreciate non-figural art, that women are unhappy because feminism is forcing them to be away from home too much... THAT kind of crap. naturally, i wanted to rip his smug white face off...so, in conclusion: if i had my own copy of this book, i might rip out the introduction and the last couple chapters and feel okay about it. maybe just keep the bibliography, though....                   6 reviews2 followers     November 14, 2007   Pinker examines the concept of the mind as a blank slate capable of taking any impressions that arose in England and France in the mid-18th century and became the basis for liberal democracy in the 19th and 20th centuries. The "blank slate" underlies the nurture pole of the nature/ nurture debate and looms huge in political and social policies. Drawing on an immense body of research in psychology and other social sciences, linguistics, and evolutionary biology, Pinker makes the case for the nature pole, arguing that it is now apparent that the human brain is not a blank slate, but in fact bears powerful imprints of our evolutionary past that in effect hardwire us to feel, respond, and behave in specific ways. The denial of this human nature is now an impediment to solving many problems that are now plaguing Western democracies. -- This is an exciting read for anyone interested in contemporary social and political issues. It powerfully summarizes a huge body of knowledge that is forcing us to rethink who we are and how we ought to organize our collective behaviors.                  39 reviews438 followers     November 12, 2018   This book is not without its flaws. As others have pointed out, the picture here might just be a tad bit too simple. However, Pinker accomplishes one important feat in this book, and that is to point out that our theories of justice and morality are not hostage to the empirically falsifiable claim that there are no innate differences between individuals. Our moral commitment to respecting the human dignity, equality, freedom, and human rights of any and all regardless of gender or race is in no way advanced by stifling scientific research that might reveal essential differences between individuals. In fact, Pinker argues that it is quite the contrary. He nicely shows how extreme postmodernist, social constructivist views share a disturbing commonality with totalitarian thinking, in that they both do violence to the natural tendencies and inclinations of individuals by making armchair prescriptions that ignore these. Instead, he argues that to respect individuals implies first and foremost to recognize and nurture their innate tendencies, whether through education, parenting, or through empirically-informed ethical practices and social policies. In contrast, what postmodern views tend to share is this social constructionist view that there are no essential properties that define who people are. Instead, people either: 1) "make" up their identities, ex-nihilo, (whatever that means, and however that is supposed to work out in practice for embodied human agents who are constrained in the range of possible identities that they can adopt by virtue of their very embodiment), or  2) are passive receptacles of social "codes" that determine who they are, as well as being pawns of larger institutional forces that lack any agency and standing as responsible, autonomous individuals. Ultimately, both views hinge on the notion that there are no innate, natural constraints that might define what it is to be a functional human agent. This can be seen, for instance, in the second- and third-wave feminist dogma that biology is irrelevant to psychology, and that gender is entirely a social construct. Pinker rightly reminds us that this is an empirically falsifiable claim, and that we had better not build our ethical theories about gender equity on a claim that, he says, has been shown to be false by evolutionary neuropsychology.  Moreover, he argues that this rejection of human nature is actually counterproductive when it comes to advancing the goals of social justice. This is because, by ignoring empirical evidence regarding the conditions that are conducive to human flourishing, it cannot possibly engage in practices that are likely to lead to such flourishing. So if we care about promoting the flourishing of, say, women, then what better guide to understanding what such flourishing might be could we have than a psychology that is as free from ideological policing as possible?  To deem certain thoughts unthinkable because they are anathema according to our latest ideology (e.g., second- and third-wave feminism's cardinal sin of gender essentialism) is to pit truth against right, which makes us less likely to get the latter, since the former is the only reliable guide we could possibly have to understanding what the latter could be. Thus, he argues that we needn't fear that the scientific approach to understanding human nature will legitimize bigoted, unethical views. He seems to have a pretty firm conviction that the principles of ethics are universal and grounded independently of any kind of empirical considerations. This isn't to say that we can meaningfully apply these universal principles without empirical knowledge. If these principles are to apply to human beings, we had better have empirical data about what human beings are really like.  Because individuals aren't just abstract, characterless units, but rather have innate characteristics that define them as the individuals that they are, equality cannot be sameness or interchangeability. Thus, for instance, second- and third-wave feminism needn't police biology and psychology in the fear that such sciences might uncover data showing that women on average exhibit cognitive differences from men. Should evidence of such innate differences appear, it would in no way undermine women's claim to equal human rights, since difference doesn't imply inferiority. Just because human individuals exhibit a vast degree of variation in aptitude and natural ability doesn't imply that some are to be accorded rights that others lack. Each one of us has capacities that others lack, while lacking capacities that others possess. Nevertheless, we already accord equal recognition to others despite these everyday, obvious differences. In addition, such ideological policing of science, and such a need to cover up in advance what the science might show, reveals too much about our own fears. We implicitly confess the weak foundations of our ethical principles every time we put restrictions on science ahead of time. Moreover, because humans are adapted to living interdependent lives as members of purposive groups, freedom cannot imply that individuals are to be seen as free-floating atoms, while groups are mere aggregates of such atoms. Rather, a great deal of our flourishing and thus of meaningful freedom depends on properly adjusting ourselves to others. Hence, freedom must be tempered with equality if human flourishing can be attained. Finding the right way of mutually constraining freedom and equality is the goal of political thinking, and Pinker argues that it cannot be achieved if we ignore the innate traits of individuals.                   551 reviews1,857 followers     September 23, 2017   I love Steven Pinker and I loved this book.NOTE: What an ironically lame review of a book that is legitimate genius! In retrospect, I must not have had the time/wherewithal to write the review this amazing book deserves.  It had (and still has) a HUGE influence on my thinking and way of seeing the world. How many books can you say that about?  Clichés like ‘transformative’ or ‘monumental’ or ‘important’ come to mind when I try to describe it in a quick pass. That sounds lame and hyperbolic, but that’s honestly appropriate when describing this work.  I guess I’m left where I started.  I love Steven Pinker and I loved this book.                   Author  3 books255 followers     July 24, 2022   Преди да прочета тази книга не знаех, че формирането на човешката природа е толкова спорен въпрос в интелектуалните среди. Изгледа, много хора смятат, че например насилието е болестно, несвойствено за човека състояние - и да се каже, че склонността към насилие всъщност е еволюционна адаптация за справяне с определени ситуации е същото, като оправдаване на насилието. Също според тях, откритието, че съществуват известни вродени разлики в начина на мислене и в емоциите на мъжете и жените, породени от различия в мозъка и хормоните им - е подтикване към дискриминация към жените. Понеже книгата е изключително обемна и разглежда широк кръг въпроси, позволявам си да преведа част от описанието и от издателството, което според мен успява отлично и накратко да я представи: "В книгата си, Пинкър разглежда идеята на т.н. "човешка природа" и нейното морално, емоционално и политическо значение. Той показва как много интелектуалци отричат съществуването на каквито и да е вродени характеристики у човека и вместо това догматично приемат три постулата:- Tabula rasa: човешкият ум няма каквито и да е вродени характеристики, таланти, наклонности и т.н. - всичко това зависи и се формира от средата, в която човек израства;- Благородният дивак: хората се раждат добри и невинни и биват "покварени" от обществото, на което се дължат всякакви лоши техни черти и поведение;- Духовен свят: човек има душа, която мисли и чувства независимо от биологията на тялото, което обитава. Всяка от тия три догми носи своя морален и исторически багаж и техните защитници прибягват до понякога отчаяни тактики, за да дискредитират учените, които ги отхвърлят." Доста по-интересно е, отколкото успявам да опиша. Сори.     всеки-трябва-да-прочете               38 reviews18 followers     January 6, 2020   Reading this book has been a transformative experience for me, and I just happened to read it at the perfect time, a time where I was having trouble verbalising my moral convictions as a scientist. It was as if Pinker read my mind and listed my ideas, only in a more eloquent, well structured manner.  He argues that the acceptance of innate differences and tendencies between members of our species, a result of genetic make-up, should not be detrimental to our moral reasoning, but rather the opposite. Acknowledging such truths, and using reason and logic to transcend our innate limitations, would allows us to make more informed decisions within many realms of society, including politics, bioethics and education.  Pinker's argument resonates well with that of Rakitin in Dostoevsky's "The Karamazov Brothers", when he says: "Humanity will find in itself the power to live for virtue, even without believing in immortality. It will find it in love for freedom, for equality, for fraternity."  And what a wonderful thought that is.                   Author  9 books4,307 followers     January 11, 2022    يعد ستيفن بينكر واحدا من أهم المفكرين المعاصرين انطلاقا من دراساته النفسية والعصبية وقدرته على تبسيط العلوم. في هذا الكتاب يبرهن بينكر خطأ نظرية (الصفحة الفارغ) والتي تقول بأن الإنسان يأتي لهذه الحياة بريئا كصفحة فارغة، لكن الحياة (بما فيها من تجارب وأحداث وتربية…إلخ) هي ما تملأ هذه الصفحة وتجعله كما هو عليه.. يقول بينكر أن هذا غير صحيح. في هذا الكتاب يستعرض بينكر العديد من النظريات والأبحاث بطريقة شيقة، ليرينا كيف أن الإنسان يأتي للحياة مجهزا مسبقا بالكثير من لآليات الذهنية التي لها دور كبير في صياغة سلوكه.. وأن الفطرة ليست بريئة بالضرورة.. للبيئة دور في تشكيل الإنسان بالطبع، لكنه ليس الوحيد كما كان الفلاسفة يظنون قديما. فعلى الإنسان مغالبة فطرته كثيرا كي يصبح متحضرا... الكتاب مليء بالدراسات الشيقة لدراسة التوائم مثلا، و كذلك من من الممتع متابعة تسلسل أفكار بينكر وطريقة عرضه لأفكاره بشكل سلس.. يستعرض الكتاب حقيقة الرنسان كما هي من منظور بيولوجي ونفسي.. لا ما نتمنى له أن يكون.. لأن هذه أولي خطوات التعامل مع أنفسنا ومغالبة قصورها الطبيعي وبدائية تكوينها النفسي                  309 reviews37 followers     February 19, 2012   How refreshing that S. Pinker abundantly refers to the vast trove of literary works, picking out gems of insight into human nature, in his elegant scientific analysis! Perhaps no surprise from a cognitive psychologist so implicated in the study of linguistics and language acquisition, but welcome all the same.Far from rendering his propos less scientific, his quotes from literary sources (throughout the book, not limited to the chapter on the Arts) give depth and relevance to his arguments, which are anything but "warm and fuzzy." And the opening chapters in Part 1, while perhaps too drawn out for many readers (including myself) provide a very coherent framework for the reasoning (The Blank State, The Ghost in the Machine, and The Noble Savage) behind the denial of human naure by many well-intentioned scientists and politicians.Unfortunately, Pinker has obliged himself to take great pains to explain, again and again throughout the book, that understanding some of the more unpleasant aspects of human nature(selfishness, violence...)does not mean that one condones the behaviour. I would think that most readers already grasp this point without needing to be continually reminded of it, but I suppose he addresses himself to his detractors (and potential deniers). I especially enjoyed chapters 8, "The Fear of Inequality" and 11 "The Fear of Nihilism", which are not only convincingly written, but full of humour as well. Ditto for the chapter on children. Any parent who has managed to raise children despite the continuous onslaught of conflicting childrearing advice by the "experts" can attest to Pinker's observations. Well-written, meticulously documented, and insightful; a good place to begin reading within the currents of evolutionary psychology and sociobiology.      brain-mind-cognition non-fiction reviewed               323 reviews45 followers     June 5, 2014   Not that I was convinced by all the arguments presented in this book, but it is an incredible joy to discover a single book that echoes so many thoughts that have been percolating in my mind, and to hear the same things I have been trying to say, argued and articulated so well. With age I have come to dislike the idea of an ideology, any ideology. Anything that compels us to think that something is correct or good because it ought to be correct. Reality does not care how any of us feel about it. Also accepting something to be true does not in any way imply that I have to like it or support it. So often we see these things mixed up in our modern intellectual mindset, and if anyone suffers from such distractions then this book is a must read for them.                   935 reviews556 followers     September 24, 2017   "Once again a Pinker book changed my world view."The book really opened my eyes about how we learn and become who we are. I had previously just accepted the various interpretations of the the noble savage, the ghost in the machine and the blank slate. Pinker demolishes and demonstrates why those interpretations are misleading, and you will realize why Pinker is called one of the only linguists who can write in prose.
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5752.The_Blank_Slate
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/373969.The_Stuff_of_Thought
The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human N…
2007-01-01
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 Language and Human Nature Tetralogy #4

 The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

 Steven Pinker

 3.91
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 New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker possesses that rare combination of scientific aptitude and verbal eloquence that enables him to provide lucid explanations of deep and powerful ideas. His previous books, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Blank Slate , have catapulted him into the limelight as one of today's most important and popular science writers.

 Now, in The Stuff of Thought , Pinker marries two of the subjects he knows best: language and human nature. The result is a fascinating look at how our words explain our nature. What does swearing reveal about our emotions? Why does innuendo disclose something about relationships? Pinker reveals how our use of prepositions and tenses taps into peculiarly human concepts of space and time, and how our nouns and verbs speak to our notions of matter. Even the names we give our babies have important things to say about our relations to our children and to society.

 With his signature wit and style, Pinker takes on scientific questions like whether language affects thought, as well as forays into everyday life: why is bulk e-mail called spam and how do romantic comedies get such mileage out of the ambiguities of dating? The Stuff of Thought is a brilliantly crafted and highly readable work that will appeal to fans of readers of everything from The Selfish Gene and Blink to Eats, Shoots & Leaves .
 Genres Nonfiction Psychology Science Linguistics Language Philosophy Neuroscience
 ...more

 499 pages, Hardcover

 First published January 1, 2007

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 About the author

 Steven Pinker

 63 books 9,942 followers
 Steven Arthur Pinker is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science. Pinker is known for his wide-ranging explorations of human nature and its relevance to language, history, morality, politics, and everyday life. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as the New York Times, Time, and The New Republic, and is the author of numerous books, including The Language Instinct , How the Mind Works , Words and Rules , The Blank Slate , The Stuff of Thought , The Better Angels of Our Nature , The Sense of Style , and most recently, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress .

 He was born in Canada and graduated from Montreal's Dawson College in 1973. He received a bachelor's degree in experimental psychology from McGill University in 1976, and then went on to earn his doctorate in the same discipline at Harvard in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, then became an assistant professor at Harvard and then Stanford University. From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. (Except for a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1995-6.) As of 2008, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard.

 Pinker was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in 2004 and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in 2005. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv, McGill, and the University of Tromsø, Norway. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003. In January 2005, Pinker defended Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, whose comments about the gender gap in mathematics and science angered much of the faculty. On May 13th 2006, Pinker received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.

 In 2007, he was invited on The Colbert Report and asked under pressure to sum up how the brain works in five words – Pinker answered "Brain cells fire in patterns."

 Pinker was born into the English-speaking Jewish community of Montreal. He has said, "I was never religious in the theological sense... I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew." As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969. His father, a trained lawyer, first worked as a traveling salesman, while his mother was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has two younger siblings. His brother is a policy analyst for the Canadian government. His sister, Susan Pinker, is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and the author of The Sexual Paradox and The Village Effect .

 Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too divorced. He is married to the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, the author of 10 books and winner of the National Medal of the Humanities. He has no children.

 His next book will take off from his research on "common knowledge" (knowing that everyone knows something). Its tentative title is: Don't Go There: Common Knowledge and the Science of Civility, Hypocrisy, Outrage, and Taboo .

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 BlackOxford
 1,095 reviews 69k followers
 May 1, 2023
 How To Tell If You’re a Horse

 I remember seeing, perhaps 30 years ago, a chart of a design for an artificial intelligence computer programme by academic engineers at a university somewhere in Texas. The chart showed an enormous logically ramifying hierarchy of various sorts of events, experiences, and actions which their computer was intended to understand. Everything that the engineers could imagine happening was included somewhere in a sort of organisational chart of existence. At the very top of the chart was a single box that stood for exactly that, existence itself. From that box, the designers had drawn an upward facing arrow pointing to a word without a box:. ‘REALITY.’

 The Stuff of Thought brought back memories of that AI chart. ‘Reality’ is something that Pinker refers to frequently as that which keeps language on the straight and narrow: “ The tethering of words to reality helps allay the worry that language ensnares us in a self-contained web of symbols.” Like the AI designers, Pinker has a little arrow that points out of language, to something other than language to which language is tied. But also, just like the AI designers, the only thing Pinker’s arrow actually points to is... well another word.

 Pinker doesn’t like the idea that words, language, have a life that is only loosely and unreliably connected to that which is not-language. He does recognise that ‘reality’ is an awkward thing for a linguist to talk about: “[T]he nature of reality does not dictate the way that reality is represented in people’s minds,” he says. So, according to this logic, despite our conviction that the world consists of more than human minds, it would be impossible to determine what reality is except by consultation with other minds. How does Pinker arrive at such a confused place?

 Pinker likes to be very precise in his semiotic descriptions and examples. But not when it comes to this business of reality. For that he plays fast and loose, conflating semantics (the connection of words to things that are not-words), syntactics (the relations among words and the ways in which they can be used with each other), and pragmatics (the effect that words have on human behaviour, including what and how words are used) into a very imprecise theory of language. He knows that only words define other words, that these definitions slip and slide continuously in the way they are used with each other, and that their effects on human activities are consequently uncertain in many critical situations. Yet he says: “The logic of names, and of other words that are connected to events... allay these concerns [about misidentifications and falsehoods] by anchoring the web of meanings to real events and objects in the world.”

 If only it were so. At any given time much of what we refer to as reality simply doesn’t exist (the sun doesn’t actually rise; the moon doesn’t shine). Quite aside from the casual use of everyday language, when we try to be very precise about what we mean, we find ourselves in a pickle about reality. For example, for centuries Isaac Newton’s gravitational ‘action at a distance’ was an important scientific ‘thing.’ Turns out it never was anything at all except a phrase used by scientists. Now we say that what we see astronomically is all down to relativistic time-space distortion. Perhaps in resolving the contradictions of quantum physics, we will find that time-space distortion isn’t a thing either. That AI arrow, in other words, points not toward somewhere ‘out there’ but something ‘in here.’ Most probably what is in here is a residual religious hope that the universe is as orderly and benign as our cultural legacy says it is.

 So we can, and frequently do, have serious conversations about absolutely nothing. We accept the possibility of an ontological faux pas with reasonably good grace. Yet we worry constantly about the somewhat lesser linguistic sin of ‘error,’ either accidental or intentional, which is the subject of epistemology. Here we are culturally proud of ourselves that the ‘scientific method’ can ultimately sort out the factual core from the fictional chaff of any assertion and that through unrelenting ‘objectivity’ we can distinguish Trump’s lies from his covfefe’s (it seems safe to presume all his statements are somehow defective). Pinker calls this philosophical realism in the sense that people “... are tacitly committed, in their everyday use of language, to certain propositions’ being true or false, independent of whether the person being discussed believes them to be true or false.”

 But this sort of realism gets sorely tested to breaking point more and more frequently. Beliefs about Trump, climate change, Russian assassinations and cyber-attacks, abortion, as well as my neighbour’s intentions regarding the shaping of our shared hedge, to name just a few examples, are beliefs held by many as true or false without a fact in sight. Assertions about these topics tend to be true or false precisely because they are believed not because they can be proven. Facts emerge as a matter of faith.

 Epistemology is, consequently, as political as any other investigation. Interests - personal, material, psychological, familial, religious, reputational - are a dominant force in any attempt to connect words and things. That’s just the way it is. And the way it is is being demonstrated as I write in the impeachment trial in the US Senate. Trump’s innocence or guilt is a purely political conclusion, as indeed is every ‘fact’ provided by any investigation, criminal, civil, scientific, or corporate.

 This is distressing to some people including Pinker. Bertrand Russell’s famous quip, “I am firm; you are obstinate; he is pigheaded,” is the epitome of the politics of language. It seems too obvious to need saying but apparently it does need saying yet again: Reality is nothing more (or less) than a transient political consensus about what constitutes facts. And facts are those assertions which, at least for the moment, are not contradicted by any other facts. And just as no one is quite sure what they mean by ‘scientific method,’ no one is any wiser about what constitutes the definitive rules of language and how to tell fact from fiction - except through politics. So Pinker is certainly right to suggest that the language we use discloses our model of reality. In fact it is our model of reality tout court (his analysis of verbs in shaping thought is exemplary).

 Reality is the elephant in Pinker’s rather elegantly laid out phenomenological room of language, however. There are a multitude of lovely linguistic furnishings, the erudition of extensive research lines the bookshelves, quirky incidental knowledge is apparent in the quaint knickknacks strewn throughout, and there are even quite a few saucy paintings on the walls. And all this is set off by a veritable Aubusson carpet of lucid and witty prose.

 But right in the middle of that carpet sits an enormous turd of that which is not-language. The odd thing is that Pinker put it there. He could have written about the quaint vagaries of (mostly English) language semantics and its implicit politics and left it at that. But by insisting on this strange thing he calls reality, a deus ex machina of absolute rationality, he leaves a strange smell around his entire enterprise. I wish I could remember the names of the AI engineers. I’d send them a copy asking them where they think Pinker’s arrow should point.

 I am also reminded of an important Yiddish saying which might have originated with Isaac Breshevis Singer but I can’t be sure. It sums up the politics of reality nicely, and shows where the arrow really points: ‘If one person calls you a horse, ignore him. If two people call you a horse, look in the mirror. If three people call you a horse, YOU'RE A HORSE.’
 american epistemology-language science
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 Trevor
 1,341 reviews 22.8k followers
 March 10, 2009
 It is remarkable how much of modern thought can track its genetic heritage back to Kant. When I studied Kant at uni I was told that there was an entire school of philosophy that was formed on the basis of a poor (mis)translation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason into English. I always liked the idea of that.

 It is also nice to hear someone talking about Kant and not talking about ‘the unknowability of the thing in itself’ – often the only bit of Kant anyone knows. One of the things Kant sought to do in his philosophy was to find a way out of the endless debate (war?) between Empiricism (knowledge comes from experience) and Rationalism (knowledge is innate and logic eternal). Kant rejected both of these views and sought a compromise. He put forward that we had to have already existing structures in our minds that allowed us to frame the world and thereby understand it – these already existing structures – a priori categories he calls them – are the lenses we use to bring the world into focus.

 This is much the same as Chomsky’s view that we learn language because we have evolved mental pathways that make learning language easy – if not virtually inevitable. Pinker is perhaps the greatest populariser of Chomsky living today. His earlier books – particularly The Blank Slate (ironically titled this, despite him arguing against notions of blank slates) and How The Mind Works - are virtually treatises on the victory of nature over nurture. As such these two have been my least favourite of his books. As a recovering meliorist I still struggle with ideas that fix human nature quite as firmly as I feel Pinker – and oddly enough, even Chomsky – would seem to require it to be fixed.

 All the same, his other books, and large parts of this one, make me wish I’d become a Linguist. There is a long and amusing – well, I found it amusing, anyway – discussion about sexual intercourse and the various ways one can refer to it. Basically there are two ways – a series of ‘polite’ forms: they were intimate, made love, (or my current favourite which my daughter told me tonight) they had a marital embrace. (Sorry, I’ll need to pause for a moment while I stop laughing).

 The other way one can refer to sex is somewhat less polite. Without using any words that will require asterisks, these might involve verbs such as 'to rut' or 'to nail'. Okay, they are clearly less pleasant than 'to make love' or 'to engage in marital embracing' – but what I liked most about this was his explanation of why one lot are polite and the others less so. Pinker points out that all of the polite forms are intransitive verbs (verbs that don’t take an object and so the act 'just happens', rather than being done) whereas the impolite forms are all transitive – one person does something to someone else. So, I shagged her – is going to be impolite. Now, isn’t that interesting?

 There was also a long discussion in the middle about a book I read a couple of years ago called Don’t Think of an Elephant - I really didn’t think too much of that book at the time. It all seemed a bit simple-minded to me - a bit like an advertising man getting into politics. So I was very surprised to see so much space devoted to it here. I think Pinker is right – it is not enough to ‘reframe the debate’ and I also think there is a reality below the fluff of political debate that eventually asserts itself - frame or no frame.

 One thing you can say about Pinker is that he has many more thoughts per page than your average book. The fact that I don’t agree with everything he says is hardly a criticism compared to the pleasure I get out of reading him. Sometimes he makes me smile, sometimes I can't help laughing out loud.
 evolution language philosophy
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 Jennifer Welsh
 271 reviews 295 followers
 September 9, 2020
 DNF: Have you heard of top-down learning vs. bottom-up learning? If not, top-down learners prefer to see the big picture before the supporting details can become meaningful, whereas bottom-up learners like to build the big picture by first understanding the details. I am a top-down learner, and this book is written for the bottom-ups.

 This book’s subtitle is “Language as a Window into Human Nature,” and that’s what I kept waiting for. Pinker spent a lot of time on details such as how “in a palm” suggests a hand curvature, whereas “on a palm” suggests hand flatness, and after 140 pages of that...ugh.

 I bought this book after reading a Japanese translation that gave details of how images combine differently to create specific characters of their language. It got me wondering whether using different symbols for communication affects how we see the world.

 It turns out that language is more a result of innate thinking, development, and a response to our environment, rather than the other way around - at least as of 1/3 of the way through.

 The latter chapters look interesting. But, I tried skipping and felt lost without the prior points.

 Pinker at least talks to me as an equal.
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 Jafar
 728 reviews 287 followers
 August 3, 2008
 It’s hard to review this book. The book starts off to look too heavy with a long chapter on verbs. If you think verbs are simple things that are classified into transitive and intransitive, you’re in for a big surprise. The chapter is named Down the Rabbit Hole after how Alice ended up in Wonderland. And the world of verbs is quite a Wonderland. This chapter can seem a bit too technical and tedious unless you really love language. There’s a chapter about the relationship between language and intelligence. Is intelligence possible, or even meaningful, without language, or is it a slave to language? Fascinating theories there. Another chapter is on how causality, time, and space are represented in language, and how this representation affects our understanding of these notions. More fascinating stuff. There are more chapters on metaphors, names, profanity, and indirect language. All intensely fascinating stuff. Steven Pinker is a genius, yessir!

 Pinker wants to show what language – words, their meanings, constructions, and how they’re used – can teach us about human nature. Except for the discussion on Nativism vs. Pragmatism (whether mental representation of word meanings are innate or not) he stays clear of the nature vs. nurture debate. In the course of the book, we do encounter a lot of insight into human nature based on language. It may seem obvious if put abstractly, but language, being the most prominent thing that separates us from other animals, do say a lot about what we are.

 I think the chapter on swearing by itself should qualify this book for some grand prize.
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 Jen
 247 reviews 154 followers
 June 17, 2009
 "Knowledge, then, can be dangerous because a rational mind may be compelled to use it in rational ways, allowing malevolent or careless speakers to commandeer our faculties against us. This makes the expressive power of language a mixed blessing: it lets us learn what we want to know, but it also lets us learn what we don't want to know. Language is not just a window into human nature but a fistula: an open wound through which our innards are exposed to an infectious world."

 It has taken me three months, or thereabouts, to read this book. In an early status update I commented that this book was like a dense poundcake; the going was delicious but slow. That should probably be my whole review, but I am going to go on. Gird thyself.

 This book did indeed let me learn what I wanted to know. The chapters on metaphors, naming, and the taboo were incredibly interesting and insightful. Why isn't rape a taboo word, when the word that represents my genitalia is? How is it possible that the Morning Star and the Evening Star represent the same thing? What curious cerebral happening allows us to come to better understanding through metaphor and analogy? The book also let me learn what I didn't want to know, which mostly involved words that have -ing attached to them....the author's exuberance for verbs seemed to culminate in an almost orgasmic manner: "Our trip down the rabbit hole has taken us to a semantic wonderland. We encountered a lush profusion of verbs- a dozen verbs of emitting substances, twenty verbs of changing the aesthetics of a surface, and no fewer than sixty-nine verbs of manner of speaking." (!)
 It was during those passages that Pinker took on the voice of the count from Sesame Street in my head..."Crinkling! One verb! Crumpling! Two verbs! Screeching! Three verbs! AHAHAHAHA!"

 But perhaps Pinker would argue with me, in fact, I know he would. He argues with everyone! And he mostly wins, which makes him a genius in the field of linguistics AND a world class smartass, which makes me want to smack him over the head with his 499 page work. There are a few things I don't think he is fair about- and one of those things is religion (Surprise!) He makes this statement: "The earthly representatives of God would just as soon preserve the belief that he (God) does listen and act in matters of importance, and so are unhappy about people diluting the brand by invoking God as the muscle behind their small time deals. Hence the proscriptions against taking the name of the Lord in vain." Now, Pinker can say that this is how it is being used now,and he might even be right, (the smartass!), but it is wrong to assume that that is THE very reason that it was written down thousands of years ago. Pinker does this quite a bit- smacks down a topic or a rival linguist's theories and then uses the "hence" or "of course" and "obviously" to draw the reader to a conclusion that makes sense, but might not really be fully true or able to be conclusively proved to anyone but Pinker. He is a linguist, after all, and who can blame him for using his masterful command of language to explain, sway, discuss, or provoke- doing so butters his bread and gets him all "verbingly" excited. Did I just make a new word? I think I did! Curl my hair and color it gray and call me Pinker!

 4.5 stars for the Pinkerman from me, the coiner of "verbingly", and the mistress of nothing in particular

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 Miles
 478 reviews 156 followers
 May 17, 2014
 I am a big fan of Steven Pinker. I think he's a very smart man, and a great advocate for science and reason in the public sphere. In interviews, he's witty, informed, and able to make concise points about a vast swath of intellectual topics. His book The Blank Slate had a very significant impact on me when I read it in late 2011. I had just finished a teaching credential program and was unsure about my next step in life; one of the only things I knew I wanted to do for sure was to read and self-educate as much as possible. The Blank Slate helped me understand psychology via methods I didn't encounter in my undergraduate philosophy classes, and pointed me in directions that would further integrate my love of philosophical inquiry with a more scientifically-informed perspective. Pinker is famous for being polemical and is often disparaged by conservatives and liberals alike, but I typically find his opinions to be well-reasoned and as responsibly middle-of-the-road as possible. Even so, my respect for Pinker was not enough to guide me contentedly through this book, which I generally found repetitive, esoteric, and––worst of all––boring.

 Though he has suffered much criticism for his flouting of traditional psychological theories and the pleasure he seems to take in prodding people toward revisiting their foundational ideas and values, I actually think Pinker is at his best when he has a bone to pick. If I had to identify just one reason why this book didn't work for me, it would be that Pinker doesn't have anyone to argue against––no unifying target on which to set his intellectual sights. There are a couple minor exceptions to this, the first of which is Pinker's advocacy for the theory of conceptual semantics, which he posits as superior to extreme nativism, linguistic determinism, and radical pragmatics (all of which Pinker portrays as rather extreme positions, possibly falling into straw man territory). In another chapter, Pinker challenges Johnson and Lakoff's theory of metaphor with varying success, making a few good points but also portraying their theory as far more relativistic than it truly is. These are interesting but not hotly controversial arguments, and neither provides the kind of overarching strength that would provide the book with a firm thematic backbone.

 The rest of the book is essentially a group of loosely related chapters that all center around the idea that "language is a window into human nature"––a claim I can't imagine anyone trying to refute. So while this might represent the side of Pinker who is more concerned with responsible scholarship in his particular field of study rather than shaking things up in town square, I didn't find the premise intriguing enough to explore with much enthusiasm.

 This book also reminded me why I studied philosophy instead of linguistics. Past a certain point, I just don't care enough about the intricacies of language. When I feel like the conversation has traveled away from pragmatic explications of how language helps or hinders people and toward abstruse descriptions of grammatical and speech constructions, I begin to check out. To be fair, Pinker does include many examples of how such rules can be relevant to the lives of normal people, but over the course of the book I wasn't convinced that most of the topics were adding anything significant to my understanding of people's relationship with language.

 This disappointment is probably my fault more than Pinker's. I've read many popular science books over the last few years, so I was already familiar with much of his research, some of which was probably cutting-edge when the book was first published in 2007. However, many of the insights found here would no longer be considered news to anyone with a passing interest in modern psychology. As a result, the information that was new to me almost exclusively had to do with obscure linguistic theories I'd never heard of, and I finished the book feeling like there are probably many good reasons for that. Much of the first half felt like repeated instances of Pinker saying gleefully: "You can do this with language, but you can't do that! And it's all because of this: (insert recondite linguistic theory here)!" This approach sent me spiraling into inanition, and also opened the way for an additional problem: Pinker occasionally comes off as being imperialistic with language rules in a way that excludes the important contributions of poets and creative writers, who often work very hard to challenge or reformulate traditional methods of usage and structure.

 There are definitely some strong points to be found in these pages. Pinker includes many visual aids that helped me understand some of the finer points of grammar that have eluded me over the years, which made me wish such aids were more widely used in junior high and high school classrooms. Ironically, sometimes an image is a better vehicle for explaining a language construction than language itself. He also offers some good information about why early exposure to linguistic conventions is so crucial in developing the basic tools for success in modern education. In my experience, this is especially important when the time comes in adolescence for young people to start formulating their ideas using academic concepts, abstract language, and advanced argumentation. Finally, the second to last chapter provides salient (if not exactly solution-based) explanations of why people have such a difficult time with directness, causing us to create all kinds of elaborate ways to communicate without having to take full responsibility for the possible negative outcomes of our intimations to others. This is an important issue in social life, but I was dissatisfied that Pinker didn't offer many thoughts about how we can overcome this problem; he seemed more concerned with justifying why it is okay for people to avoid being open about their motives and desires. I'm not naive enough to advocate for complete honesty all the time, but I think our social lives would improve immensely if we consciously developed new linguistic and behavioral mechanisms for being upfront about what we want from ourselves and others, while still allowing a safe space for people to give potentially disappointing responses to our entreaties. It's a tough project, but one with potentially huge gains for quality of life. I wonder if Pinker would agree.

 I'm sure this is a great book for the right kind of reader. For those who don't enjoy Pinker's snarky side, this would perhaps be a better choice than one of his works in which he seeks to subvert what he perceives as unfounded popular beliefs or sentiments. This is in no way a book rife with objectionable claims or disingenuous scholarship––it's just not my cup of tea.
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 Kevin Lopez (on sabbatical)
 85 reviews 22 followers
 May 22, 2021
 “ Though language shows us the walls of our cave, it also shows us how we venture out of it, at least part way. People do, after all, catch glimpses of the sunlit world of reality. Even with our infirmities, we have managed to achieve the freedom of a liberal democracy, the wealth of a technological economy, and the truths of modern science. Though I doubt we will ever reach a cognitive utopia in which all the problems we dream up for ourselves are solvable, the human mind does have the means to go beyond a few reruns perpetually showing on the wall of the cave. Indeed, language offers the clearest window on how we can transcend our cognitive and emotional limitations. ”



 NEW WORDS LIST! :
 Whenever I read a book I keep a running list of new or novel words (and also word derivatives and novel usages), plus new phrases and idioms. So, for example, the word ‘telic’ is (for me at least) a novel adjectival sense of a word—‘telos’—which I knew and have encountered before (and which I recently encountered in yet another novel usage, this time in its plural form--‘teloses’--in China Miéville’s excellent short story “The Rope is the World”), but in this form, as it's new to me, I write it down. A conceptual linguistic phrase like ‘container locative’, and an idiomatic phrase like ‘hammer and tongs’—which I either haven't encountered before, or have encountered but never bothered to identify or define—are the sorts of phrases I'd note down. I hope that a few people will (maybe? probably not) find these lists interesting—perhaps even useful (though that's even more unlikely)—as I’m going to try to include my novel words-and-phrases lists from now on when I review a book, rather than just leaving them in the notes folder I keep on my phone, gathering digital dust. So, here’s my list from Stephen Pinker’s “The Stuff of Thought.”

 *(All definitions are from that yet unsurpassed lexicographic opus, the Oxford English Dictionary, unless otherwise stated.)


 • phonaesthesia : attribution of common elements of meaning or connotation to certain sound sequences, especially consonant clusters, for example initial sl- , as in slow , sleep , slush , slide , slip .
 (Origin, 1950s: modern Latin, from Greek phōnē ‘sound’ + aesthesthai ‘perceive’.)

 • coprolalia : the involuntary and repetitive use of obscene language, as a symptom of mental illness or organic brain disease.
 (Origin, late 19th century: from Greek kopros ‘dung’ + lalia ‘speech, chatter’.)
 ^ (Pinker writes that coprolalia “ literally means ‘dung speech’ ” [and of course he’s right]; it is mentioned in the book in association with Tourette’s syndrome.)

 • dubiety : the state or quality of being doubtful; uncertainty: [illustrative sentences] “ his enemies made much of the dubiety of his paternity ” | “ anxiety has been excited by the dubiety of his fate ”
 (Origin [clearly (or, better yet, indubitably ) a nounal derivative of the common adjective “dubious”], mid 18th century: from late Latin dubietas , from Latin dubium ‘a doubt’.)

 • sidereal : (pronunciation: sī- ’DEE -ree-ul) of or with respect to the distant stars (i.e. the constellations or fixed stars, not the sun or the planets).
 (Origin, mid 17th century: from Latin sidereus [from sidus , sider - ‘star’] + the suffix ‘-al’.)



 More to come (I underestimated how tiresome it is to convert notes on my phone--which are easily put into italics or bold print--into similar notes using GR's clunky word-processing software)!
 language-and-etymology nonfiction-general psychology
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 Dan
 78 reviews 35 followers
 January 24, 2009
 I am always hesitant to completely pan a book that is clearly written by someone vastly more intelligent than I, but in this case I would have to say that this book definitely did not work for me.

 The root of my problem with this book is that the claims and synopsis printed on the cover seem to bear little relation to the actual material contained within. We are led to believe that this is a book solidly within the "popular science" category and that it will deal primarily with the concept of how language molds the way that we think and interact.

 Instead, we crack open the novel to find what would best be suited as a textbook for the aspiring linguist. The first third of this book is devoted almost entirely to what seems like some sort of painful flashback to 6th grade English grammar lessons - on speed. Its been a long while since the days of transitive/intransitive/ambitransitive verbs, content-lockatives, and the like. I'll admit that I do not share Pinker's sense of thrill when discussing such topics, but I did slog through them and can vaguely see why he begins his discussion with this approach. Yet the "meat" of this initial discussion seems fairly scanty relative to the painfulness of the necessary effort on the part of the reader.

 The book picks up a little steam as it heads into the next few chapters. Describing those on the "fringe" of the language & thought debate. First we hear of academics that make claims that imply that nearly all words are innate to the human mind, and are inborn as part of our genetic makeup (i.e. that our vocabulary is essentially hard-wired). Pinker dispatches this idea summarily - a feat that hardly seemed heroic, given how ludicrous the concept is.

 Then Pinker goes on to disarm the arguments of the opposing camp, Determinists that believe that language controls thought. As an uninitiated, arm-chair philosophizer on the subject of language and thought, I had always given more credit to this idea. I am aware of how much of my inner life and thoughts seem to use a dialog that is carried out in words. However, Pinker gives scientific evidence that suggests that our minds control language moreso than the other way around. This was my favorite part of the book. Yet, by deflating this argument, Pinker also takes away a good deal of the relevance of the book, thereby deflating my interest as well...

 The major themes in the rest of the book take the form of:
 1. Dissecting the ideas of other academics in the field. Which again, would be a great deal more interesting if I had actually decided to go into graduate school for linguistics and was familiar with these persons.

 2. Discussing tangental psychological/cultural concepts, often in terms that seem so divorced from language that one might wonder if they are sections taken from another book.

 3. Hand-wavy ideas about the evolution of the human brain.

 And last, but certainly not least...

 4. LOOOOOONNNNGGGG paragraphs of word-"play" in-between.

 Its not so much that Pinker doesn't have interesting ideas wedged in here and there, its just that if you've followed other sciences, you've most likely encountered most of these concepts before. Then again, even some of the original ideas that I found in this book were fairly obvious and were ones that I had already conceptualized myself, even if I wouldn't have been able to frame them as well as Pinker does. Furthermore, Pinker writes with a playfulness towards language that is fun in short bursts, but can obscure his point and be exhausting in the long haul. The delivery of some ideas were so couched in unnecessary detail that I almost felt like Steven Pinker and "The English Language" were sharing some sort of private joke. Frequently, after spending a few moments to decrypt some of his more florid paragraphs, I found that the concept they contained was fairly banal.

 Pluses: Pinker clearly knows his stuff and presents it with what appears to be an unbiased eye. The sections involving direct scientific experiments were revealing and fun, as were the sections on polite language and sex (as sex always is...). The language of the book is a great exercise in concentration and is peppered with lots of great SAT/GRE-Prep words! Doubles in value as a good Kaplan study book! The take-home message seemed to be that language is not in control, we (and culture) are... Which is a reassuring thought, and is one that I am grateful to have learned.

 Negatives: By thereby castrating the power of language to affect our thought process with his initial arguments, much of the remainder of the book is left floundering around in the domains of other disciplines. We hear of psychology, cultural practices, and evolution. Yet, language must now take a passive back-seat to these issues, only acting to give us tiny clues to their nature. The novel concepts that language can teach us turn out to seem scanty and flimsy. Furthermore, manner in which Pinker doles out these intriguing little nibblets seems unnecessarily drawn-out and buried in overly technical/flowery language.

 In the end, too much of this book seems to reach for something larger, but end up as merely 'semantics' (fully in the negative connotation of the word).
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 Laura Noggle
 691 reviews 499 followers
 May 28, 2020
 A loquacious look at language.

 “Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics is about the relation of words to reality—the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situations in the world.”

 “If adults commit adultery, do infants commit infantry? If olive oil is made from olives, what do they make baby oil from? I a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian consume? A writer is someone who writes, and a stinger is something that stings. But fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce, hammers don't ham, humdingers don't humding, ushers don't ush, and haberdashers do not haberdash...If the plural of tooth is teeth, shouldn't the plural of booth be beeth? One goose, two geese-so one moose, two meese? If people ring a bell today and rang a bell yesterday, why don't we say that they flang a ball? If they wrote a letter, perhaps they also bote their tongue.”

 Interesting at points—though not as quite as I'd hoped—and periodically a total slog.
 2020 nonfiction
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 Helio
 513 reviews 75 followers
 September 8, 2022
 a lot of this was familiar territory > for an easier read try Bill Bryson's "The Mother Tongue and How It Got Tha Way." However Pinker goes into quite a bit of detail on analyzing unspoken rules, that we as users are not cognizant when we speak English. Subtitlies that bedevil English learners that we with English as a first language have trouble explaining. It is reminiscent of the ordering of adjectives. We are not taught this in school yet we know which category (of seven) adjectives come first, making for mllions of possibilities, that we chose the correct one. I'm suprised Steve didn't touch on that rule.
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 Gwen
 105 reviews 1 follower
 January 21, 2008
 A friend gave me this book. I didn't like Pinker's other one and I don't like this one. This isn't a knee-jerk reaction from a sociologist; socio-biological explanations are generally examples of people reading their own interpretations of the social world, and how it "ought" to be, back into "history" and saying that it's natural. The arguments themselves are contradictory--men evolved to be promiscuous and sleep with any woman, except they also evolved to not sleep with ugly women. So they'll sleep with anyone to spread their seed, but not take a chance of impregnating a less-than-attractive woman? Huh. Interesting.
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 Alex
 Author 78 books 21 followers
 April 23, 2008
 The Stuff of Thought succeeds where his last book, The Blank Slate, failed. Here, Pinker largely abandons the heredity vs. environment debate for a discussion of the mind itself, and what role language plays in human thinking.

 Drawing from Immanuel Kant, who first proposed the concept of a priori cognitive frameworks of time and space (so-called "pure intuitions") in his Critique of Pure Reason, Pinker argues that the human brain comes equipped with an innate understanding of certain fundamental attributes of the world like matter, causality and duration. Over the course of evolution, we developed basic preset cognitive models that allow us to navigate reality, tell past from present, evaluate volume, and square the perceived world with the self that perceives it. This runs counter to Wittgenstein's belief that thought is the slave of language. Rather, Pinker suggests, our core knowledge of space, time and identity precedes our knowledge of the words that represent them . How those words and their usage come to reflect our inborn predilections of the world is the subject of the book.

 This is a tremendously ambitious undertaking, and Pinker for the most part rises to the challenge with clarity and gusto. As a non-linguist, I am severely handicapped in my ability to verify or contest his many assertions, but as a language enthusiast I found his evidence compelling and his investigation enthralling.

 Consider his opening example. On the morning of September, 11th, 2001, a hijacked plane crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, causing a deadly explosion killing thousands. Seventeen minutes later, a second plane crashed into the South Tower, incinerating more still, and within an hour an a half, both buildings were reduced to heaps of toxic rubble. By any standard, what happened in that small window of time changed the world. But of all the heavy themes and loaded issues debated by scholars and pundits in the years since, Pinker hones in a single, deceptively complex question: how many events took place on the morning of 9/11—one or two?

 Initially, the question seems so trivial as to be offensive—the reduction of a calamitous tragedy to a piddling cardinal distinction—but follow Pinker's thread a bit further and one finds oneself in a turbulent theoretical sea, light years away from "mere" semantics. What constitutes an event ? What do we mean by cause ? These concepts, to say nothing of ordinality, intention, continuity, being, and force are constants in the human mind—atomic units of comprehension—and Pinker exhaustively yet effortlessly analyzes how these irreducible meanings manifest themselves in the ever-shifting matrix of grammar and lexicon. As it turns out, many of these analyses turn out to have dramatic real-world consequences, such as whether or not a president should be tried for perjury due to a particular use of tense, or how much insurance companies must dole out to their clients on the basis of what determines a single event versus two separate events. (In the case of the World Trade Center attacks, this meant the difference between 3.5 and 7 billion dollars.)

 Not that the book is without its flaws. All along, one can't help sense the author's half-assed attempt to atone for the hostility he's exhibited towards the arts in the past (for instance, his famous dismissal of music as "auditory cheesecake"), and his awkward inclusion of familiar quotations and stock literary allusions comes off as amateurish and not entirely genuine. Does he really hold Shakespeare, whose vocabulary he once deemed inferior to that of modern third-graders, to be singularly capable of distilling profound psychological insights into mellifluous verse? Or is he just throwing a bone to his critics?

 The second half is also markedly less inspired than the first, and indeed actively disappointing. Linguistic factoids and etymological myth-bustings abound. Pinker chooses to spend a great deal of time on baby names, among other things, analyzing why certain trends arrive and depart when they do. My God, who cares? In the hands of Bill Bryson, such digressions might be worthy of a reader's attention, but here they feel like empty Gladwellisms, trivial observations dressed up in zippy anecdotes and cute funfacts.

 Uneven though it is, The Stuff of Thought generates enough escape velocity to merit a place among the strongest and most original works of popular science in recent memory. Not since The Astonishing Hypothesis, in which Francis Crick dismantled the longstanding myth of Cartesian Dualism, has a single work managed to elucidate such a mysterious and controversial realm, wedged as it is between cognitive science, philosophy of mind, neurology and evolutionary psychology.

 "I've never met anyone who isn't interested in language," wrote Pinker in the introduction to his 1994 bestseller, The Language Instinct. Too often, though, that fascination is squashed by pedantic grammarians bemoaning the degradation of standards on one side and pious sociologists extolling the virtues of primitivism on the other. The Stuff of Thought should provide an antidote.

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 Rossdavidh
 539 reviews 182 followers
 October 6, 2015
 Steven Pinker is as close to a famous linguist as we have today (Noam Chomsky doesn't count, because he's famous for his politics, not his linguistics). He is also a clever writer, willing to think originally about deep topics, and to say unconventional things about them. Here, he more or less says that when you understand how language works, you have figured out how human thinking works. He seems to think it has a lot to do with verbs. He also spends an entire chapter (50 pages long) telling us how to use profanity with correct grammar.

 It's a bit odd. He points out that all of the impolite verbs for sex (f*ck, scr*w, sh*g, etc.) are transitive verbs, while all the polite verbs for sex (have sex, make love, sleep together, have intercourse, copulate) are intransitive. How could we explain that people who don't know the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs, make sure to use transitive ones for sex, but only when used as profanity?

 It's the sort of odd things that linguists discover: patterns in how we use language, that we follow without knowing. This is very different than "don't end your sentence in a preposition", the kind of rules which are broken more often than not. These are rules which a poorly educated blue collar worker who considers the very word "grammar" to be effete, much less the concept, will nonetheless follow, and make fun of anyone who doesn't. Try saying 'they made f*ck together', or 'sex you!', and you will find that they take the rule of transitive vs. intransitive seriously.

 We don't spend the whole book on this, but it's an eye-opener, and not only because if this book ever becomes a PBS mini-series they would have to skip the whole chapter. It's because Pinker's basic proposition is that the way our grammar rules work (in English and in other languages) is a clue as to how our brain works. We study language, what it does and (perhaps more importantly) doesn't do, to see how concepts are manipulated in our brain.

 Which is all fairly abstract stuff, and Pinker does a good job of finding concrete examples to keep our interest. Why is it that 'Steve' (and variations such as Stephen) went from being 75th in popularity, to being so omnipresent that Stephen Pinker admits to getting some extra sales because Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, and Stephen Jay Gould all gave the name some extra cachet? If you try to bribe a maitre d' at a trendy New York restaurant to get seated early without a reservation, how often will it work (answer: nearly always, but not if you say what you want too plainly)? There are also a fair number of comic strips, especially from the series "Robotman".

 Pinker's book is not to be read late at night in bed; this is a 'sit up straight and pay attention' kind of book. But he's a gifted writer with sympathy for those among his readers who haven't spent half their waking life pondering verb tenses, and he makes us laugh as often as furrow our brow. If language is the stuff of thought, this book is the best kind of language, that makes you think better and more deeply about topics like space, time, causality, free will, and the Seven Words You Can't Say on TV. Highly recommended.
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 Justin
 87 reviews 59 followers
 June 10, 2008
 Great expose of how the mind can be exposed through the semantics and structure of language.

 I was bogged down my the technical aspects of verbs and grammar towards the beginning of the book but the second half really hit its stride as Pinker explains metaphors, the need for taboos, expletives and indirect language.

 A worthwile read for those wishing to learn more about humanity and the illogical quirks that make us interesting.

 Most importantly, the purpose of education is revealed. Not to convey concepts in alien and unrecognizable form but to package concepts in a way that inspires original thought while relating ideas to past experience. Ideally we can educate people to compensate for the fallacies induced by normal brain operation. A noble and explicit goal for the teaching structure of society.

 Perhaps we are trapped in the cave that is the mind but every so often we have a book that shines some light in that cave. The Stuff of Thought is one of those books.
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 Joshua Nomen-Mutatio
 333 reviews 945 followers
 November 2, 2009
 Listened to this on audiobook last night/this morning after having just returned from seeing Pinker speak at UW-Madison last evening, which was excellent and a real treat for this cognitive science and evolutionary psychology nerd and huge fan of Steven Pinker. Books like this are too rich and complex to give a half-assed review of, or one where I just write clever anecdotes about my life and vaguely tie them to some idea in the book, like a blog entry beneath a book, awaiting your votes. Not that anyone actually does this around here...
 cognitive-science-and-or-psychology cultural-and-or-political evolutionary-theory
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 Ana
 2,383 reviews 374 followers
 March 25, 2018
 This could've been shorter, but I liked a lot of the arguments presented.
 21st-century canadian-literature non-fiction
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 Megan
 12 reviews
 February 25, 2008
 This book presented some interesting ideas on how language is shaped by the way we think, and how it enables us to think in new ways, but ultimately i found it to be too academic, like attending a long lecture by a Harvard professor, which the author is. But others may have more patience with it, especially if they don't read it while recovering from a head cold. My favorite sections talked about how new words and metaphors arise and how names come into and out of fashion, as well as how we selectively use direct or indirect, "polite" language, including cases where obscurity of meaning or openness to interpretation is helpful such as in international diplomacy.
 This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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 Христо Блажев
 2,331 reviews 1,581 followers
 April 15, 2020
 Метафора: езикът е прозорец към човешката природа: http://knigolandia.info/book-review/m...

 Но ако мога все пак да сумирам какво представлява книгата – една смайващо вивиксекция на езика, на думите и на скритите значения за тях. Стивън Пинкър демонстрира виртуозно умение да поставя под въпрос наглед подразбиращи се и прости идеи и внезапно да открива под тях смайващи дълбини, които говорят за човешкия ум и човешката природа. Не съм чел друга негова основополагаща книга, “Езиковият инстинкт” (и тя краси библиотеката, де), но тук той просто демонстрира не само смазваща ерудиция, но и магарешко (цяла глава има за метафорите, ей!) търпение да разчепква дума по дума езика. Има буквално цели страници с думи, които доказват гледната му точка – например, че в повечето езици глаголите за естествена и насилствена смърт се отличават рязко и никога не се припокриват. На много места Пинкър спори оживено с други учени, като коректно излага и техните теории, така че книгата му има и справочна стойност за достиженията на науката за езика.

 Издателство "Изток-Запад"
 http://knigolandia.info/book-review/m...
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 Magdelanye
 1,802 reviews 227 followers
 April 21, 2012
 SP seems to be a fan of reality, of the everything-is-explicable,not-a-problem type.
 He is so good at what he does (explaining how come and how) that it becomes beside the point to disagree. In pointing the reader to the trap door of language theory and even holding it open, he is the perfect tour guide.Following along his inexorable logic,the reader can easily forget this, forget even his or her own position and the fact that,although the guide is especially friendly and attentive,that's all part of his job, and he works for the company after all.

 The first part of the book is devoted to methodologies of classification and functional delineations of linguistic habit. SP minimizes the impact of language on thought and credits our urge to communicate with the fact that we do manage to convey quite precisely some of what we actually think.

 The whole issue is complicated by the fact that, even if we do possess the capacity to think beyond words, without words we cannot express our thoughts. Our feelings, yes, can be conveyed by a gesture or a groan. And body language certainly transcends all language barriers. SP takes the postion that our reasoning and our logic are influenced more by cultural and environmental constraints than by language. At the end of this book,as much as I enjoyed and even learned from it and regardless of his persuasive arguements, I have come to the conclusion that I am in a different camp.

 "Left to our own devices, we are apt to backslide to our instinctive conceptual ways." he laments towards the end. I can't help but think this might be a good thing.

 Other chapters investigate the power of names and the ubiquity of metaphor. SP asks provocative questions. Where do the meaning of words live, in the world where we find the things we are talking about? Or in our head,where our understanding resides? People need some concept in their heads that corresponds to the words used. How then do we accomodate new concepts? The same word can carry quite different meanings just as regularly as different words can describe the same person, activity, or thing. The words we choose convey more than just description but also where we stand, unless we are dissembling to save face, perhaps, or to keep our options open. The great role of innuendo as social glue is examined in its full spectrum.

 This was not an easy book but I do recommend it for anyone interested in the development of the thinking process as well as for those interested in language and communication.


 culture-conflict language-thought-reality social-commentary
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 liz
 276 reviews 30 followers
 February 26, 2008
 I love Steven Pinker. LOVE Steven Pinker. But I also think Linguistics is the Best Thing Ever. So I loved SP's book "The Language Instinct" (even though a lot of it was old news to me, since I was fresh off of my linguistics course), and I was super-stoked for this one. Well, the first couple of chapters were not that great. But things totally picked up after that! Once his focus widened from strictly the brain to the influence of language on culture , the type of things that were detailed became way more interesting (and amusing!).

 If [Lakoff] is right, conceptual metaphor can do everything from overturning twenty-five hundred years of misguided reliance on truth and objectivity in Western thought to putting a Democrat in the White House.

 The Doors' song "Love Me Two Times" sounds strange at first, because the temporal phrase x times applies only to events, not to states, and loving someone is a state. Of course, we are meant to interpret the verb as a euphemism for having sex, which is an activity and an accomplishment (sometimes in more ways that one).

 And a wee shout-out to my buddies from Texas: The social psychologist Richard Nisbett has noted that societies with a "culture of honor," where affronts must be quickly and sometimes violently redressed, are often extremely polite, because an unintended insult can escalate into a duel or a feud. [I have also read that this is the case in prison.] The American South was historically a culture of honor, and Nisbett, a native Texan, recalls that his first impression on arriving at Yale as a freshman was that everyone seemed to be really rude.
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 Lars Guthrie
 546 reviews 175 followers
 October 9, 2010
 Science, like art, opens our eyes to what is in front of us. But unlike art, which honors transcendence and promises infinity, science measures what is observable and defines what is finite. Neuroscientists tell us that the possibilities are not limitless. The equipment we are given performs specific functions. We can adapt our brains to tasks unrelated to these functions, like reading, but this kind of ‘neuronal recycling,’ as Stanislas Dehaene calls it, still makes use of the same old brains.

 I think Steven Pinker is transmitting the same message in ‘The Stuff of Thought.’ That ‘I think,’ will serve as a general qualifier for everything that follows, because Pinker’s message is often buried in his relentlessly verbose prose. If one example would serve to make a point, you can be sure that’s not where he will stop.

 Pinker is one brainy dude, so perhaps the problem is with my own intelligence. He avoids jargon, and throughout ‘Stuff’ self-effacingly makes fun of his own tendency to ramble on and on (and on and on). But those self-induced chuckles are pretty much self-indulgent, because they fail to dam an overwhelming onslaught of logorrhea.

 So if I missed what he’s really trying to say, that’s the way it goes. I’m relieved to have finished the book.

 One limitation on our brains, on the way we think, is how we think—in words. Language, Pinker finds, is based on conceptual constructs that are not mathematical or scientific. We make meaning that is ‘very different from the analogue flow of sensation the world presents.’ We don’t measure space ‘in smooth coordinates like those revealed by rulers, protractors, and surveyors’ levels.’ We use a ‘mental cartoon of pushing and resisting’ that is laden with emotion and concerned with saving face.

 Pinker summarizes these linguistic constructs in the final chapter of ‘Stuff,’ ‘Escaping the Cave.’ If you want the gist of the book’s thesis, reading this chapter would be a quick way to do so. Yes, that cave is Plato’s and language is the shadow on the walls. We can perhaps start to break out, though, with Pinker’s version of neuronal recycling—inventing new ways of using language through metaphor and combining our words in new ways. In other words, through art.

 But we will still always bound by what we are, which is expressed in the language we speak and in which we think. Pinker refuses to completely throw out the genetically determined ‘universal grammar’ of his progenitor, Noam Chomsky. In the nature vs. nurture, innatism vs. tabula rasa, debate, Pinker leans toward nature, but his position—that of a conceptual semanticist—is rather carefully nuanced. He outlines that position in a chapter called ‘Fifty Thousand Innate Concepts’ by contrasting it with other linguistic theories.

 Those theories are placed on a continuum that has Jerry Fodor’s ‘extreme nativism’ at one end and radical ‘linguistic determinism’ on the other. An extreme nativist holds that the language we use for thought is totally predetermined. A radical linguistic determinist argues that our thoughts are completely determined by the language we invent. If I’ve got it right, the conceptual semanticist says, now let’s be reasonable, our thoughts are based in a given structure that we’ve extended to include new ways of thinking.

 I found this chapter to be the most valuable in the book because it gave me some grounding in the current prevailing wisdom of linguistics, even though following the reasoning of linguists can be as painful and convoluted as the following the reasoning of philosophers. Dang it, give me some nuts and bolts, I say. Some clear explanations and practical advice. And less laundry lists.

 The most entertaining chapter is ‘The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television.’ Pinker’s nerdy obsessiveness and self-deprecation (as well as his love of dirty jokes) suits his discussion of why one word for an object or an act can be acceptable, while another one is taboo, and how excrement has trumped sacrilege in shock value (at least in English).

 For the most part, however, that nerdy obsessiveness weighs down ‘The Stuff of Thought’ to the point where I wanted to tell Pinker to stuff it.
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 Frankie
 231 reviews 37 followers
 July 23, 2010
 Stunned. I've never read a book so packed with new revelations and well-researched, referenced ideas. The text moves at breakneck speed, elucidating every corner of my pitifully thin familiarity with linguistics and logic. There are myriad illustrations, statistics and studies that support and ease readability. From describing the way children learn sentence structure, showing by their cute mistakes how infant speech can help us trace the language of time, space and causality; to the surfacing of the metaphor and just how much metaphor lends to nearly every expression (the "metaphor metaphor"); to the faddish cycle of baby names as the layman's dominance over making new words; to the great chapter on taboo language (Carlin's "7 Words You Can't Say on Television" and more); and finally to the absurd but necessary use of indirect language. The concepts are astoundingly simple at heart. I don't know where to begin citing my favorites, but two should be enough.

 The first epiphany I experienced on page 183, as Pinker describes how the concept of moving through space affects 2 and 3 dimensional ideas of shapes. As in "...why we say that something can be underwater or underground even though it's surrounded by, not beneath, the water or the ground. It's because water and ground are conceived as 2-D surfaces, not 3-D volumes..." The idea took me by surprise when I imagined something buried in the dirt on the ocean floor as only then literally "underwater," and something being "underground" is quite impossible (depending on your definition of "ground").

 Another concept I enjoyed was the logic fable on pages 419-420 called the "Barbecue Sauce Problem." I'll paraphrase.
 20 people meet for dinner and eat ribs. 3 of them get sauce on their face. There are no mirrors, and no one wants to be rude and point out the messy eaters, plus no one with even a clean face is sure if they have sauce on their face either. So no one wipes their face. the host comes in and solves the problem. "At least one of you has sauce on their face, I'll ring the dinner bell once for each person that does." He rings the bell once and no one moves. Twice, and no one moves. The third time he rings the bell, the very 3 who have messy faces immediately wipe their faces.

 I never figured this out until the author explained it, but I'm sure you can. I don't want to spoil it for anyone ruminating right now. Comment if you wish to know.

 When I first sat down to read this book, I thought it might be a rough ride filled with difficult to grasp allusions at best. Something like reading Baudrillard. Pinker, however, drives his points with repetitive and humorous ease, with jokes, puns, cartoon clippings and examples. The chapters climb in complexity, bringing even the most distracted reader into his insightful take on language as a whole.
 linguistics logic mytop10
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 Sarah Clement
 Author 1 book 112 followers
 June 26, 2013
 If I were rating this book based on the first 4 chapters, it would get two stars. The rest of the book deserves 4 stars, so I'm meeting in the middle.

 The first four chapters were, from my perspective, painful, drawn out descriptions of linguistics material more appropriate for a Linguistics 101 textbook than a popular book. Although sometimes these culminated in quite interesting points, Pinker often took dozens of pages to say what he could in just a few. The early chapters, in fact, contained only a few major points that are really central to highlighting the way language can give us a glimpse into human nature. I think these points could have easily been made without throwing dozens of linguistic concepts at the reader, particularly the terminology. Perhaps knowing the terminology is a great party gag for some, but I for one don't ever expect to use most of that information again. Most of the points in this portion of the book, where interesting, were more "huh, isn't that neat?" rather than really revolutionary or central to the theme of the book. the chapter in which he debunked other linguistic theories was really not essential to the rest of the book, and if he wanted to include it, it could have gone in an appendix. My advice to readers who find themselves annoyed or uninterested in the first few chapters is to skip ahead to chapter 5. You won't miss anything that is necessary for understanding the rest of the book or understanding his thesis.

 Once you get the chapter on metaphor, this book gets interesting. Linguists never tire of discussing metaphor, it seems, but I really enjoy reading about it. So many of our expressions are metaphors, whether we realise it or not, and that is a really interesting when you consider what that might tell us about the human brain. The chapter on swearing was also brilliant, particularly for me - someone who doesn't see why people are so offended by profanity. While I had to convince myself to sit down and actually read the first half, I found myself looking forward to picking up the book again when I was reading the second half. Considering the book's theme of "language as a window into human nature", this is where I actually think Pinker provides a winder and provides some rather interesting points to ponder. A lot of what he does is to point to things that are quite obvious once he's flagged it, but as a native speaker of english (and member of the human race), you never thought about before. Sure, most of these things aren't completely universal - which I think makes language a rather imperfect medium through which to explore the nature of humanity more generally - but many of them are nearly so, and that makes them all the more fascinating.

 skeptics-book-club
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 Cheryl
 10.7k reviews 453 followers
 February 3, 2020
 Too wordy, too many examples, too much narrative, too much that is a retelling of what is known. I just couldn't find a focus, a significance, to all the interesting stuff. Readable, but not memorable. The intro. & epilogue would have been enough for me... except for all the references in the epilogue that weren't explained, but only allusions to stuff mentioned in earlier chapters. I dunno, maybe if I were less distracted I would have done better. But I really do think it's the book, not me.

 Anyway, there is lots of interesting stuff.:

 Apparently lots of computer programmers count "zero, one, two, three, four... there are five." (Mentioned in the section that refutes Linguistic Determinism.)

 "Put the new material last," and "put the heavy material last" are two of the most important guidelines for good style in writing and speaking. (I assume that by 'good' he means 'effective' and in context he means 'of exposition.') (In any case, I disagree. He used that style in this book, and I found it unhelpful.)

 To make a potion that changes color on demand, boil small pieces of purple cabbage in water, then fish out the cabbage and let the purple liquid cool. If you add a base to it, such as baking soda, it will turn green; if you add an acid, like lemon juice, it will turn pink.

 In some languages, like Chinese, *all* nouns behave like mass nouns, standing for the concept itself rather than for separate incarnations of it, and speakers may not count or pluralize them without the use of a classifier, as in 'two tools of hammer' or 'three rods of pen.' (Not sure how credible that is. No source note is given, and which Chinese language is being referenced, anyway?)

 In the decade between the sexual revolution of the early 1960s and the feminist revolution of the early 1970s, many works of popular culture celebrated the overthrow of puritanism with sympathetic portrayals of lascivious men.... (recognized now as) misogynistic today, with depictions of women as bimbos and an amused tolerance of rape, harassment, and spousal abuse. (Ah, so that explains why some novels, esp. SF, are popular among men, esp. those slightly older than I, and are seen as horrible by me!).

 Well, anyway, if you do decide to try to read this, remember the lens through which the author tries to focus. As he says in the last chapter (actually an epilogue though not so titled):

 "In this book I have [explored]... what we can learn about human nature from the meanings of words and constructions and how they are used."
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 Todd Martin
 Author 4 books 77 followers
 December 31, 2017
 In The Stuff of Thought Steven Pinker, noted public intellectual and linguist at MIT, "analyzes how our words relate to thoughts and to the world around us and reveals what this tells us about ourselves". So, sure … language can provide a “window into human nature”, just as the output of a computer can tell us something about the software it is running.

 The question is, whether this ‘window’ is interesting.

 Let’s look at an example. You can “load hay onto the wagon” and you can “load the wagon with hay”, they mean the same thing. Along the same lines, you can “toss the cat onto the bed”, but you can’t “toss the bed with the cat”, the latter is nonsensical.

 Why?

 Because in the first example – we are describing an activity that changes the state of the wagon … from empty to full.
 In the second example – when we toss something on a bed, we don’t think of the bed’s state as being changed.

 We can therefore conclude that the brain must think that an object’s state is important since it features prominently in the construction of these types of sentences. The verb “load” implies a change of state in the object, the verb “toss” does not.

 Does that reveal something profound about the brain? I suppose linguists think so, but frankly … meh.

 The book largely consists of an endless series of examples along the lines of the above dealing with such things as: verbs, time, place, relations of objects with respect to each other, direction, quantity, word and name origins and trends, profanity and others.

 I very much enjoyed The Better Angels of our Natures and The Blank Slate , but the books Pinker has written about his own field of expertise (linguistics), not so much. They come across as too wonky (a word that is a phonaesthesia in case you were wondering) and arcane to leave much of an impression. I should say that it didn’t help that I listened to the audio version of this book, a format that isn’t particularly suited to the comprehension of abstruse concepts.
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 Rick Patterson
 282 reviews 8 followers
 February 20, 2021
 Imagine you have been kidnapped by a former classmate (Steve, the guy who was really really weird but whom you later figured out was on the autism spectrum and therefore in retrospect forgave him for his eccentricities even though it's a condition--duh--so what's to forgive?) who has not-so-subtly threatened you with some form of harm if you try to escape, made you ride shotgun in his car, and is travelling across the country with you in tow, all the while regaling you with his very very detailed observations about different verb forms and how they do or do not work together, excruciatingly boring and clinical analyses that you have to nod and smile and agree are fascinating, just fascinating, every time he looks over at you and raises his eyebrows to see if you are following what he's saying, but then--somewhere around the time that your cardyssey crosses the Alleghenies and you officially hit the Midwest--he starts becoming more interesting, his funny asides are actually really funny and even thought-provoking because you had never ever thought about that word that way before, and you haven't put that bit of knowledge together with that other bit of knowledge in quite that illuminating way, so the whole normally boring stretch of highway that crosses from Illinois to Iowa to Nebraska to Wyoming is punctuated by occasional--and ever more frequent--fits of sudden laughter and knee-slapping merriment, including a whole state's worth of his disquisitions on profanity, which he conducts with a twinkle in his eye and one side of his lip curled up as if you really aren't supposed to take him all that seriously, but you still have to take him seriously because he's an expert, of course, and he knows really a whole lot about this and has obviously taken a lot of time and made a big effort to get all of this material under control, so by the time he pulls up in a cloud of crushed seashells at the promontory overlooking Monterey, you have accumulated, well, quite the experience, haven't you?
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 Ioannis Savvas
 339 reviews 44 followers
 February 14, 2013
 Ο Steven Pinker είναι γνωστός εξελικτικός γλωσσολόγος (evolutionary linguist). To The Stuff of Thought είναι το δεύτερο βιβλίο του που διαβάζω, ύστερα από το Γλωσσικό ένστικτο. Το βιβλίο είναι αυτό που λέει ο υπότιτλος: Language as a Window into Human Nature. O Pinker εξηγεί σε ένα περιεκτικό και πυκνογραμμένο κείμενο, με όρους κοινωνιολογικούς, ανθρωπολογικούς, ψυχολογικούς και κυρίως νευροφυσιολογικούς, πώς η γλώσσα αντικατοπτρίζει τον τρόπο σκέψης του ανθρώπου. Ή αντίθετα, πώς η σκέψη του ανθρώπου σε όλες της τις εκφάνσεις (λογική, συναίσθημα, διαπροσωπικές σχέσεις, θρησκευτική πίστη, σεξουαλικότητα, κ.λπ.) εκφράζονται μέσω της γλώσσας και την διαμορφώνουν.

 Εκφράσεις όπως «to think is to grasp a metaphor» ή «a basic principle in linguistics is that the relation of a sound to a meaning is arbitrary» αποτελούν ανατρεπτικές ιδέες, τουλάχιστον για την ελληνική πραγματικότητα. Ίσως οι Έλληνες γλωσσολόγοι θα πρέπει να δουν την ελληνική γλώσσα μέσα από άλλη προοπτική. Να χρησιμοποιήσουν και λίγη νευροφυσιολογία και όχι μόνο «φιλολογία». Και ο συγγραφέας καταλήγει: «Language is not just a window into human nature but a fistula: an open wound through which our innards are exposed to an infectious world».

 Το βιβλίο είναι δομημένο σε κεφάλαια που χτίζουν το οικοδόμημα με τρόπο συνθετικό. Το υποκεφάλαιο «Oomph: thoughts about causality» του κεφαλαίου «Cleaving the air» είναι μια επιτομή της αιτιότητας και των πλανών που ο ανθρώπινος εγκέφαλος εξυφαίνει γύρω της. Κάθε υποψήφιος διδάκτορας -ως υποψήφιος επιστήμονας- θα πρέπει να διαβάσει αυτό το υποκαιφάλαιο. Επίσης, εξαιρετικό είναι το κεφάλαιο «The seven words you can’t say on television», στο οποίο ο συγγραφέας εξηγεί γιατί βρίζουμε, βλαστημούμε και καταριόμαστε. Και γιατί αυτή η πλευρά της συμπεριφοράς μας σχετίζεται κυρίως με το σεξ, τη θεότητα και τις ασθένειες.

 Ένα υπέροχο βιβλίο, τεκμηριωμένο και συνεκτικό. Το προτείνω για προσεκτική ανάγνωση ανεπιφύλακτα.
 γλώσσα
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 Kevan
 55 reviews 13 followers
 February 15, 2009
 I've read a number of Pinker's books.

 I very much enjoyed The Language Instinct and quite enjoyed How the Mind Works.

 I read Words and Rules when living in Thailand and learning Thai. I had real problems mapping what he had to say from English to Thai. What he had to say about English and its implication for how the Mind/Language engine work simply did not seem to be true.

 The Stuff of Thought seems much more solid though and I am finding it quite fascinating.

 Pinker keeps saying "for English speakers" and "in English" which I definitely don't recall him doing in Words and Rules .

 It will be interesting to see if he explores how the deeper cognitive structures he posits map across languages.

 I'd be interested to know if other readers had also worried about this problem and what they had learned since.

 ---------------

 He does indeed go on to touch upon multiple languages.

 I found the chapter on verbs "Down the rabbit hole" interesting for many reasons. It was fascinating not just because it showed that there are families of verbs whose existence I had never suspected existed but also because I was impressed by how this type of analysis provides a plausible window on the mind.

 Unfortunately, this was, for me, the highpoint of book. I most enjoy Pinker when he's doing the detailed, example baaed stuff around language. I find him much less convincing when he moves onto the broader canvas of the mind and morality.

 Still, worth the read.

 cognitive-science
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 Khari
 2,685 reviews 61 followers
 August 28, 2018
 I am disappointed that I didn't find and read this book while I was in grad school, there are some quotes that would have worked quite well for the paper I wrote on comparative naming cultures.

 There, now that I have completely sounded like an arrogant elitist intellectual, I can talk about my other impressions about this book.

 Wow.

 That's really the only thing I can say. Pinker thinks about verbs more deeply than I've ever thought about anything. I like abstract thought, don't get me wrong, I like linguistics, I enjoy musing about a linguistic puzzle for a couple of hours, that's just good fun. But to spend like 100 pages just talking about verbs?!? His seemingly favorite topic in this chapter was content locatives. I've never thought about content locatives. Not once. The difference between loading a wagon with hay, and loading hay into a wagon. Seriously, who spends enough hours thinking about such a thing to build a cogent theory that takes 100 pages to explain!?!? I am in awe.

 Like I said, I enjoy a good abstract thought puzzle every now and again, and had the arrogance to think that I was something special until I read this book. Then I realized, nope, I'm just your run of the mill dabbler, people like Pinker take abstract and deep thought to a whole new level that I don't even want to attempt.

 That said, I really enjoyed the book and I learned a lot from it. Not only is he a deep thinker, but he is a good writer and when you can't understand him, it's not because he writes in an obtuse way, it's just that you are literally incapable of going that deep into a concept.
 non-fiction
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 John
 45 reviews
 June 23, 2009
 This is a fast read book. Though I don't like Pinker's allegiance to Chomsky, I think he's great for summing up the bunches of different theories and even better at describing the problems in linguistics that people are trying to understand--excellent examples! And he has an entertaining narrative voice. My only beef was that after he spent time talking about fallacious arguments and the people who use them, he tended to attack "radical" or "extreme" versions of theories, thereby leading the reader to think (not always) that the whole of those particular fields were stupid. And then later, appeals to different parts of said theories to back up what he, himself, is arguing. BUT, having said that, it was a fun read and,again, a great (re-)introduction to conceptual metaphor theory and its competition to explain everyday things, like why is it we tend to use a swear word after hitting our thumbs with a hammer? And though I don't necessarily buy into every explanation, they are still worthwhile to consider because they, again, highlight sets of problems that linguists face when trying to understand why we do the things we do with language.
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This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human N…
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/373969.The_Stuff_of_Thought
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5755.The_Language_Instinct
The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
2023-01-01
Author
<div><div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1237196-petra-x-has-her-eye-on-the-prize"></a></section><section><p>2,384 reviews33.9k followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2172468564">November 29, 2017</a></section><div><p>In my bookshop are lots of books like, 'First 100 Words' and "ABC with pictures", you know those sort of books. We talk to our babies in 'motherese' and we point to things and name them, but we do not teach our babies grammar. We say things like 'look at those puppies there, they are much smaller than these ones here'. We don't explain when to use words like 'those' or 'these' or 'there' and 'here' and where we put them in a sentence. <p>We don't need to, Pinker says, Chomsky said, that grammar is built-in. That no matter what language a child learns, they will use the words grammatically without any instruction. And if a child learns wildly different languages as say Welsh, Spanish and English (there are many people who grow up speaking these particular three in Patagonia) they will use the correct grammar as well as words without any difficulty at all.<br />__________</p><p>Notes on reading: What I've learned so far: that it takes only one generation to turn a pidgin into a creole (language). Immigrant workers in Hawaii, Japanese, Filipinos, Chinese, Koreans even Portuguese and Europeans spoke to each other in pidgin. Pidgin is a collection of words without any grammar. It's a bit like what most of us who are not linguistically-gifted speak when we travel. We mix the few words we know of the local language with English and (if British) shouted loudly and repetitively until the 'native' gets it. </p><p>The children of the immigrant workers were looked after together when their parents were in the fields and they, just like that, because of the instinct for language, for grammar, turned the pidgin into a creole, a language that could express anything and everything. Children never speak pidgin, their brains impose structure on words and they learn from each other. Sadly, the window for language acquisition closes as puberty approaches. After that it is only talented individuals who can acquire a foreign language with perfect grammar and accent. </p><p>Jamaican, which Jamaicans continually put down as the patois of the poor people', not proper 'standard English' is in fact a proper language with its own grammar, although a majority of the words are derived from English and Akan, </p><p>Pinker says he's not 100% behind Chomsky's theories. He's pretty close though. I got bored with the chapters on Chomsky's language trees, I'm more interested in how we produce language than the structure of it. </p><p>Great book, a difficult and academic read (at least to me) and boring in bits too but none of that takes away from opening up a new skein of thought for me, and I enjoy that more than anything else from a book.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1237196?shelf=10-star-books">10-star-books</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1237196?shelf=2017-100-reviews">2017-100-reviews</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1237196?shelf=2017-read">2017-read</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1713956-manny"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>28 books13.4k followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/45281117">June 14, 2012</a></section><div><p>There's a joke in this book that linguists really like. An English woman has just got off the plane at Boston's Logan airport. She takes a cab, and starts questioning the driver about where to obtain various local delicacies.<p>"Oh yes," she says in her posh English accent. "Could you tell me where you can get scrod here?"</p><p>And the driver replies, "You know, you don't often hear that in the pluperfect subjunctive!"</p><p>__________________________________________</p><p>Another linguist joke, for people who haven't already heard it. The guy is visiting the university, and managed to get himself thoroughly lost. He goes up to an academic-looking type and asks politely,</p><p>"Excuse me, do you know which building the linguistics department is in?"</p><p>"It's generally considered incorrect to end a sentence with a preposition" replies the academic.</p><p>"I'm sorry!" says the visitor. "I mean, do you know which building the linguistics department is in, asshole?"</p><p>__________________________________________</p><p>An American grad student and a German grad student are talking about their dissertations.</p><p>"I've nearly finished mine," boasts the German. "It's in four volumes!"</p><p>"Wow!" says the American, impressed. "What are they?"</p><p>"Well," says the German. "The first one is the background, the second is the experiments, and the third is the analysis."</p><p>"What about the fourth?" asks the American.</p><p>"Oh! That's just the verbs."</p><p>[You may need to know something about German word-order to find this amusing.:]</p><p>__________________________________________</p><p>It's the day after the Great Vowel Shift, and this guy goes into a bar.</p><p>"Can I have an ale?" he asks. </p><p>And the barman replies,</p><p>"I'm sorry sir, the fishmonger is next door."</p><p>__________________________________________</p><p>I wondered where the Great Vowel Shift Joke came from, and - how could I not have guessed? - it turns out to be the work of the late, much-lamented James D. McCawley. Specifically, it comes from his piece "Linguistically Noteworthy Dates in May", which I reproduce here for your delectation:</p><p>May 2, 1919. Baudouin de Courtenay concedes defeat in his bid for the presidency of Poland. <br />May 3, 1955. Mouton &amp; Co. discover how American libraries order books and scheme to cash in by starting several series of books on limericks. The person given charge of this project mishears and starts several series of books on linguistics. No one ever notices the mistake. <br />May 5, 1403. The Great English Vowel Shift begins. Giles of Tottenham calls for ale at his favorite pub and is perplexed when the barmaid tells him that the fishmonger is next door. <br />May 6, 1939. The University of Chicago trades Leonard Bloomfield to Yale University for two janitors and an undisclosed number of concrete gargoyles.<br />May 7, 1966. r-less pronunciation is observed in eight kindergarten pupils in Secaucus, N.J. The governor of New Jersey stations national guardsmen along the banks of the Hudson. <br />May 9, 1917. N. Ja. Marr discovers ROSH, the missing link for Japhetic unity. <br />May 11, 1032. Holy Roman Emperor Conrad II orders isoglosses erected across northern Germany as defense against Viking intruders. <br />May 12, 1965. Sydney Lamb announces discovery of the hypersememic stratum, setting off a wave of selling on the NYSE. <br />May 13. Vowel Day. (Public holiday in Kabardian Autonomous Region). The ceremonial vowel is pronounced by all Kabardians as a symbol of brotherhood with all speakers of human languages. <br />May 14, 519 B.C. Birth of Panini. <br />May 15, 1964. J. Katz and J. Fodor are separated in 5-hour surgery from which neither recovers. <br />May 17, 1966. J. R. Ross tells a clean joke. <br />May 18, 1941. Quang Phuc Dong is captured by the Japanese and interned for the duration of hostilities. <br />May 19. Diphthong Day. (Public holiday in Australia) <br />May 20, 473 B.C. Publisher returns to Panini a manuscript entitled Saptadhyayi with a note requesting the addition of a chapter on phonology. Panini begins struggling to meet the publisher's deadline. <br />May 21, 1962. First mention of The Sound Pattern of English as ‘in press’. <br />May 23, 38,471 B.C. God creates language. <br />May 26, 1945. Zellig Harris applies his newly formulated discovery procedures and discovers [t]. <br />May 27, 1969. George Lakoff discovers the global rule. Supermarkets in Cambridge, Mass. are struck by frenzied buying of canned goods. <br />May 29, 1962. Angular brackets are discovered. Classes at M.I.T. are dismissed and much Latvian plum brandy is consumed. <br />May 30, 1939. Charles F. Hockett finishes composing the music for the Linguistic Society of America's anthem, ‘Can You Hear the Difference?’ <br />May 31, 1951. Chomsky discovers Affix-hopping and is reprimanded by his father for discovering rules on shabas.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1713956?shelf=linguistics-and-philosophy">linguistics-and-philosophy</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1198255-madeleine"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>2 books848 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/316656391">June 28, 2013</a></section><div><p>I have this incredible mental block about reviewing nonfiction. <p>My formal linguistics experience is limited to exactly one History of the English Language class as a college junior (and it remains one of the most fascinating, satisfying and illuminating classroom experiences I've ever had, university-level or otherwise), which was about when I realized that the study of language was up there with the school paper and my creative-writing courses in terms of the all-over fulfillment I found in it. It helped that I had an enthusiastic professor whose wealth of knowledge and general zeal turned my disappointment in the English department's lack of additional linguistic offerings into a fervent hunt for extracurricular reading material regarding the topic, though I can't help but feel that my self-guided tour through the field isn't yielding the same benefits I'd've received from exploring the same terrain with an expert leading the way. Hence my concern that I'll sound like I'm trying to pretend that I know what I'm talking about on some deeper level when my background in the roots of language is far more recreational than academic. All's I can say for sure is that <i>The Language Instinct</i> was great fun, beautifully written and an absolute whirlwind of information that covers a dizzying array of unexpected but thought-provokingly relevant subjects.</p><p>Oh, and that <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3915.Steven_Pinker">Steven Pinker</a> has the most admirably disheveled hair since <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/15923.Georges_Perec">Georges Perec</a>. Their locks are not to be trifled with, nor, clearly, are their minds. </p><p>The last language-centric book I read argued in favor of a point that had been laughed into noncredibility for years thanks to the implied racism it still carried from the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis days, which is that the world actually looks different based on one's view of the world based on his or her culture and language (<i>Through the Language Glass</i>, written by Guy Deutscher and published in 2010 -- and which I must admit to having read long enough ago that I have shamefully forgotten many of its finer details but do recall as having made a rather convincing argument, as it delved into stuff such as how a language can reflect a culture's attitude toward its women) -- an hypothesis that Pinker decried within the first 50 pages of this 1994 bestseller as "wrong, all wrong," as it is his view that "discussions that assume that language determines thought carry on only by a collective suspension of disbelief." My copy of <i>The Language Instinct</i> includes Pinker's chapter-by-chapter asides about updates in the many areas he explored in a book he published more than two decades ago, including the neo-Whorfism that has sprung up in recent years, a revival that allowed works such as <i>Through the Language Glass</i> to be taken more seriously because the misguided blinders and red herrings of the linguistic avenue of contemplation have finally fallen away and its points can be made in such a way to sidestep the unfortunate pitfalls of the past.</p><p>Seeing the inverse of an argument made just as successfully as my initial exposure to it was what sucked me in for good with this book. The overlapping of an argument's two sides and seeing familiar names, familiar backgrounds, familiar failings and completely different conclusions were all strangely rewarding payoffs for my own curious, solitary explorations. </p><p>And that spark of recognition just kept cropping up in myriad forms as I read on and on (and on and on, as it took me, like, two months to finish this -- absolutely no fault of Pinker's, but rather that of my compulsion to juggle two and three books at once and work's nasty habit of reducing my reading time in two-week cycles). While the biology and neurobiology and child development and abnormal psych were all a bit of alien territory for me, Pinker presented them all in such accessible ways that my tactile-learner self was picking up everything he was putting down. Which made the friendlier faces I'd seen before all the more inviting: The progression of Old English to Middle English to Modern English was like having tea (or mead) with an old friend, reading about the Great Vowel Shift was like reminiscing with an old lover and wondering if maybe the stars are finally aligned in our favor, the uncanny commonalities between seemingly unrelated tongues was a kiddie ball pit wrapped in a trampoline for my brain, and the pages and chapters of grammatical theory? Be still, my pedantic heart! I didn't even mind, as a happily neurotic proofreader, when Pinker started asserting that maybe the Grammar Mavens have their priorities all wrong, that even nontraditional dialects have their merits, that "whom" ought to go the way of "ye" and its other equally antiquated brethren, that it's okay to hang on to the rules of usage for clarity's sake rather than browbeating those poor folks who don't work themselves into paroxysms of glee at the very notion of sentence diagrams over their truly nitpicky transgressions. </p><p>I had no idea the lengths and detail necessary in asserting that something so mind-bogglingly complex but is so universally taken for granted -- that is, human speech -- is a deep-seated biological impulse, hard-wired into our brains to the point that we are all, in fact, baby geniuses when it comes to sussing out most of the nuances of our diabolically tricky native languages by the age of three. I had no well-formed opinion on the matter of language as a learned habit versus a communicative imperative instilled in us via evolution before coming into this but did Pinker ever reel me in, hold my attention and make me want to delve deeper into his research, theories and positions regarding the language instinct. Bearing witness to the impressive lengths he goes to to cover all his ground from every angle is reward enough for hearing him out for nearly 500 pages, because Pinker's dedication to the language instinct is evident enough in the miles of homework he did to make his point with armfuls of wide-ranging detail and chapter upon chapter of some truly compelling writing.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1198255?shelf=2013">2013</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1198255?shelf=blogophilia">blogophilia</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1198255?shelf=head-in-the-clouds-nose-in-a-book">head-in-the-clouds-nose-in-a-book</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1445709-tyas"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>27 books75 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/44910472">February 25, 2009</a></section><div><p>A friend, a diplomat’s daughter, when asked how she had managed to master Dutch when she went to a school in Suriname, shrugged.<br />“I don’t know. I remember being so confused during the first day, not understanding a single word. But not so long after that, I was able to speak in Dutch. I just spoke, I don’t know how.”<p>That had happened years ago, when she was still very young. We have always wondered how come children are able to learn language easily, while many, if not most adults, find the task of learning a new language bewildering, bordering with the impossible. Plus, children are not just great imitators. If they were, we would only be repeating things our parents had told us when we were small. But we don’t. We don’t just mimic our parents’ words. Something in our neural circuitry does more than just copying; it analyses grammar, it finds for pattern, it composes new combination of words... frighteningly complex processes that, so far, cannot even be matched by the most advanced of AI. C3PO is still a long way to go.</p><p>The ability of learning language is one of the many subjects covered by the book <i>The Language Instinct</i>, written by Steven Pinker, a psycholinguist in Harvard. (No, he’s not some crazy linguist who enjoys slaying people.)</p><p>Language is probably the hallmark of human race. We boast our ability to communicate in words, a feature of our culture that no other living forms have. But Pinker shows us that far from being a cultural invention, <i>language is actually an instinct</i>. And because it is, then despite the doubts of the likes of Chomsky, it must be built gradually in the lineages one of which led to us thanks to natural selection. Aiming towards the goal of convincing us about that main point of language being an instinct, Pinker wove an abundance of evidence into this clear, mostly easy-to-swallow book. I said most, because to be frank at times I was lost among a wealth of linguistic terms that I had to crawl through, trying to just grab the general point of some parts.</p><p>Nevertheless, I like Pinker’s book for dissecting language thoroughly. My favourite part is of course about the language mavens – people who think they have the task to safeguard the purity of language and grammar. Pinker showed us that many instances of ‘ungrammatical’ words or sentences according to those mavens, are actually grammatical according to how our brain works. Very enlightening, especially for someone like me who has for quite some time lost her faith in the tyranny of KBBI and EYD of the Indonesian language. (Our own language mavens, for instance, would waste their sweat telling us that the correct spelling for ‘lembab’ is ‘lembap’, though you understand that both mean the same anyway, and that you may not speak of ‘jam delapan’, but ‘pukul delapan’ instead.)</p><p>But hey, if this sounds like telling us to ditch our dictionaries and standard spellings and pronunciation altogether, what am I doing, writing something in what, I hope, is a neat piece of review, instead 0f sumth1n l1k3 d33s? (You might even notice that I even care to hit the spacebar twice after a period, but only once after a comma.)</p><p>Well, when I talk with my sister and brother, or with my bestfriends, sometimes we use words and phrases only we understand. (I wager none of you know what an ‘exedol’ is.) Sometimes we don’t even have to finish our sentences. Our experience together has created specific words and phrases and shaped the language that we use when we communicate with each other. But, when I write something, keeping a general reader in mind, I must be careful to use words and phrases most, if not all, readers would understand, presenting my thought clearly, preventing misunderstanding or confusion (except if that is exactly my intention, but Joyce I am not). Hence my writing style – but trust me, in verbal communication, I might sound very, very different.</p><p>Language is far more interesting than filling up blanks on a question sheet with the right form of verbs, and Steven Pinker has a way of revealing to us how amazing our language and our brain are.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1445709?shelf=biology">biology</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1445709?shelf=general-science">general-science</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1445709?shelf=language">language</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/86946-jessica"></a></section><section><p>583 reviews23 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/164910495">May 2, 2011</a></section><div><p>I had <i>The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language</i> out of the library for the entire summer. I finally finished it by actively reading it on the train for a couple of weeks. It's interesting, don't get me wrong, it's just LONG and has enough dull/confusing stretches that I couldn't bring myself to read it in my free time - it was pretty much a train-only book.<p>The book's underlying claim is that all human beings are born with something Pinker calls a Universal Grammar, which causes us to acquire language instinctively. Whether we are born into an English or Kinyarwandan or sign-language community affects only the details of our language acquisition - we are wired to understand the way language works.</p><p>He makes many good points, and I learned a lot from reading this book, but something underlying the text was somewhat disturbing to me (and it's not just the way he seems to revere Noam Chomsky as a god, quoting him earnestly and often, and almost overemphasizing the one point where he disagrees with Chomsky as if to say, "Look, all you people who think I'm just digesting Chomsky for the masses - I DO have my own thoughts! So there!"). It's that Pinker is 100% an objectivist, believing that our language and culture don't really affect the underlying processes in our minds and that human beings are ultimately the same, whereas I can't see the world without some degree of relativity slipping in, thinking that we are all very very similar and are justified in acting as if we are all the same, but that there are subtle differences that we may not entirely be able to overcome. I think lanugage, at least to a small degree, does affect the way we think and process the world, even if the differences are mostly ones we can see past or work around when talking with others from a different language background.</p><p>(I laughed every time I turned the book over and saw the quote on the back from William F. Buckley, Jr.: "Steven Pinker is, I think, engagingly wrong in some of his conclusions, but the operative word here is engagingly. He reminds us of the pleasures of reading about language, provided people like him are at the wheel.")</p><p>A few details I really enjoyed about this book: Case studies and quotes from people with various neurological disorders affecting their language abilities. The detail to which Pinker addressed sign languages, showing how language acquisition follows the same steps whether it is spoken or gestured (deaf babies "babble" with their hands at the same age that hearing babies babble with their mouths). The linguistics primers, which had me making phoneme sounds and sticking my finger in my mouth to see how my tongue and lips were arranged (while on the train!). Reasons why the "language mavens" (people who bemoan the decline of English) are often wrong. </p><p>This is definitely a worthwhile read if you're interested in linguistics but haven't studied much on the topic yet. There's a lot of value in this book, even though some passages do get overwhelmingly dry or pedantic (pages of sentence diagramming scattered throughout the book, for example). I wouldn't recommend it to a casual reader, since I kind of had to will myself to finish reading the book, but I do think I learned a lot for sticking it out. </p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/86946?shelf=nonfiction">nonfiction</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/442654-andrew"></a></section><section><p>1,963 reviews675 followers</p></section></div><section><section><p><b>Read</b></p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/123388976">October 9, 2010</a></section><div><p>Steven Pinker and I should be natural enemies. He's a representative of what I consider to be the smarmy, science-precludes-all-else school of hung-up modernist reductionists, while I fly the flag of what he considers to be the wishy-washy, Nietzsche-damaged academic Left. And yet it's difficult for me not to have some respect for his project.<p>When he's not making potshots at relativism(s), he is generally quite lucid and charming, and throughout writes with a clear, approachable logic. By cogitating on the structure of Creole languages and the speech patterns of aphasics, he makes a very, very strong case for a universal grammar. While there are suggestions that certain features of universal aren't present in some languages, it seems to be a reasonable hypothesis. I will say, as an arch-empiricist and an arch-skeptic, that there's a very strong chance that grammatical structures quite likely have a social rather than a strictly evolutionary basis, but the idea is certainly thought-provoking. And, importantly for us moody relativists, he has convinced me (in a way that Peter Singer totally didn't) of the democratic potential of the notion of innate human nature. </p><p>I do feel that he utilizes a certain circular logic. In Pinker's view, morphemes fit into the framework of syntax, and therefore language is innate. What is a morpheme? Something that fits into the framework of syntax. Also, he largely relies on generalizations rather than universals.</p><p>Oh, and he claims signifiers are arbitrary, even in the case of onomatopoeia. And yet he tries to claim that certain signifiers are non-arbitrary because we evolved in certain ways. This is just a glaring example that implies, to me, that Pinker used his data to fit his conclusion. Bad science booohissss.</p><p>But while these problems call into question his work and method, it's still a work I have the utmost respect for, and that everyone interested in language, whether liquored-up French deconstructionist or icy positivist, needs to read.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/442654?shelf=scientific-nonfiction">scientific-nonfiction</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/155663-david-rubenstein"></a></section><section><p>801 reviews2,503 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/40592304">April 10, 2010</a></section><div><p>Previously, I had read Steven Pinker's "The Stuff of Thought", which is also an excellent book. I enjoyed that book, so I next read this one--and I'm glad I did. "The Language Instinct" is an absolutely fascinating book! The author presents some very convincing arguments, that the acquisition of language is an instinct that has evolved over many generations, through natural selection. Steven Pinker is right on the money, when it comes to his analysis of evolution. Every chapter is compelling, and each chapter investigates language from a different perspective. <p>In both this book, and in "The Stuff of Thought", Pinker investigates why so many seemingly irregular word usages are not irregular at all. Often we instinctively use words and phrases that seem illogical, just because "it sounds right." Pinker shows the logic underlying the usage--and each time, I just have to say, "oh-my-gosh--of course!" </p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/155663?shelf=linguistics">linguistics</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/155663?shelf=nonfiction">nonfiction</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/155663?shelf=psychology">psychology</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/3452722-koen-crolla"></a></section><section><p>722 reviews168 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/136530562">December 29, 2010</a></section><div><p>Pinker is as much of a twit as his hair suggests: The Language Instinct is a miserable pile of unsupported and unsupportable conclusions, straw man attacks, hypocrisy leap-frogging into doublethink, shoddy reasoning, knee-jerk contrarianism, indeliberate obtusity, and gut-feeling argumentation. Pinker tries to synthesize the ideas of people smarter than he is (Chomsky, mostly), and many of these are perfectly fine the way they were originally formulated; they no longer are after Pinker is through defending them, because he understands neither the ideas nor any arguments in their favour.<br />As an example, do you remember the argument Dawkins once made, possibly in The Blind Watchmaker, about how very small changes can accumulate and turn into very significant results in a relatively small amount of time? He used a hypothetical population of mice that grew in average size by one percent every generation, and showed that within a few thousand generations — a mere couple of millennia! — those mice would be the size of elephants. Pinker tries to use this same story to show that small *selection pressures* can have significant results quickly:<p>&gt; ``Imagine a mouse that was subject to a miniscule selection pressure for increased size—say, one percent reproductive advantage for offspring that were one percent bigger. Some arithmetic shows that the mouse's descendants would evolve to the size of an elephant in a few thousand generations, an evolutionary eyeblink.''</p><p>Which is obviously fractally incoherent, as he would have realised if he'd understood Dawkins's argument instead of just trying to repeat it to try to get a good review by him for the back cover (which he got), or even just tried to do said arithmetic. The sad part is that what he set out to argue is actually true; his bungled argument just undermined it.<br />This is par for the course (there are more egregious examples, but this one stuck because it's Dawkins), and Pinker repeatedly fucks over his main thesis — that language is instinctive, which was as uncontroversial in 1994, when the book was written, as it is now — in the same way. Worse than that, though, he then tries to pretend that arguments in favour of this thesis mean that language is *nothing but* instinctive and, incidentally, uniquely human, and that ``therefore'' everything from linguistic prescriptivism to animal language to Sapir-Whorf to being interested in etymology is completely and utterly wrong-headed and obviously moronic, which he tries to back up by attacking caricatures of these things or, not infrequently, the character of the people involved.</p><p>Anyway, other people have apparently done thorough jobs of taking apart The Language Instict, so I won't waste any more time on it. Not everything he says is wrong (stopped clocks and all that), and it's a lot like Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind in that some of the digressions are interesting enough, but the signal-to-noise ratio is so pathetically low that the book as a whole isn't worth your time. Read Chomsky instead; Pinker would claim he's saying the same things he is anyway, which demonstrates just how confused he is.<br />Maybe it's just because TLI is his first book. Elsewhere in my to-read stack is his most recent one, The Stuff of Thought; we'll see how it compares. I'm not holding my breath. Ultimately, the problem isn't that he was new to writing, because he wasn't; it's that he's a psychologist, and not a real scientist.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/3452722?shelf=biology">biology</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/3452722?shelf=language">language</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1107219-jimmy"></a></section><section><p>150 reviews182 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/34494086">March 27, 2015</a></section><div><p>In The <i>Descent of Man</i>, Charles Darwin wrote, “Man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children; while no child has an instinctive tendency to bake, brew, or write.” The experimental psychologist, Steven Pinker, took this quote as the inspiration for his book on – what he considers – the idea that there exists an innate language instinct to be found across all cultures. Elaborating on the canonical linguistic ideas of Noam Chomsky, particularly in regard to Chomsky’s Universal Grammar, Pinker presents the lay reader with numerous examples of how language acquisition, grammatical comprehension, and the tendency to speak, are all aspects of an innate linguistic tendency that human beings share, regardless of cultural background or specific language.<p>Though Pinker generally agrees with Chomsky’s work on Universal Grammar, <i>The Language Instinct</i> focuses primarily on the idea that thoughts create language, a mental process that Pinker refers to as “mentalese”. This theoretical linguistic perspective is diametric to that of the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, which suggests that language determines thought, and that the particular culture one belongs to is unique, in turn greatly affecting the way that a person communicates, utilizes language, and ultimately, perceives the world around them.</p><p>	In Chapter one, entitled “An Instinct to Acquire an Art”, Pinker covers the two opposing linguistic schools, and talks about Chomsky and his research on Universal grammar. Pinker begins his polemic on Whorfian claims about language coloring in human perspective by discussing Chomsky’s skepticism, concerning not merely the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, but the “Standard Social Science Model” (SSCM) in general. Pinker, siding with Chomsky, feels that, not only is the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis wrong, but the basic intellectual stance that “the human psyche is molded by the surrounding culture”, is a dramatic misconception inspired by the SSCM. However, as we see later in the book, Pinker will part ways with Chomsky, ideologically. Though they both feel that grammar is a discrete combinatorial system; and is also a soundly structured tool with words and rules that human beings have an innate tendency to acquire, Chomsky is apprehensive about whether or not this language instinct, or gene, is part of the process of evolutionary adaptation. Pinker feels that the language instinct is similar to the human eye in that it has the appearance of design. In other words, the eye, for human beings, is a tool engineered with a very specific purpose. It has the appearance of design, and elements of an engineered tool, just like a camera, or an engine. The significant point that Pinker does take from Chomsky’s work is his claim that “the same symbol-manipulating machinery, without exception, underlies the world’s languages.”</p><p>	A chapter by chapter synopsis of a book of such layered complexity would become tedious after chapter 5. Everything from Broca’s Aphasia (which can cause language impairment), to x-bar theory (a theoretical version of phrase structure proposed by Chomsky that compares common grammatical rules and structures across different languages), artificial intelligence, prescriptive vs. descriptive grammar, and language organs and grammar genes, is covered in this erudite defense of Universal Grammar. These examples are useful to Pinker because they assist him in elucidating his rational stance on a language of thought. Logic-heavy gems such as, “And if there can be two thoughts corresponding to one word, thoughts can’t be words”, are peppered throughout the book. When he talks about x-bar theory, he explains how, “A part of speech, then, is not a kind of meaning: it is a kind of token that obeys certain formal rules, like a chess piece or a poker chip.” Pinker’s strongest arguments for a Universal Grammar or a language of thought, primarily concern phrase structure within sentences. </p><p>Chomsky laid much of the ground on syntactic structures in his linguistic work in the 1960’s. But Pinker sees grammar as a technical aspect of language that “offers a clear refutation of the empiricist doctrine that there is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses.” So, again, the book is covering a lot of linguistic ground concerning academic debates about what language essentially is, but for Pinker, an unabashed devotee of Darwin, The Language Instinct is also about how language is an innate tendency that undergoes evolutionary adaptive processes. He disagrees with the Whorfians and cultural relativists in the sense that he sees grammatical comprehension and language acquisition as innate tendencies. It’s not that he disagrees with the claim that culture can occasionally influence how people speak, or the way a language sounds. Pinker simply believes that there is a common capacity for speech and language utilization across all cultures, and it’s not that different. Again, he refers to the apparent design of language toward the end of chapter 10, entitled “Language Organs and Grammar Genes”, when he reflects, “I would expect the basic design of language, from x-bar syntax to phonological rules and vocabulary structure to be uniform across the species; how else could children learn to talk and adults understand one another.” </p><p>	In the academic arena of linguistics, this debate between people arguing that language is an innate instinct and those that feel that language influences thought is slightly less prominent than it was in the past. In example, one of the strongest claims supporting the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis is that the speakers of the Piraha tribe of South America were incapable of using recursion (inserting embedded clauses within sentences ad infinitum) in their language. In 2004, Peter Gordon conducted an experiment consisting of various counting exercises in order to determine whether or not the Piraha were capable of counting exact cardinalities. He concluded that the Piraha had numbers for one, few, and many, but were incapable of remembering large exact numbers. Gordon’s experimental design was relatively crude, and he merely concluded that the Piraha couldn’t count that well under the conditions of the experiment. Since then, the linguist Andrew Nevins, along with his colleagues concluded that Piraha does allow for some recursive embedding using verb suffixes and conversions of nouns to verbs. It is also possible to conjoin propositions within a sentence, such as “We ate a lot of the fish, but there was some fish that we did not eat." The debunking of linguistic myths such as the apparent absence of recursion in the Piraha language, are concrete proof that Pinker is on to something profound when he suggests an underlying linguistic design in human nature.</p><p>	One might argue that, throughout <i>The Language Instinct</i>, Pinker attempts to insert too many anecdotes from technical linguistics as well as from popular culture. <i>The Language Instinct</i> was one of Pinker’s first popular science books. This onslaught of information is understandable as he is a trained experimental psychologist trying to make technical linguistic explanations understandable to a lay audience. He does so with flying colors. There is also his Darwinist bent, along with the genetic approach to language research, which many traditional linguists (especially academic Whorfians, clearly) might find a little too reductionist. What stands out in this wonderfully informative book is Pinker’s basic, non-threatening theoretical stance that language is part of an adaptive process in nature. There may be notable superficial distinctions across different languages, but the basic structure of language and its apparent design is something that is utilized across all cultures, regardless of location, history, or linguistic origin. For Pinker, culture is not to be devalued or overlooked, but when lost in the cacophonous babel of world languages he opines, “I imagine seeing through the rhythms to the structures underneath, and sense that we all have the same minds.” </p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1107219?shelf=cognitive-science">cognitive-science</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1107219?shelf=linguistics-semiotics">linguistics-semiotics</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/83419690"></a></section><section><p>1,209 reviews118 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4276357773">October 7, 2021</a></section><div><p>I have great respect for Noam Chomsky's Theory of Universal Grammar, to the popularization of which Steven Pinker dedicates this work. The idea of a built-in mechanism of instinctive comprehension of language at the genetic level is a powerful incentive for those who want to study.<p>It is sad that the time for activation is given only up to twelve years, but maybe it is somehow possible to activate after this period? Many literary translators, I know, came to serious studies at a much more mature age. And this means that we should not throw off the ship of modernity a functional and cognitive approach to linguistics, old-school and not as bright as Chomsky's generative linguistics, but explaining a lot in the mechanisms of conscious language acquisition.</p><p>Moreover, to achieve a level of persuasiveness, as it was with "the best in us. Why there was less violence" this time Pinker failed. The book is extremely uneven in terms of style. All the time there was a feeling that he was spreading his thoughts along the tree, rushing in all directions, simultaneously arguing with opponents, sitting down to chat over a cup of tea with like-minded people (speaking the same language with him), continuing to explain what students did not fully understand during the special course, and only last of all remembers the reader himself.</p><p><b>Ваш великий и могучий Структуральнейший лингвист</b><br /><i>Во все времена во всех человеческих сообществах язык изменялся, хотя разные части языка изменялись в разных человеческих сообществах по-разному.</i><br />Есть у вас мечта нематериального свойства? В смысле, не яхта, Ferrari, отель в Дубае в собственность - не то, для чего нужны, главным образом, деньги. Я мечтала понимать сказанное-написанное на чужих языках и всегда думала, что это нереально, нужно с детства воспитываться в двуязычии и/или окончить языковую спецшколу, и/или долго жить в чужой стране с возможностью глубокого погружения. А без того, оставь надежду, всяк...</p><p>Пока однажды не взяла себя в руки, хорошенько пнув собственную лень и неуверенность, и занялась, наконец, языками. Многими, за тот период прошла в общей сложности четырнадцать языковых курсов, в том числе т��кие не самые популярные, как португальский, датский, венгерский. На каждом стараясь прочитывать хотя бы небольшую книжку. Эксперимент длился три года с небольшим, оказался насыщенным, хотя непростым периодом личной истории. На испанском и английском я теперь читаю, польский понимаю с голоса, при необходимости пойму написанное на любом индоевропейском. Неожиданным побочным результатом стало быстрое чтение на русском.</p><p>Это вступление было к тому, что , случись "Язык как инстинкт" со мной в тот период, книга наверняка произвела бы большее впечатление и послужила источником немалых читательских радостей. Подумать только, тебе авторитетно, на шести сотнях страниц объясняют, что язык встроен в человека врожденной функцией, как плетение паутины в паука и умение строить плотины в бобра. Как минимум, вдохновляющее чтение.</p><p>Сегодня, когда роман с лингвистикой отошел в область нежных воспоминаний, я воспринимаю такого рода книги как занятный нон-фикшн, но с изрядной долей критичности. То есть, к Теории универсальной грамматики Ноама Хомского, популяризации которой Стивен Пинкер посвящает этот труд, я с большим уважением. Идея встроенного на генетическом уровне механизма инстинктивного постижения языка мощнейший стимул для желающих изучать.</p><p>Печально, что времени на активацию отводится всего-то до двенадцати лет, но может быть как-то можно активировать и по истечении этого срока? Многие литературные переводчики, я знаю, приходили к серьезным занятиям в куда более зрелом возрасте. И значит, не стоит сбрасывать с корабля современности функциональный и когнитивный подход к лингвистике, олдскульные и не столь яркие, как порождающая лингвистика Хомского, но многое объясняющие в механизмах осознанного овладения языками.</p><p>Тем более, что достичь уровня убедительности, как это было с "Лучшим в нас. Почему насилия стало меньше" на сей раз Пинкеру не удалось. Книга чрезвычайно неровная с точки зрения стиля. Все время не покидало чувство, что он растекается мыслию по древу, мечется во все стороны, одновременно полемизируя с оппонентами, присаживаясь поболтать за чашкой чая с единомышленниками (говорящими с ним на одном языке), продолжает объяснять не до конца понятое студентами в ходе спецкурса, и лишь в последнюю очередь вспоминает собственно о читателе.</p><p>Еще один нюанс, исходя из которого я не рекомендовала бы этот томик русскому читателю, в то время, как англоязычному эта особенность подарит много радости. Книга выражено англизированная. Для иллюстрации своих идей автор приводит массу замечательно интересных примеров историко-географических, социально-обусловленных, стилистических трансформаций английского языка.</p><p>Немало страниц посвящены восхитительным игрищам с идиомами, когда, буквализацией значения расхожие выражения доводятся до абсурда. Кроме того, "Язык как инстинкт" это еще и разговор о литературном стиле. Где наряду с универсальными советами о том, как следует работать с текстом, сколько раз вычитывать и редактировать его, немалую роль играют и такие специфически английские темы, как насколько приемлемо использование тех или иных слов и выражений. Вы найдете их полезными, если собираетесь писать книги на английском, в остальных случаях вряд ли.</p><p><b>Резюмируя</b>: книга представляет интерес для очень ограниченной и специфичной читательской аудитории, и практически невозможна для адаптации к руксскоязычным реалиям.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/3335664-david"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>17 books333 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/97886785">April 10, 2010</a></section><div><p>Interesting for its discussion of language and language acquisition. <b>But</b>: too many people take Pinker's word as gospel, when in fact his theories are quite controversial. This book also bears a lot of responsibility for the rise of pop EvPsych. Evolutionary psychology is a field that has a few worthwhile observations mixed with an awful lot of BS used to justify all sorts of learned behavior. So, read this book with a very large grain of salt.</p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/3335664?shelf=evolution">evolution</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/3335664?shelf=linguistics">linguistics</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/3335664?shelf=non-fiction">non-fiction</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/5237420-ana"></a></section><section><p>805 reviews588 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2112200033">September 7, 2017</a></section><div><p>A highly interesting book about how language came about in the human mind. It gets quite technical at times, but that's an added bonus for anyone who is truly interested in the subject.</p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/5237420?shelf=absolute">absolute</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/5237420?shelf=humour-me">humour-me</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/5237420?shelf=non-fiction">non-fiction</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/2432122-joseph"></a></section><section><p>38 reviews27 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/76881383">January 16, 2011</a></section><div><p>Given the current divide in linguistics between the Functional/Cognitive theoretical approach to language and the formalist, generative approach which Pinker supports and has largely popularized with this book, The Language Instinct is an intellectually irresponsible endeavor. He frames linguistic nativism as a non-negotiable fact when actually, there is a fierce debate within linguistics which is moving away from ideas of those like Steven Pinker and Noam Chomsky. The opposing school of thought argues that although the cognitive underpinnings of language are innate (having developed in evolutionary time), language itself is more like a new machine made out of old parts, which develops in social interaction and cannot be localized in any set of genes or related to any "instinct." <p>Fraught with error, Pinker's pseudo-science is based on an approach that seeks not to fully understand the nature of real language as it exists, as it evolves over time, and as it is acquired by young children - but to rehash a pre-supposed view of language that was developed by "linguists" philosophizing as they sat in their armchairs in the 50s and 60s, fundamentally concerned with abstracting language into mathematical elegance rather than recognizing it for the complex system that it is. I highly recommend anyone who found themselves nodding at every turn as they read this book to read Tomasello's response "Language is not an Instinct" (to be found in full just by doing a google search). And I quote, "At heart, Chomskyan nativism is a philosophical endeavor to discern by means of logic what is uniquely and innately human. Cognitive and Functional approaches are scientific endeavors aimed at understanding how people learn and use natural languages." Couldn't have said it better myself.</p><p>One star for effort, Pinky-Poo.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2432122?shelf=linguistics">linguistics</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/223837-nicky"></a></section><section><p>4,138 reviews1,004 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1005742996">July 24, 2014</a></section><div><p>When it comes to something I don't know much about, I'm pretty easily swayed by other people's arguments. Like, I finished this book feeling it was pretty intelligent and interesting, and then I read some criticisms and reviews and heck, I don't know what to think. Still, I did find it interesting, and while the book looks deceptively slim for how long it took me to get through it, Pinker expresses his arguments clearly, with examples and sourcing, etc. <p>His basic argument is that we're hardwired for language. That, as with our sight, hearing, etc, we have a 'language sense'; if properly stimulated during the critical period, our brains quickly figure out how to parse language (at least, the language spoken around us when we are at that age, even if that language is sign language). We don't need to hear every word or possible sentence structure (couldn't possibly) to pick up on the rules of grammar and apply them, when speaking and when listening. This only refers to the critical period; a child will learn grammar instinctively on being exposed to a language, but an adult must learn it by rote, in the same way as you have to learn to process visual input during the critical period for <i>that</i>, or you'll never have the same visual acuity as someone who did.</p><p>Thus far, I think I'm going along with him. I do have questions of a sort of chicken and the egg nature: which came first, the brain's Universal Grammar module, or language that necessitated it? I'm inclined to think that the structures that we now use to understand language were used for something else earlier in our evolution, and became co-opted into our communications array (so to speak) over time. Our brains formed language, and then the language formed our brains...</p><p>All in all, I don't know whether Pinker's right, but I found his work convincing. Having read a couple of other books on language, including Guy Deutscher's <i>
 <a href="http://breathesbooks.com/2014/01/25/review-through-the-language-glass/">Through the Language Glass</a>
</i>, and applying what I know from those too, I find it hard to disagree with Pinker even where I want to, for example about relativism.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/223837?shelf=non-fiction">non-fiction</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/223837?shelf=science-fact">science-fact</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/5130906-mikael-lind"></a></section><section><p>173 reviews53 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/154948047">January 8, 2012</a></section><div><p>First of all, I am not a big fan of Steven Pinker. I found <i>How the mind works</i> erroneous on many accounts. That said, <i>The Language Instinct</i> is despite its uncompromising MIT cognitivist stance a fun and interesting read. To me, even the title reveals a general error; i.e. <i>How the Mind Creates Language</i>. The mind does not create language; human beings create language in an inter-subjective way. (Compare: <i>brains</i> do not think (except as metaphorical speech, not suitable for scientific writing) <i>people</i> think.) So be on your guard and do not accept mr. Pinker's arguments without reflecting upon them. This book is full of interesting facts and stories, but I would recommend anyone to pick up a copy of Wittgenstein's <i>Philosophical Investigations</i> after having read Pinker in order to get a glance of the complicated reality outside the cognitivist nimbus cloud.</p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/5130906?shelf=cognitive-science">cognitive-science</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/5130906?shelf=linguistics">linguistics</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/36047563">June 2, 2010</a></section><section><div><p>Very interesting. Too long and technical for me. Most of the stuff I didn't care about. Not a criticism of the book but just a mismatch of interest.<p>Middle was boring. Writing was good. Sharp style. Insults fools and posers. Funny. Charming. The perfect example is the beginning of chapter 11 pg 340. This is the way to argue. Funny, ridiculing, forceful and gets the message across.</p><p>His metaphors are really good. Aspire to this.</p><p>Language is built into the mind. It evolved by natural selection. It is not a cultural artifact. "Ghetto talk" is just as complex as perfect english. Perfect english is a collection of rules that were sold to allow new wealth from the industrial revolution seem classy.</p><p>Quotes:</p><p>"Simply by making noises with our mouths, we can reliably cause precise new combinations of ideas to arise in each other's minds."</p><p>"Language is not a cultural artifact that we learn the way we learn to tell time or how the federal government works. Instead, it is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains. Language is a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the child spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal instruction, is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic, is quantitatively the same in every individual, and is distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently."</p><p>"In many cases a pidgin can be transmuted into a full complex language in one fell swoop: all it takes is for a group of children to be exposed to the pidgin at the age when they acquire their mother tongue."</p><p>"People store genes in their gonads and pass them to their children through their genitals; they store grammars in their brains and pass them to their children through their mouths. Gonads and brains are attached to each other in bodies, so when bodies move, genes and grammars move together. That is the only reason that geneticists find any correlation between the two."</p><p>"The brute mathematical fact is that all things being equal, there is a better chance of being a young person than being an old person. So genes that strengthen young organisms at the expense of old organisms have the odds in their favor and will tend to accumulate over evolutionary timespans, whatever the bodily system, and the result is overall senescence."</p><p>"Neuroscientists estimate that about thirty thousand genes, the majority of the human genome, are used to build the brain and nervous system."</p><p>"Outwitting and second-guessing an organism of approximately equal mental abilities with non-overlapping interests, at best, and malevolent intentions, at worst, makes formidable and ever-escalating demands on cognition. And a cognitive arms race clearly could propel a linguistic one. Ina ll cultures, social interactions are mediated by persuasion and argument...evolving humans lived in a world in which language was woven into the intrigues of politics, economics, technology, family, sex, and friendship that played key roles in individual reproductive success."</p><p>"All behavior is an interaction between nature and nurture, whose contributions are as inseparable as the length and width of a rectangle in determining its area." Beautiful</p></p></div><div><p>This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.</p></div></section><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1052384?shelf=biology">biology</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1052384?shelf=psychology">psychology</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/17568354-eliza"></a></section><section><p>592 reviews1,378 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1884299379">March 26, 2017</a></section><div><p>*Read for school*<p><b>2.5/3 stars</b></p><p>This was an okay read - very technical at some points, so those parts nearly lulled me to sleep. Honestly, I wouldn't have picked it up had it not been for my linguistics class - but i <i>did</i> learn about how languages formed, so in a way, it was pretty interesting. </p><p>Nothing remarkable, though.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/17568354?shelf=3-stars">3-stars</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/17568354?shelf=nonfiction">nonfiction</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/17568354?shelf=owned">owned</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/27613955-ashley-reid"></a></section><section><p>147 reviews113 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1311239873">May 20, 2017</a></section><div><p>There were some parts of this that were interesting and worth reading for, but overall it was a waffly and long winded book that I struggled to get through at some boring points.</p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/27613955?shelf=cover-love">cover-love</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/27613955?shelf=language">language</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/27613955?shelf=non-fic-blnk">non-fic-blnk</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1828815-anthony-buckley"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>9 books98 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/49666244">November 5, 2012</a></section><div><p>I had always supposed that linguists could not write clearly. Rather like psychiatrists who were mad, sociologists who couldn’t get on with people, and social anthropologists who were permanent outsiders, linguists, I supposed, devoted their adulthood overcoming their childhood difficulties with language. Here, however, I discover my prejudices overturned. Considering the inherent complexity of his topic, Steven Pinker’s book on language is witty, lucid and intelligible. <p>Pinker’s theme is that people are born with an inherent capacity – an instinct – that enables them to construct language. In much the same way as they are programmed to learn, at appropriate ages, to walk, to tell jokes and to have sex, so people have an innate ability to learn to speak correctly. Around this central idea – derived from Chomsky’s studies of syntax – Pinker hangs a summary of some of the most important recent ideas in linguistics. </p><p>The book therefore doubles as a textbook for a first year linguistics student and a good general introduction for a mildly interested beginner (for somebody like me). It is also a polemical book, for Pinker is not afraid to ride hobby horses and proclaim his own vision of the one true linguistics. He delves into the mysteries of Chomskyan deep structure, explaining that the grammar of particular languages are constructed from the inbuilt language-structure that is common to every person and every language. He defies the linguistic relativism associated with the names of Sapir and Whorf. He explains how people and animals think without having a language. He tells the story of deaf children in Nicaragua who were thrown together with older children who knew bits and pieces of sign language from a variety of sources, but who, from these bits and pieces, were able to construct a sign language as coherent as any other. He casts doubt on the supposed ability of monkeys and whales to speak human languages. He explores the biology that explains – or might explain – the instinct for speaking. He opposes those who fight endless wars against the split infinitive, the greengrocer's apostrophe and the final participle, claiming that their own version of English is the only correct one. And he does much more. </p><p>The book is, in short, informative and intelligent. It is also a lot of fun. I see that a more recent book by Pinker has been nominated for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. Having just read this one, I am not at all surprised. </p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1828815?shelf=anthropology">anthropology</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1828815?shelf=language">language</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1828815?shelf=useful">useful</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/7552897-sebastian"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>8 books26 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/591845053">June 15, 2018</a></section><div><p>A good portion of this book can be summed up in the relatively simple graph that was making the rounds on Twitter a while back: <a href="https://twitter.com/robdrummond/status/693384567038840832">https://twitter.com/robdrummond/statu...</a>. However, Pinker is a good enough writer that reading about the issue in book-length format rarely feels boring, as he throws about a plethora of interesting examples and anecdotes to illustrate the point. What’s more, the book skips around quite a bit, covering just about every aspect of general linguistics I could think of that actually interests me – how language works, how it was created, how the brain produces it, how various internal and external processes shape it, etc.<p>I do have objections, of course, one of them being that for a book that very loudly proclaims to be about language in general, it retains a strong English-leaning slant – there is quite some talk, for instance, about how English spelling is an optimal system of representing speech vocalizations on paper, which comes off as a really weird claim to someone reared in a writing system with a phonetic alphabet/script (Serbian Cyrillic, and to an extent, Serbo-Croatian Latin).</p><p>The segment on Chomsky and the structure of deep grammar/mentalese also suffers quite a bit in audiobook format. The narrator really makes an effort, but some of the structures described, while probably quite clear at a mere glance at a hand-drawn diagram, become an impenetrable forest of P(NP)VPs when read out loud.</p><p>On the other hand, the majority of the objections I saw here, glancing through the comments, boil down to either “boo-hoo, I disagree with his views, therefore this is a bad book” or “Pinker’s presentation is simplistic cherry-picking of straw-man arguments”. Well, one may disagree with what he’s saying, but Pinker <i>does</i> mention very specific sources and research his arguments lean on, and my humble academic experience with some of the opposition to his views leaves me inclined towards aligning with the theories presented herein. As for simplistic? Probably, but this is not a university textbook, so I don’t see the problem. He does what he meant to do, present an overall state of play in linguistics at the time of writing for a more-or-less lay audience. My edition also has a neat addendum at the end, where he looks back after more than a decade has passed, and discusses some of the changes and reactions to the contents of the book.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/11962530-krish"></a></section><section><p>23 reviews5 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2619381448">January 23, 2019</a></section><div><p>Main takeaways:<br />- Language is an innate skill possessed by humans and not acquired artificially through teaching like writing, programming, etc.<br />- Although innate, the skill can be automatically learnt only during the critical period of up to 6 years of age. Beyond this age, it has to be artificially acquired like a second language.<br />- Just one generation of children brought up by adults who speak a "pidgin" (a language lacking grammar and consisting of mere words from a number of different languages) is enough to create a "creole" (a grammatically rich language which borrows the pidgin vocabulary)<br />- All languages share a Universal Grammar (which is the part of language learning that's probably innate in humans). Each language follows the super-rules of this grammar but has its own values for the variable parameters depending on various cultural and environmental factors. <br />- Rules of grammar are only useful as long as they help resolve ambiguity and enable effective communication among humans. Rules like "don't end a sentence with a preposition" and "use whom instead of who" are bookishly enforced and serve no practical purpose.<br />- "English spelling could be better than it is. But it is already much better than people think it is. That is because writing systems do not aim to represent the actual sounds of talking, which we do not hear, but the abstract units of language underlying them, which we do hear."</p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/24011982-cynda"></a></section><section><p>1,238 reviews140 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1751864814">September 19, 2016</a></section><div><p>I so so so wanted to like this book. I took one linguistics class and did a number of rhetoric classes so I thought that I would find this book accessible. I did not. I recognize the Chomsky language trees. I did see why the trees were so important to discuss top and bottom sentences and to prove how all humans are hardwired for language so that babies simply learn if their family speaks top or bottom sentences and SVO or some other construction. Yet all human languaget is obviously human. I get that. I wonder why Pinker wrote such a detailed argument, so detailed that my attention derailed, and I cannot read one more page of this book.<br />So why 3 stars when I seem to hate this book? I do not hate the book. I am frustrated by the details. I plan to retern to this book at a later date and to read one chapter at a time and then put the book away for a month and then repeat the process until I complete the book. I am simply on information overload. I will re-read this book and fully intend to rate it 4 or 5 stars.</p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/24011982?shelf=history">history</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/24011982?shelf=language-writing">language-writing</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/24011982?shelf=medical-science">medical-science</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/7626390"></a></section><section><p>171 reviews3 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1377852487">September 12, 2018</a></section><div><p>This book is an excellent introduction into linguistics and language-related scientific fields (such as psycholinguistics, evolutionary linguistics, learning theory, etc), for someone like me who has been fascinated by the subject for a long time, but only had the chance to dabble a toe or two into one sub-area or another.<br />It corrects many popular misconceptions about language and language learning, from the point of view of the author, based on the latest scientific concensus (at the time the book was written in 1994, though there's a section at the end of the 2007 edition with additions and corrections), such as the strong Whorf-Sapir hypothesis (which states that language determines thoughts) which discredits the possibility of the 1984 dystopian scenario with Newspeak (*sigh of relief*), the idea that some non-human members of the great apes could use "language" even remotely close in complexity to human language as claims have continuously been made over the years, or that parents speaking to their young children is essential for the later's ability to acquire language.<br />It also presents Chomsky's hypothesis of Universal Grammar, which is a set of rules thought to be the backbone of all human languages, regardless of their apparent phonetics, vocabulary or grammatical rules, and a mirror image of the brain structures that might have evolved to allow complex language parsing and construction, as well as acquiring the native language during childhood.<br />Considering Steven Pinker's simple and beautiful style, as well as clear and direct explanations (for the most part), I am certainly looking forward to reading the rest of his books.</p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/7626390?shelf=above-150p-read">above-150p-read</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/7626390?shelf=format-paperback">format-paperback</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/7626390?shelf=language-learning">language-learning</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/28368477-alatea"></a></section><section><p>484 reviews41 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2166647311">November 4, 2017</a></section><div><p>I usually "go with the feeling" when I review books, so it's really difficult to review non-fiction. But I'll try anyway.<p><i>The language history</i> was an easy, but satisfying popular-science read. I highly recommend it to everyone who is interested in linguistics or language in general.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/43915571-zsa-zsa"></a></section><section><p>342 reviews61 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1612961930">June 18, 2016</a></section><div><p>it took me a while to read it cause it got too scientific at times, but Pinker has tried to explain this as simple as he can and his humor makes it a good read. i recommend this to language lovers.</p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/33275759-elena"></a></section><section><p>130 reviews38 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1928455114">March 9, 2017</a></section><div><p>I really-really like my readings about languages (English and my native Russian), never bored with them, and this particular book was a treat. I’ll read other books of Steven Pinker for sure.</p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/147818-john-wiswell"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>43 books373 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/43693460">October 3, 2009</a></section><div><p>This review could be long or short. I wasn't sure if I wanted to waste the time, but it's a long book and there are some seriously interesting and seriously stupid things in it. It centers on the issue of language as learned or as instinct, which can be so fine an issue that most people really won’t care. For the short: it's very nice to see so much research on language presented and Pinker does a good job of explaining the often oversimplified theory that there is a genetic basis for understanding language (parts are probably split between your genetic code, but there is no one gene that controls all of it). But there is also some will-meltingly stupid material, like arguments that we can't have standards in our language because we can't judge whale songs and programming a useful speaking device wouldn't include commands like "don't split infinitives" because a screwdriver doesn't split infinitives. As he tries to illuminate how the brain creates language, the book is pretty interesting. As he tries to enforce his values, like that we shouldn't have any aesthetic consideration, he's worthless.<p>Okay. That's the short one. Here’s a longer one.</p><p>Pinker's central argument does nothing for me. That argument is that we have an instinct for creating language. You can construct sentences without thinking about the structure, and even when you babble you have a sense of when to pause for verbal grammar. Think of kids picking up swearing just by hearing it – they aren’t instructed in how to use it, but figure it out logically and intuitively. Since I already believe in this instinct and it seems pretty obvious that we do have it, an argument that it exists isn't impressive, though it was nice of him to collect so many anecdotes and studies that illustrate it to be the case. The best parts of the book are studies that show how versatile people are with language, like children picking up Pidgin or nonsense and converting them, within one generation, into grammatically sound modes of communication.</p><p>The whole matter is kind of a bunk argument. Either our brains have an instinct for picking up and creating language, or we created languages that our brains are capable of picking up and using. If you think about it on those terms for so much as a minute, you'll get how silly the debate is. At best, both are partially true: we generate and imitate modes of expression that our brains can use readily. From the creation standpoint, why wouldn't we make something that's pretty close to what our brains can handle with unconscious ease? And from the instinct standpoint, why wouldn't we have instincts of some strength or other for the things that are created from inside our heads?</p><p>Do we think about language or use it unconsciously? It’s obvious that we do both, though we wing it more than we plot it. It’s not an either/or problem, and that Pinker misses this almost entirely is sad. Parents help teach their children and foster language, from obvious examples like imparting the names for things and spelling of words, to what’s been found in recent scientific studies (not in this book) examining mastery of language in children who come from households with differing amounts of speech. Every day you probably struggle for words and consciously choose what to say at least some of the time – you know there is a conscious component to speech. There is unconscious and conscious education that he simply disregards because he's arguing for this instinct. Pinker choosing a side here feels like he's doing it for attention, and it's not as though this is the only time (in this book or academia in general) where it feels like his decision was unnecessary to the pursuit of truth.</p><p>His side-arguments can get annoying. Sometimes he seems downright condescending on the intelligence of children and the deaf, and often he seems to skim rather than analyze evidence when it suits his arguments. For instance in the case of a Simon, a deaf boy whose deaf parents had improper signing that he did not pick up, Pinker makes serious assumptions about what he must have done with no evidence or even interviews with the boy in question to verify the conclusions. It’s not even anecdotal at that point; it’s conjecture, which does not belong next to the real research on Simon’s case. Conjecture is essential in analysis, but not like this, and not in making the ironclad decisions about the way minds work as Pinker does.</p><p>By far his silliest argument is in favor of descriptivism over prescriptivism. Descriptivism is the school that describes how people speak; prescriptivism deals with how people ought to. Here, like in the bunk argument over using a language consciously or unconsciously, most intelligent people understand that language functions best when we mediate between the descriptive and prescriptive influences, changing the rules to better suit some things, but sticking to them for others. Being a scientist who observes, Pinker is interested in descriptivism as it shows the most about how we are inclined to speak and act in language. But being foolishly inclined to polar positions, he argues that we ought to only follows descriptivism and does it in downright stupid ways, like saying that we don't need a speaking machine is programmed to "not split infinitives" because screwdrivers already don't split infinitives. That’s moronic and if his opposition made a similar rhetorical move he would never allow it. His conclusions are that whatever we “get” by the language instinct should make up all the prescriptive rules, and that whatever we don’t make should constitute the rest. You know, in the way that we eat whatever tastes good, think whatever we like regardless of objective evidence and live in total anarchy without any government. Okay, those three examples are stupidity on my own part, but that’s what this pure-descriptive argument deserves. It comes from his oversimplified approach to language cognition, at first pretending that people don’t think or act in their education of language, and now proceeding that we shouldn’t think about how we’re going to use it or apply intentional value. That he quotes a Shakespearian character in defense his of anti-prescriptive campaign when that author taught writing seals the deal.</p><p>Now before Pinker's fans get angry over the rating alone, if you hold your mouse button over the stars you see that each correlates to a statement. One star means "I didn't like it," and for the fascinating research in the book, Pinker became too annoying and questionable at too many points for me to like his book. So it gets one star because, you see, they have prescribed meaning and are not just whatever you want them to be.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/8235372-may"></a></section><section><p>146 reviews63 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/965124315">August 24, 2014</a></section><div><p>I just finished reading the most challenging non-fiction leisure book I have ever read: Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct. It was a close call, but I'm relieved that I powered through.<p>Before I dive into my review, I'd like to clarify that I found it challenging not because my knowledge of linguistics prior to reading this book was terribly basic, but rather because there is so much information packed into The Language Instinct. That is, however, its greatest merit - and the reason why my mind was being blown after every chapter.</p><p>In The Language Instinct, Pinker argues that humans' ability to acquire language is not dependant on education or imitation. Rather, it's instinctual. It's "wired into our brains by evolution."<br />According to Pinker, "evolution did not make a ladder. It made a bush." That is to say, Pinker disagrees with Darwin's theory that we evolved from Monkeys.</p><p>That's why computers will never be able to learn language the way a child could, and also why apes will never be able to speak English or Learn American Sign Language. Indeed, Pinker's research shows that those who claimed that laboratory apes' gestures resembled sign language were actually overanalyzing what they observed.</p><p>Of course, there are many Darwinists out there who would shake their heads at such a thought (Pinker, however, is pretty convincing). All it would take, however, is the discovery of an evolved trait for an aesthetic, and not pragmatic, purpose, to defy the theory of natural selection.</p><p>Anyway - because Pinker is trying to prove that language is an instinct, he begins at the roots of language acquisition. There is a lot of research on children. Such research is especially interesting when Pinker discusses 'creoles,' mother tongues that are developed as a result of several languages meshed together. The possibility of such 'meshing' suggests that an universal grammar underlies all language.</p><p>The existence of a "universal grammar," however, would not wholly verify that language is an instinct. After all, we have words for 'water' not because our DNA dictates it but because we need to refer to water. Neither is there a 'grammar gene - an American-born Chinese can just as easily learn English as his or her American peers. So, it seems that "complexity in the mind is not caused by learning; learning is caused by complexity in the mind."</p><p>The Language Instinct is also in many ways a defense of language. Pinker argues that there is no reason to look down upon primitive dialects because primitive cultures have complex language systems and, after all, a language is also a dialect - just one with "an army and a navy."</p><p>In his chapter on language mavens, a.k.a grammar nazis, Pinker also explains why certain grammatical errors are perhaps even preferable. For example, language mavens will argue that "Who did you see" should be "Whom did you see" or at least "Which person did you see" according to the rules of grammar. Yet can you imagine, Pinker asks, saying something like "Whom did you sound like?" Moreover, the final option ("which person") restricts the 'who' from being an animal or multiple people.</p><p>The Language Instinct is an enlightening read that leaves reader with a deeper understanding, and growing curiosity, of language. Pinker writes in a clear and sometimes almost conversational way that renders a PhD-worthy subject into one that general audiences can grasp. Of course, certain sections are utterly perplexing and almost impossible to retain. Above all, however, Pinker convincingly presents the thesis that language - contrary to what many believe - is instinctual.</p><p>As he says, "this is news." If language is innate, much more could be; such a revelation would revolutionize the way we consider education, study the human brain and even assess the validity of Darwin's theory of evolution!!</p><p>Factoids:</p><p>- We are told that a noun is the most important part of a sentence because it is the doer; however, a noun cannot operate without verb. So, the verb is the boss of a sentence<br />- Mentalese: the hypothetical "language of thought, or representation of concepts and propositions in the brain in which ideas, including the meanings of words and sentences, are couched.<br />- Listeme: an element of language that must be memorized because its sound or meaning does not conform to some general rule. All word roots, irregular forms and idioms are listemes. <br />- When your tongue is high and at front of your mouth, you'll produce high-frequency sounds (e.g. e in teeny); when your tongue is low and at the back of your mouth, you'll produce low-frequency sounds (e.g. a in large). Now, this is especially fascinating when we consider words such as frobbing, twiddling and tweaking. To frob is to move a dial or switch by drastically adjusting its range; to twiddle is to adjust the switch by a smaller margin; to tweak is to adjust the switch by only a litte. Interestingly, it's always the word with the high front vowel that goes first in expressions such as ping-pong and chit-chat. Hip-hop, flip-flop, the list goes on... <br />- English is an isolating language, meaning that you must say "to go" to indicate the act of going somewhere - two units are used to express one definition. The french aller, however, does the deed in one word. </p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section></section></article></div></div>||||I|||| * Home
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 Language and Human Nature Tetralogy #1

 The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

 Steven Pinker

 4.01
 21,131 ratings 1,095 reviews
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 The classic book on the development of human language by the world’s leading expert on language and the mind.

 In this classic, the world's expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution. The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistics Society of America. This edition includes an update on advances in the science of language since The Language Instinct was first published.
 Genres Nonfiction Science Psychology Linguistics Language Philosophy Neuroscience
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 448 pages, Paperback

 First published January 1, 1994

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 Steven Pinker

 67 books 9,344 followers
 Steven Arthur Pinker is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science. Pinker is known for his wide-ranging explorations of human nature and its relevance to language, history, morality, politics, and everyday life. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as the New York Times, Time, and The New Republic, and is the author of numerous books, including The Language Instinct , How the Mind Works , Words and Rules , The Blank Slate , The Stuff of Thought , The Better Angels of Our Nature , The Sense of Style , and most recently, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress .

 He was born in Canada and graduated from Montreal's Dawson College in 1973. He received a bachelor's degree in experimental psychology from McGill University in 1976, and then went on to earn his doctorate in the same discipline at Harvard in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, then became an assistant professor at Harvard and then Stanford University. From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. (Except for a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1995-6.) As of 2008, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard.

 Pinker was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in 2004 and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in 2005. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv, McGill, and the University of Tromsø, Norway. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003. In January 2005, Pinker defended Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, whose comments about the gender gap in mathematics and science angered much of the faculty. On May 13th 2006, Pinker received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.

 In 2007, he was invited on The Colbert Report and asked under pressure to sum up how the brain works in five words – Pinker answered "Brain cells fire in patterns."

 Pinker was born into the English-speaking Jewish community of Montreal. He has said, "I was never religious in the theological sense... I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew." As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969. His father, a trained lawyer, first worked as a traveling salesman, while his mother was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has two younger siblings. His brother is a policy analyst for the Canadian government. His sister, Susan Pinker, is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and the author of The Sexual Paradox and The Village Effect .

 Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too divorced. He is married to the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, the author of 10 books and winner of the National Medal of the Humanities. He has no children.

 His next book will take off from his research on "common knowledge" (knowing that everyone knows something). Its tentative title is: Don't Go There: Common Knowledge and the Science of Civility, Hypocrisy, Outrage, and Taboo .

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 Petra X has her eye on the prize
 2,384 reviews 33.9k followers
 November 29, 2017
 In my bookshop are lots of books like, 'First 100 Words' and "ABC with pictures", you know those sort of books. We talk to our babies in 'motherese' and we point to things and name them, but we do not teach our babies grammar. We say things like 'look at those puppies there, they are much smaller than these ones here'. We don't explain when to use words like 'those' or 'these' or 'there' and 'here' and where we put them in a sentence.

 We don't need to, Pinker says, Chomsky said, that grammar is built-in. That no matter what language a child learns, they will use the words grammatically without any instruction. And if a child learns wildly different languages as say Welsh, Spanish and English (there are many people who grow up speaking these particular three in Patagonia) they will use the correct grammar as well as words without any difficulty at all.
 __________

 Notes on reading: What I've learned so far: that it takes only one generation to turn a pidgin into a creole (language). Immigrant workers in Hawaii, Japanese, Filipinos, Chinese, Koreans even Portuguese and Europeans spoke to each other in pidgin. Pidgin is a collection of words without any grammar. It's a bit like what most of us who are not linguistically-gifted speak when we travel. We mix the few words we know of the local language with English and (if British) shouted loudly and repetitively until the 'native' gets it.

 The children of the immigrant workers were looked after together when their parents were in the fields and they, just like that, because of the instinct for language, for grammar, turned the pidgin into a creole, a language that could express anything and everything. Children never speak pidgin, their brains impose structure on words and they learn from each other. Sadly, the window for language acquisition closes as puberty approaches. After that it is only talented individuals who can acquire a foreign language with perfect grammar and accent.

 Jamaican, which Jamaicans continually put down as the patois of the poor people', not proper 'standard English' is in fact a proper language with its own grammar, although a majority of the words are derived from English and Akan,

 Pinker says he's not 100% behind Chomsky's theories. He's pretty close though. I got bored with the chapters on Chomsky's language trees, I'm more interested in how we produce language than the structure of it.

 Great book, a difficult and academic read (at least to me) and boring in bits too but none of that takes away from opening up a new skein of thought for me, and I enjoy that more than anything else from a book.
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 Manny
 Author 28 books 13.4k followers
 June 14, 2012
 There's a joke in this book that linguists really like. An English woman has just got off the plane at Boston's Logan airport. She takes a cab, and starts questioning the driver about where to obtain various local delicacies.

 "Oh yes," she says in her posh English accent. "Could you tell me where you can get scrod here?"

 And the driver replies, "You know, you don't often hear that in the pluperfect subjunctive!"

 __________________________________________

 Another linguist joke, for people who haven't already heard it. The guy is visiting the university, and managed to get himself thoroughly lost. He goes up to an academic-looking type and asks politely,

 "Excuse me, do you know which building the linguistics department is in?"

 "It's generally considered incorrect to end a sentence with a preposition" replies the academic.

 "I'm sorry!" says the visitor. "I mean, do you know which building the linguistics department is in, asshole?"

 __________________________________________

 An American grad student and a German grad student are talking about their dissertations.

 "I've nearly finished mine," boasts the German. "It's in four volumes!"

 "Wow!" says the American, impressed. "What are they?"

 "Well," says the German. "The first one is the background, the second is the experiments, and the third is the analysis."

 "What about the fourth?" asks the American.

 "Oh! That's just the verbs."

 [You may need to know something about German word-order to find this amusing.:]

 __________________________________________

 It's the day after the Great Vowel Shift, and this guy goes into a bar.

 "Can I have an ale?" he asks.

 And the barman replies,

 "I'm sorry sir, the fishmonger is next door."

 __________________________________________

 I wondered where the Great Vowel Shift Joke came from, and - how could I not have guessed? - it turns out to be the work of the late, much-lamented James D. McCawley. Specifically, it comes from his piece "Linguistically Noteworthy Dates in May", which I reproduce here for your delectation:

 May 2, 1919. Baudouin de Courtenay concedes defeat in his bid for the presidency of Poland.
 May 3, 1955. Mouton & Co. discover how American libraries order books and scheme to cash in by starting several series of books on limericks. The person given charge of this project mishears and starts several series of books on linguistics. No one ever notices the mistake.
 May 5, 1403. The Great English Vowel Shift begins. Giles of Tottenham calls for ale at his favorite pub and is perplexed when the barmaid tells him that the fishmonger is next door.
 May 6, 1939. The University of Chicago trades Leonard Bloomfield to Yale University for two janitors and an undisclosed number of concrete gargoyles.
 May 7, 1966. r-less pronunciation is observed in eight kindergarten pupils in Secaucus, N.J. The governor of New Jersey stations national guardsmen along the banks of the Hudson.
 May 9, 1917. N. Ja. Marr discovers ROSH, the missing link for Japhetic unity.
 May 11, 1032. Holy Roman Emperor Conrad II orders isoglosses erected across northern Germany as defense against Viking intruders.
 May 12, 1965. Sydney Lamb announces discovery of the hypersememic stratum, setting off a wave of selling on the NYSE.
 May 13. Vowel Day. (Public holiday in Kabardian Autonomous Region). The ceremonial vowel is pronounced by all Kabardians as a symbol of brotherhood with all speakers of human languages.
 May 14, 519 B.C. Birth of Panini.
 May 15, 1964. J. Katz and J. Fodor are separated in 5-hour surgery from which neither recovers.
 May 17, 1966. J. R. Ross tells a clean joke.
 May 18, 1941. Quang Phuc Dong is captured by the Japanese and interned for the duration of hostilities.
 May 19. Diphthong Day. (Public holiday in Australia)
 May 20, 473 B.C. Publisher returns to Panini a manuscript entitled Saptadhyayi with a note requesting the addition of a chapter on phonology. Panini begins struggling to meet the publisher's deadline.
 May 21, 1962. First mention of The Sound Pattern of English as ‘in press’.
 May 23, 38,471 B.C. God creates language.
 May 26, 1945. Zellig Harris applies his newly formulated discovery procedures and discovers [t].
 May 27, 1969. George Lakoff discovers the global rule. Supermarkets in Cambridge, Mass. are struck by frenzied buying of canned goods.
 May 29, 1962. Angular brackets are discovered. Classes at M.I.T. are dismissed and much Latvian plum brandy is consumed.
 May 30, 1939. Charles F. Hockett finishes composing the music for the Linguistic Society of America's anthem, ‘Can You Hear the Difference?’
 May 31, 1951. Chomsky discovers Affix-hopping and is reprimanded by his father for discovering rules on shabas.
 linguistics-and-philosophy
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 Madeleine
 Author 2 books 848 followers
 June 28, 2013
 I have this incredible mental block about reviewing nonfiction.

 My formal linguistics experience is limited to exactly one History of the English Language class as a college junior (and it remains one of the most fascinating, satisfying and illuminating classroom experiences I've ever had, university-level or otherwise), which was about when I realized that the study of language was up there with the school paper and my creative-writing courses in terms of the all-over fulfillment I found in it. It helped that I had an enthusiastic professor whose wealth of knowledge and general zeal turned my disappointment in the English department's lack of additional linguistic offerings into a fervent hunt for extracurricular reading material regarding the topic, though I can't help but feel that my self-guided tour through the field isn't yielding the same benefits I'd've received from exploring the same terrain with an expert leading the way. Hence my concern that I'll sound like I'm trying to pretend that I know what I'm talking about on some deeper level when my background in the roots of language is far more recreational than academic. All's I can say for sure is that The Language Instinct was great fun, beautifully written and an absolute whirlwind of information that covers a dizzying array of unexpected but thought-provokingly relevant subjects.

 Oh, and that Steven Pinker has the most admirably disheveled hair since Georges Perec . Their locks are not to be trifled with, nor, clearly, are their minds.

 The last language-centric book I read argued in favor of a point that had been laughed into noncredibility for years thanks to the implied racism it still carried from the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis days, which is that the world actually looks different based on one's view of the world based on his or her culture and language ( Through the Language Glass , written by Guy Deutscher and published in 2010 -- and which I must admit to having read long enough ago that I have shamefully forgotten many of its finer details but do recall as having made a rather convincing argument, as it delved into stuff such as how a language can reflect a culture's attitude toward its women) -- an hypothesis that Pinker decried within the first 50 pages of this 1994 bestseller as "wrong, all wrong," as it is his view that "discussions that assume that language determines thought carry on only by a collective suspension of disbelief." My copy of The Language Instinct includes Pinker's chapter-by-chapter asides about updates in the many areas he explored in a book he published more than two decades ago, including the neo-Whorfism that has sprung up in recent years, a revival that allowed works such as Through the Language Glass to be taken more seriously because the misguided blinders and red herrings of the linguistic avenue of contemplation have finally fallen away and its points can be made in such a way to sidestep the unfortunate pitfalls of the past.

 Seeing the inverse of an argument made just as successfully as my initial exposure to it was what sucked me in for good with this book. The overlapping of an argument's two sides and seeing familiar names, familiar backgrounds, familiar failings and completely different conclusions were all strangely rewarding payoffs for my own curious, solitary explorations.

 And that spark of recognition just kept cropping up in myriad forms as I read on and on (and on and on, as it took me, like, two months to finish this -- absolutely no fault of Pinker's, but rather that of my compulsion to juggle two and three books at once and work's nasty habit of reducing my reading time in two-week cycles). While the biology and neurobiology and child development and abnormal psych were all a bit of alien territory for me, Pinker presented them all in such accessible ways that my tactile-learner self was picking up everything he was putting down. Which made the friendlier faces I'd seen before all the more inviting: The progression of Old English to Middle English to Modern English was like having tea (or mead) with an old friend, reading about the Great Vowel Shift was like reminiscing with an old lover and wondering if maybe the stars are finally aligned in our favor, the uncanny commonalities between seemingly unrelated tongues was a kiddie ball pit wrapped in a trampoline for my brain, and the pages and chapters of grammatical theory? Be still, my pedantic heart! I didn't even mind, as a happily neurotic proofreader, when Pinker started asserting that maybe the Grammar Mavens have their priorities all wrong, that even nontraditional dialects have their merits, that "whom" ought to go the way of "ye" and its other equally antiquated brethren, that it's okay to hang on to the rules of usage for clarity's sake rather than browbeating those poor folks who don't work themselves into paroxysms of glee at the very notion of sentence diagrams over their truly nitpicky transgressions.

 I had no idea the lengths and detail necessary in asserting that something so mind-bogglingly complex but is so universally taken for granted -- that is, human speech -- is a deep-seated biological impulse, hard-wired into our brains to the point that we are all, in fact, baby geniuses when it comes to sussing out most of the nuances of our diabolically tricky native languages by the age of three. I had no well-formed opinion on the matter of language as a learned habit versus a communicative imperative instilled in us via evolution before coming into this but did Pinker ever reel me in, hold my attention and make me want to delve deeper into his research, theories and positions regarding the language instinct. Bearing witness to the impressive lengths he goes to to cover all his ground from every angle is reward enough for hearing him out for nearly 500 pages, because Pinker's dedication to the language instinct is evident enough in the miles of homework he did to make his point with armfuls of wide-ranging detail and chapter upon chapter of some truly compelling writing.
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 Tyas
 Author 27 books 75 followers
 February 25, 2009
 A friend, a diplomat’s daughter, when asked how she had managed to master Dutch when she went to a school in Suriname, shrugged.
 “I don’t know. I remember being so confused during the first day, not understanding a single word. But not so long after that, I was able to speak in Dutch. I just spoke, I don’t know how.”

 That had happened years ago, when she was still very young. We have always wondered how come children are able to learn language easily, while many, if not most adults, find the task of learning a new language bewildering, bordering with the impossible. Plus, children are not just great imitators. If they were, we would only be repeating things our parents had told us when we were small. But we don’t. We don’t just mimic our parents’ words. Something in our neural circuitry does more than just copying; it analyses grammar, it finds for pattern, it composes new combination of words... frighteningly complex processes that, so far, cannot even be matched by the most advanced of AI. C3PO is still a long way to go.

 The ability of learning language is one of the many subjects covered by the book The Language Instinct , written by Steven Pinker, a psycholinguist in Harvard. (No, he’s not some crazy linguist who enjoys slaying people.)

 Language is probably the hallmark of human race. We boast our ability to communicate in words, a feature of our culture that no other living forms have. But Pinker shows us that far from being a cultural invention, language is actually an instinct . And because it is, then despite the doubts of the likes of Chomsky, it must be built gradually in the lineages one of which led to us thanks to natural selection. Aiming towards the goal of convincing us about that main point of language being an instinct, Pinker wove an abundance of evidence into this clear, mostly easy-to-swallow book. I said most, because to be frank at times I was lost among a wealth of linguistic terms that I had to crawl through, trying to just grab the general point of some parts.

 Nevertheless, I like Pinker’s book for dissecting language thoroughly. My favourite part is of course about the language mavens – people who think they have the task to safeguard the purity of language and grammar. Pinker showed us that many instances of ‘ungrammatical’ words or sentences according to those mavens, are actually grammatical according to how our brain works. Very enlightening, especially for someone like me who has for quite some time lost her faith in the tyranny of KBBI and EYD of the Indonesian language. (Our own language mavens, for instance, would waste their sweat telling us that the correct spelling for ‘lembab’ is ‘lembap’, though you understand that both mean the same anyway, and that you may not speak of ‘jam delapan’, but ‘pukul delapan’ instead.)

 But hey, if this sounds like telling us to ditch our dictionaries and standard spellings and pronunciation altogether, what am I doing, writing something in what, I hope, is a neat piece of review, instead 0f sumth1n l1k3 d33s? (You might even notice that I even care to hit the spacebar twice after a period, but only once after a comma.)

 Well, when I talk with my sister and brother, or with my bestfriends, sometimes we use words and phrases only we understand. (I wager none of you know what an ‘exedol’ is.) Sometimes we don’t even have to finish our sentences. Our experience together has created specific words and phrases and shaped the language that we use when we communicate with each other. But, when I write something, keeping a general reader in mind, I must be careful to use words and phrases most, if not all, readers would understand, presenting my thought clearly, preventing misunderstanding or confusion (except if that is exactly my intention, but Joyce I am not). Hence my writing style – but trust me, in verbal communication, I might sound very, very different.

 Language is far more interesting than filling up blanks on a question sheet with the right form of verbs, and Steven Pinker has a way of revealing to us how amazing our language and our brain are.

 biology general-science language
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 Jessica
 583 reviews 23 followers
 May 2, 2011
 I had The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language out of the library for the entire summer. I finally finished it by actively reading it on the train for a couple of weeks. It's interesting, don't get me wrong, it's just LONG and has enough dull/confusing stretches that I couldn't bring myself to read it in my free time - it was pretty much a train-only book.

 The book's underlying claim is that all human beings are born with something Pinker calls a Universal Grammar, which causes us to acquire language instinctively. Whether we are born into an English or Kinyarwandan or sign-language community affects only the details of our language acquisition - we are wired to understand the way language works.

 He makes many good points, and I learned a lot from reading this book, but something underlying the text was somewhat disturbing to me (and it's not just the way he seems to revere Noam Chomsky as a god, quoting him earnestly and often, and almost overemphasizing the one point where he disagrees with Chomsky as if to say, "Look, all you people who think I'm just digesting Chomsky for the masses - I DO have my own thoughts! So there!"). It's that Pinker is 100% an objectivist, believing that our language and culture don't really affect the underlying processes in our minds and that human beings are ultimately the same, whereas I can't see the world without some degree of relativity slipping in, thinking that we are all very very similar and are justified in acting as if we are all the same, but that there are subtle differences that we may not entirely be able to overcome. I think lanugage, at least to a small degree, does affect the way we think and process the world, even if the differences are mostly ones we can see past or work around when talking with others from a different language background.

 (I laughed every time I turned the book over and saw the quote on the back from William F. Buckley, Jr.: "Steven Pinker is, I think, engagingly wrong in some of his conclusions, but the operative word here is engagingly. He reminds us of the pleasures of reading about language, provided people like him are at the wheel.")

 A few details I really enjoyed about this book: Case studies and quotes from people with various neurological disorders affecting their language abilities. The detail to which Pinker addressed sign languages, showing how language acquisition follows the same steps whether it is spoken or gestured (deaf babies "babble" with their hands at the same age that hearing babies babble with their mouths). The linguistics primers, which had me making phoneme sounds and sticking my finger in my mouth to see how my tongue and lips were arranged (while on the train!). Reasons why the "language mavens" (people who bemoan the decline of English) are often wrong.

 This is definitely a worthwhile read if you're interested in linguistics but haven't studied much on the topic yet. There's a lot of value in this book, even though some passages do get overwhelmingly dry or pedantic (pages of sentence diagramming scattered throughout the book, for example). I wouldn't recommend it to a casual reader, since I kind of had to will myself to finish reading the book, but I do think I learned a lot for sticking it out.
 nonfiction
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 Andrew
 1,963 reviews 675 followers
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 October 9, 2010
 Steven Pinker and I should be natural enemies. He's a representative of what I consider to be the smarmy, science-precludes-all-else school of hung-up modernist reductionists, while I fly the flag of what he considers to be the wishy-washy, Nietzsche-damaged academic Left. And yet it's difficult for me not to have some respect for his project.

 When he's not making potshots at relativism(s), he is generally quite lucid and charming, and throughout writes with a clear, approachable logic. By cogitating on the structure of Creole languages and the speech patterns of aphasics, he makes a very, very strong case for a universal grammar. While there are suggestions that certain features of universal aren't present in some languages, it seems to be a reasonable hypothesis. I will say, as an arch-empiricist and an arch-skeptic, that there's a very strong chance that grammatical structures quite likely have a social rather than a strictly evolutionary basis, but the idea is certainly thought-provoking. And, importantly for us moody relativists, he has convinced me (in a way that Peter Singer totally didn't) of the democratic potential of the notion of innate human nature.

 I do feel that he utilizes a certain circular logic. In Pinker's view, morphemes fit into the framework of syntax, and therefore language is innate. What is a morpheme? Something that fits into the framework of syntax. Also, he largely relies on generalizations rather than universals.

 Oh, and he claims signifiers are arbitrary, even in the case of onomatopoeia. And yet he tries to claim that certain signifiers are non-arbitrary because we evolved in certain ways. This is just a glaring example that implies, to me, that Pinker used his data to fit his conclusion. Bad science booohissss.

 But while these problems call into question his work and method, it's still a work I have the utmost respect for, and that everyone interested in language, whether liquored-up French deconstructionist or icy positivist, needs to read.
 scientific-nonfiction
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 David Rubenstein
 801 reviews 2,503 followers
 April 10, 2010
 Previously, I had read Steven Pinker's "The Stuff of Thought", which is also an excellent book. I enjoyed that book, so I next read this one--and I'm glad I did. "The Language Instinct" is an absolutely fascinating book! The author presents some very convincing arguments, that the acquisition of language is an instinct that has evolved over many generations, through natural selection. Steven Pinker is right on the money, when it comes to his analysis of evolution. Every chapter is compelling, and each chapter investigates language from a different perspective.

 In both this book, and in "The Stuff of Thought", Pinker investigates why so many seemingly irregular word usages are not irregular at all. Often we instinctively use words and phrases that seem illogical, just because "it sounds right." Pinker shows the logic underlying the usage--and each time, I just have to say, "oh-my-gosh--of course!"



 linguistics nonfiction psychology
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 Koen Crolla
 722 reviews 168 followers
 December 29, 2010
 Pinker is as much of a twit as his hair suggests: The Language Instinct is a miserable pile of unsupported and unsupportable conclusions, straw man attacks, hypocrisy leap-frogging into doublethink, shoddy reasoning, knee-jerk contrarianism, indeliberate obtusity, and gut-feeling argumentation. Pinker tries to synthesize the ideas of people smarter than he is (Chomsky, mostly), and many of these are perfectly fine the way they were originally formulated; they no longer are after Pinker is through defending them, because he understands neither the ideas nor any arguments in their favour.
 As an example, do you remember the argument Dawkins once made, possibly in The Blind Watchmaker, about how very small changes can accumulate and turn into very significant results in a relatively small amount of time? He used a hypothetical population of mice that grew in average size by one percent every generation, and showed that within a few thousand generations — a mere couple of millennia! — those mice would be the size of elephants. Pinker tries to use this same story to show that small *selection pressures* can have significant results quickly:

 > ``Imagine a mouse that was subject to a miniscule selection pressure for increased size—say, one percent reproductive advantage for offspring that were one percent bigger. Some arithmetic shows that the mouse's descendants would evolve to the size of an elephant in a few thousand generations, an evolutionary eyeblink.''

 Which is obviously fractally incoherent, as he would have realised if he'd understood Dawkins's argument instead of just trying to repeat it to try to get a good review by him for the back cover (which he got), or even just tried to do said arithmetic. The sad part is that what he set out to argue is actually true; his bungled argument just undermined it.
 This is par for the course (there are more egregious examples, but this one stuck because it's Dawkins), and Pinker repeatedly fucks over his main thesis — that language is instinctive, which was as uncontroversial in 1994, when the book was written, as it is now — in the same way. Worse than that, though, he then tries to pretend that arguments in favour of this thesis mean that language is *nothing but* instinctive and, incidentally, uniquely human, and that ``therefore'' everything from linguistic prescriptivism to animal language to Sapir-Whorf to being interested in etymology is completely and utterly wrong-headed and obviously moronic, which he tries to back up by attacking caricatures of these things or, not infrequently, the character of the people involved.

 Anyway, other people have apparently done thorough jobs of taking apart The Language Instict, so I won't waste any more time on it. Not everything he says is wrong (stopped clocks and all that), and it's a lot like Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind in that some of the digressions are interesting enough, but the signal-to-noise ratio is so pathetically low that the book as a whole isn't worth your time. Read Chomsky instead; Pinker would claim he's saying the same things he is anyway, which demonstrates just how confused he is.
 Maybe it's just because TLI is his first book. Elsewhere in my to-read stack is his most recent one, The Stuff of Thought; we'll see how it compares. I'm not holding my breath. Ultimately, the problem isn't that he was new to writing, because he wasn't; it's that he's a psychologist, and not a real scientist.
 biology language
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 Jimmy
 150 reviews 182 followers
 March 27, 2015
 In The Descent of Man , Charles Darwin wrote, “Man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children; while no child has an instinctive tendency to bake, brew, or write.” The experimental psychologist, Steven Pinker, took this quote as the inspiration for his book on – what he considers – the idea that there exists an innate language instinct to be found across all cultures. Elaborating on the canonical linguistic ideas of Noam Chomsky, particularly in regard to Chomsky’s Universal Grammar, Pinker presents the lay reader with numerous examples of how language acquisition, grammatical comprehension, and the tendency to speak, are all aspects of an innate linguistic tendency that human beings share, regardless of cultural background or specific language.

 Though Pinker generally agrees with Chomsky’s work on Universal Grammar, The Language Instinct focuses primarily on the idea that thoughts create language, a mental process that Pinker refers to as “mentalese”. This theoretical linguistic perspective is diametric to that of the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, which suggests that language determines thought, and that the particular culture one belongs to is unique, in turn greatly affecting the way that a person communicates, utilizes language, and ultimately, perceives the world around them.

 In Chapter one, entitled “An Instinct to Acquire an Art”, Pinker covers the two opposing linguistic schools, and talks about Chomsky and his research on Universal grammar. Pinker begins his polemic on Whorfian claims about language coloring in human perspective by discussing Chomsky’s skepticism, concerning not merely the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, but the “Standard Social Science Model” (SSCM) in general. Pinker, siding with Chomsky, feels that, not only is the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis wrong, but the basic intellectual stance that “the human psyche is molded by the surrounding culture”, is a dramatic misconception inspired by the SSCM. However, as we see later in the book, Pinker will part ways with Chomsky, ideologically. Though they both feel that grammar is a discrete combinatorial system; and is also a soundly structured tool with words and rules that human beings have an innate tendency to acquire, Chomsky is apprehensive about whether or not this language instinct, or gene, is part of the process of evolutionary adaptation. Pinker feels that the language instinct is similar to the human eye in that it has the appearance of design. In other words, the eye, for human beings, is a tool engineered with a very specific purpose. It has the appearance of design, and elements of an engineered tool, just like a camera, or an engine. The significant point that Pinker does take from Chomsky’s work is his claim that “the same symbol-manipulating machinery, without exception, underlies the world’s languages.”

 A chapter by chapter synopsis of a book of such layered complexity would become tedious after chapter 5. Everything from Broca’s Aphasia (which can cause language impairment), to x-bar theory (a theoretical version of phrase structure proposed by Chomsky that compares common grammatical rules and structures across different languages), artificial intelligence, prescriptive vs. descriptive grammar, and language organs and grammar genes, is covered in this erudite defense of Universal Grammar. These examples are useful to Pinker because they assist him in elucidating his rational stance on a language of thought. Logic-heavy gems such as, “And if there can be two thoughts corresponding to one word, thoughts can’t be words”, are peppered throughout the book. When he talks about x-bar theory, he explains how, “A part of speech, then, is not a kind of meaning: it is a kind of token that obeys certain formal rules, like a chess piece or a poker chip.” Pinker’s strongest arguments for a Universal Grammar or a language of thought, primarily concern phrase structure within sentences.

 Chomsky laid much of the ground on syntactic structures in his linguistic work in the 1960’s. But Pinker sees grammar as a technical aspect of language that “offers a clear refutation of the empiricist doctrine that there is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses.” So, again, the book is covering a lot of linguistic ground concerning academic debates about what language essentially is, but for Pinker, an unabashed devotee of Darwin, The Language Instinct is also about how language is an innate tendency that undergoes evolutionary adaptive processes. He disagrees with the Whorfians and cultural relativists in the sense that he sees grammatical comprehension and language acquisition as innate tendencies. It’s not that he disagrees with the claim that culture can occasionally influence how people speak, or the way a language sounds. Pinker simply believes that there is a common capacity for speech and language utilization across all cultures, and it’s not that different. Again, he refers to the apparent design of language toward the end of chapter 10, entitled “Language Organs and Grammar Genes”, when he reflects, “I would expect the basic design of language, from x-bar syntax to phonological rules and vocabulary structure to be uniform across the species; how else could children learn to talk and adults understand one another.”

 In the academic arena of linguistics, this debate between people arguing that language is an innate instinct and those that feel that language influences thought is slightly less prominent than it was in the past. In example, one of the strongest claims supporting the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis is that the speakers of the Piraha tribe of South America were incapable of using recursion (inserting embedded clauses within sentences ad infinitum) in their language. In 2004, Peter Gordon conducted an experiment consisting of various counting exercises in order to determine whether or not the Piraha were capable of counting exact cardinalities. He concluded that the Piraha had numbers for one, few, and many, but were incapable of remembering large exact numbers. Gordon’s experimental design was relatively crude, and he merely concluded that the Piraha couldn’t count that well under the conditions of the experiment. Since then, the linguist Andrew Nevins, along with his colleagues concluded that Piraha does allow for some recursive embedding using verb suffixes and conversions of nouns to verbs. It is also possible to conjoin propositions within a sentence, such as “We ate a lot of the fish, but there was some fish that we did not eat." The debunking of linguistic myths such as the apparent absence of recursion in the Piraha language, are concrete proof that Pinker is on to something profound when he suggests an underlying linguistic design in human nature.

 One might argue that, throughout The Language Instinct , Pinker attempts to insert too many anecdotes from technical linguistics as well as from popular culture. The Language Instinct was one of Pinker’s first popular science books. This onslaught of information is understandable as he is a trained experimental psychologist trying to make technical linguistic explanations understandable to a lay audience. He does so with flying colors. There is also his Darwinist bent, along with the genetic approach to language research, which many traditional linguists (especially academic Whorfians, clearly) might find a little too reductionist. What stands out in this wonderfully informative book is Pinker’s basic, non-threatening theoretical stance that language is part of an adaptive process in nature. There may be notable superficial distinctions across different languages, but the basic structure of language and its apparent design is something that is utilized across all cultures, regardless of location, history, or linguistic origin. For Pinker, culture is not to be devalued or overlooked, but when lost in the cacophonous babel of world languages he opines, “I imagine seeing through the rhythms to the structures underneath, and sense that we all have the same minds.”
 cognitive-science linguistics-semiotics
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 Майя Ставитская
 1,209 reviews 118 followers
 October 7, 2021
 I have great respect for Noam Chomsky's Theory of Universal Grammar, to the popularization of which Steven Pinker dedicates this work. The idea of a built-in mechanism of instinctive comprehension of language at the genetic level is a powerful incentive for those who want to study.

 It is sad that the time for activation is given only up to twelve years, but maybe it is somehow possible to activate after this period? Many literary translators, I know, came to serious studies at a much more mature age. And this means that we should not throw off the ship of modernity a functional and cognitive approach to linguistics, old-school and not as bright as Chomsky's generative linguistics, but explaining a lot in the mechanisms of conscious language acquisition.

 Moreover, to achieve a level of persuasiveness, as it was with "the best in us. Why there was less violence" this time Pinker failed. The book is extremely uneven in terms of style. All the time there was a feeling that he was spreading his thoughts along the tree, rushing in all directions, simultaneously arguing with opponents, sitting down to chat over a cup of tea with like-minded people (speaking the same language with him), continuing to explain what students did not fully understand during the special course, and only last of all remembers the reader himself.

 Ваш великий и могучий Структуральнейший лингвист
 Во все времена во всех человеческих сообществах язык изменялся, хотя разные части языка изменялись в разных человеческих сообществах по-разному.
 Есть у вас мечта нематериального свойства? В смысле, не яхта, Ferrari, отель в Дубае в собственность - не то, для чего нужны, главным образом, деньги. Я мечтала понимать сказанное-написанное на чужих языках и всегда думала, что это нереально, нужно с детства воспитываться в двуязычии и/или окончить языковую спецшколу, и/или долго жить в чужой стране с возможностью глубокого погружения. А без того, оставь надежду, всяк...

 Пока однажды не взяла себя в руки, хорошенько пнув собственную лень и неуверенность, и занялась, наконец, языками. Многими, за тот период прошла в общей сложности четырнадцать языковых курсов, в том числе т��кие не самые популярные, как португальский, датский, венгерский. На каждом стараясь прочитывать хотя бы небольшую книжку. Эксперимент длился три года с небольшим, оказался насыщенным, хотя непростым периодом личной истории. На испанском и английском я теперь читаю, польский понимаю с голоса, при необходимости пойму написанное на любом индоевропейском. Неожиданным побочным результатом стало быстрое чтение на русском.

 Это вступление было к тому, что , случись "Язык как инстинкт" со мной в тот период, книга наверняка произвела бы большее впечатление и послужила источником немалых читательских радостей. Подумать только, тебе авторитетно, на шести сотнях страниц объясняют, что язык встроен в человека врожденной функцией, как плетение паутины в паука и умение строить плотины в бобра. Как минимум, вдохновляющее чтение.

 Сегодня, когда роман с лингвистикой отошел в область нежных воспоминаний, я воспринимаю такого рода книги как занятный нон-фикшн, но с изрядной долей критичности. То есть, к Теории универсальной грамматики Ноама Хомского, популяризации которой Стивен Пинкер посвящает этот труд, я с большим уважением. Идея встроенного на генетическом уровне механизма инстинктивного постижения языка мощнейший стимул для желающих изучать.

 Печально, что времени на активацию отводится всего-то до двенадцати лет, но может быть как-то можно активировать и по истечении этого срока? Многие литературные переводчики, я знаю, приходили к серьезным занятиям в куда более зрелом возрасте. И значит, не стоит сбрасывать с корабля современности функциональный и когнитивный подход к лингвистике, олдскульные и не столь яркие, как порождающая лингвистика Хомского, но многое объясняющие в механизмах осознанного овладения языками.

 Тем более, что достичь уровня убедительности, как это было с "Лучшим в нас. Почему насилия стало меньше" на сей раз Пинкеру не удалось. Книга чрезвычайно неровная с точки зрения стиля. Все время не покидало чувство, что он растекается мыслию по древу, мечется во все стороны, одновременно полемизируя с оппонентами, присаживаясь поболтать за чашкой чая с единомышленниками (говорящими с ним на одном языке), продолжает объяснять не до конца понятое студентами в ходе спецкурса, и лишь в последнюю очередь вспоминает собственно о читателе.

 Еще один нюанс, исходя из которого я не рекомендовала бы этот томик русскому читателю, в то время, как англоязычному эта особенность подарит много радости. Книга выражено англизированная. Для иллюстрации своих идей автор приводит массу замечательно интересных примеров историко-географических, социально-обусловленных, стилистических трансформаций английского языка.

 Немало страниц посвящены восхитительным игрищам с идиомами, когда, буквализацией значения расхожие выражения доводятся до абсурда. Кроме того, "Язык как инстинкт" это еще и разговор о литературном стиле. Где наряду с универсальными советами о том, как следует работать с текстом, сколько раз вычитывать и редактировать его, немалую роль играют и такие специфически английские темы, как насколько приемлемо использование тех или иных слов и выражений. Вы найдете их полезными, если собираетесь писать книги на английском, в остальных случаях вряд ли.

 Резюмируя : книга представляет интерес для очень ограниченной и специфичной читательской аудитории, и практически невозможна для адаптации к руксскоязычным реалиям.

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 David
 Author 17 books 333 followers
 April 10, 2010
 Interesting for its discussion of language and language acquisition. But : too many people take Pinker's word as gospel, when in fact his theories are quite controversial. This book also bears a lot of responsibility for the rise of pop EvPsych. Evolutionary psychology is a field that has a few worthwhile observations mixed with an awful lot of BS used to justify all sorts of learned behavior. So, read this book with a very large grain of salt.
 evolution linguistics non-fiction
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 Ana
 805 reviews 588 followers
 September 7, 2017
 A highly interesting book about how language came about in the human mind. It gets quite technical at times, but that's an added bonus for anyone who is truly interested in the subject.
 absolute humour-me non-fiction
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 Joseph
 38 reviews 27 followers
 January 16, 2011
 Given the current divide in linguistics between the Functional/Cognitive theoretical approach to language and the formalist, generative approach which Pinker supports and has largely popularized with this book, The Language Instinct is an intellectually irresponsible endeavor. He frames linguistic nativism as a non-negotiable fact when actually, there is a fierce debate within linguistics which is moving away from ideas of those like Steven Pinker and Noam Chomsky. The opposing school of thought argues that although the cognitive underpinnings of language are innate (having developed in evolutionary time), language itself is more like a new machine made out of old parts, which develops in social interaction and cannot be localized in any set of genes or related to any "instinct."

 Fraught with error, Pinker's pseudo-science is based on an approach that seeks not to fully understand the nature of real language as it exists, as it evolves over time, and as it is acquired by young children - but to rehash a pre-supposed view of language that was developed by "linguists" philosophizing as they sat in their armchairs in the 50s and 60s, fundamentally concerned with abstracting language into mathematical elegance rather than recognizing it for the complex system that it is. I highly recommend anyone who found themselves nodding at every turn as they read this book to read Tomasello's response "Language is not an Instinct" (to be found in full just by doing a google search). And I quote, "At heart, Chomskyan nativism is a philosophical endeavor to discern by means of logic what is uniquely and innately human. Cognitive and Functional approaches are scientific endeavors aimed at understanding how people learn and use natural languages." Couldn't have said it better myself.

 One star for effort, Pinky-Poo.
 linguistics
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 Hesham Khaled
 125 reviews 126 followers
 October 27, 2016

 I think this is the best review
 By pinker himself.
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-B_O...

 نسخة مترجمة من محاضرة بينكر، وهي بشكل كبير مراجعة لكتابه
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0gVL...

 الترجمة العربية سيئة جدًا، تغني عنها المحاضرة لمن يريد الاطلاع فقط
 linguistics-philosophy-of-language
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 Nicky
 4,138 reviews 1,004 followers
 July 24, 2014
 When it comes to something I don't know much about, I'm pretty easily swayed by other people's arguments. Like, I finished this book feeling it was pretty intelligent and interesting, and then I read some criticisms and reviews and heck, I don't know what to think. Still, I did find it interesting, and while the book looks deceptively slim for how long it took me to get through it, Pinker expresses his arguments clearly, with examples and sourcing, etc.

 His basic argument is that we're hardwired for language. That, as with our sight, hearing, etc, we have a 'language sense'; if properly stimulated during the critical period, our brains quickly figure out how to parse language (at least, the language spoken around us when we are at that age, even if that language is sign language). We don't need to hear every word or possible sentence structure (couldn't possibly) to pick up on the rules of grammar and apply them, when speaking and when listening. This only refers to the critical period; a child will learn grammar instinctively on being exposed to a language, but an adult must learn it by rote, in the same way as you have to learn to process visual input during the critical period for that , or you'll never have the same visual acuity as someone who did.

 Thus far, I think I'm going along with him. I do have questions of a sort of chicken and the egg nature: which came first, the brain's Universal Grammar module, or language that necessitated it? I'm inclined to think that the structures that we now use to understand language were used for something else earlier in our evolution, and became co-opted into our communications array (so to speak) over time. Our brains formed language, and then the language formed our brains...

 All in all, I don't know whether Pinker's right, but I found his work convincing. Having read a couple of other books on language, including Guy Deutscher's Through the Language Glass , and applying what I know from those too, I find it hard to disagree with Pinker even where I want to, for example about relativism.
 non-fiction science-fact
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 Mikael Lind
 173 reviews 53 followers
 January 8, 2012
 First of all, I am not a big fan of Steven Pinker. I found How the mind works erroneous on many accounts. That said, The Language Instinct is despite its uncompromising MIT cognitivist stance a fun and interesting read. To me, even the title reveals a general error; i.e. How the Mind Creates Language . The mind does not create language; human beings create language in an inter-subjective way. (Compare: brains do not think (except as metaphorical speech, not suitable for scientific writing) people think.) So be on your guard and do not accept mr. Pinker's arguments without reflecting upon them. This book is full of interesting facts and stories, but I would recommend anyone to pick up a copy of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations after having read Pinker in order to get a glance of the complicated reality outside the cognitivist nimbus cloud.
 cognitive-science linguistics
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 Nicholas
 323 reviews 13 followers
 June 2, 2010
 Very interesting. Too long and technical for me. Most of the stuff I didn't care about. Not a criticism of the book but just a mismatch of interest.

 Middle was boring. Writing was good. Sharp style. Insults fools and posers. Funny. Charming. The perfect example is the beginning of chapter 11 pg 340. This is the way to argue. Funny, ridiculing, forceful and gets the message across.

 His metaphors are really good. Aspire to this.

 Language is built into the mind. It evolved by natural selection. It is not a cultural artifact. "Ghetto talk" is just as complex as perfect english. Perfect english is a collection of rules that were sold to allow new wealth from the industrial revolution seem classy.

 Quotes:

 "Simply by making noises with our mouths, we can reliably cause precise new combinations of ideas to arise in each other's minds."

 "Language is not a cultural artifact that we learn the way we learn to tell time or how the federal government works. Instead, it is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains. Language is a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the child spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal instruction, is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic, is quantitatively the same in every individual, and is distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently."

 "In many cases a pidgin can be transmuted into a full complex language in one fell swoop: all it takes is for a group of children to be exposed to the pidgin at the age when they acquire their mother tongue."

 "People store genes in their gonads and pass them to their children through their genitals; they store grammars in their brains and pass them to their children through their mouths. Gonads and brains are attached to each other in bodies, so when bodies move, genes and grammars move together. That is the only reason that geneticists find any correlation between the two."

 "The brute mathematical fact is that all things being equal, there is a better chance of being a young person than being an old person. So genes that strengthen young organisms at the expense of old organisms have the odds in their favor and will tend to accumulate over evolutionary timespans, whatever the bodily system, and the result is overall senescence."

 "Neuroscientists estimate that about thirty thousand genes, the majority of the human genome, are used to build the brain and nervous system."

 "Outwitting and second-guessing an organism of approximately equal mental abilities with non-overlapping interests, at best, and malevolent intentions, at worst, makes formidable and ever-escalating demands on cognition. And a cognitive arms race clearly could propel a linguistic one. Ina ll cultures, social interactions are mediated by persuasion and argument...evolving humans lived in a world in which language was woven into the intrigues of politics, economics, technology, family, sex, and friendship that played key roles in individual reproductive success."

 "All behavior is an interaction between nature and nurture, whose contributions are as inseparable as the length and width of a rectangle in determining its area." Beautiful
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 biology psychology
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 Eliza
 592 reviews 1,378 followers
 March 26, 2017
 *Read for school*

 2.5/3 stars

 This was an okay read - very technical at some points, so those parts nearly lulled me to sleep. Honestly, I wouldn't have picked it up had it not been for my linguistics class - but i did learn about how languages formed, so in a way, it was pretty interesting.

 Nothing remarkable, though.
 3-stars nonfiction owned
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 Ashley Reid
 147 reviews 113 followers
 May 20, 2017
 There were some parts of this that were interesting and worth reading for, but overall it was a waffly and long winded book that I struggled to get through at some boring points.
 cover-love language non-fic-blnk
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 Anthony Buckley
 Author 9 books 98 followers
 November 5, 2012
 I had always supposed that linguists could not write clearly. Rather like psychiatrists who were mad, sociologists who couldn’t get on with people, and social anthropologists who were permanent outsiders, linguists, I supposed, devoted their adulthood overcoming their childhood difficulties with language. Here, however, I discover my prejudices overturned. Considering the inherent complexity of his topic, Steven Pinker’s book on language is witty, lucid and intelligible.

 Pinker’s theme is that people are born with an inherent capacity – an instinct – that enables them to construct language. In much the same way as they are programmed to learn, at appropriate ages, to walk, to tell jokes and to have sex, so people have an innate ability to learn to speak correctly. Around this central idea – derived from Chomsky’s studies of syntax – Pinker hangs a summary of some of the most important recent ideas in linguistics.

 The book therefore doubles as a textbook for a first year linguistics student and a good general introduction for a mildly interested beginner (for somebody like me). It is also a polemical book, for Pinker is not afraid to ride hobby horses and proclaim his own vision of the one true linguistics. He delves into the mysteries of Chomskyan deep structure, explaining that the grammar of particular languages are constructed from the inbuilt language-structure that is common to every person and every language. He defies the linguistic relativism associated with the names of Sapir and Whorf. He explains how people and animals think without having a language. He tells the story of deaf children in Nicaragua who were thrown together with older children who knew bits and pieces of sign language from a variety of sources, but who, from these bits and pieces, were able to construct a sign language as coherent as any other. He casts doubt on the supposed ability of monkeys and whales to speak human languages. He explores the biology that explains – or might explain – the instinct for speaking. He opposes those who fight endless wars against the split infinitive, the greengrocer's apostrophe and the final participle, claiming that their own version of English is the only correct one. And he does much more.

 The book is, in short, informative and intelligent. It is also a lot of fun. I see that a more recent book by Pinker has been nominated for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. Having just read this one, I am not at all surprised.
 anthropology language useful
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 Sebastian
 Author 8 books 26 followers
 June 15, 2018
 A good portion of this book can be summed up in the relatively simple graph that was making the rounds on Twitter a while back: https://twitter.com/robdrummond/statu... . However, Pinker is a good enough writer that reading about the issue in book-length format rarely feels boring, as he throws about a plethora of interesting examples and anecdotes to illustrate the point. What’s more, the book skips around quite a bit, covering just about every aspect of general linguistics I could think of that actually interests me – how language works, how it was created, how the brain produces it, how various internal and external processes shape it, etc.

 I do have objections, of course, one of them being that for a book that very loudly proclaims to be about language in general, it retains a strong English-leaning slant – there is quite some talk, for instance, about how English spelling is an optimal system of representing speech vocalizations on paper, which comes off as a really weird claim to someone reared in a writing system with a phonetic alphabet/script (Serbian Cyrillic, and to an extent, Serbo-Croatian Latin).

 The segment on Chomsky and the structure of deep grammar/mentalese also suffers quite a bit in audiobook format. The narrator really makes an effort, but some of the structures described, while probably quite clear at a mere glance at a hand-drawn diagram, become an impenetrable forest of P(NP)VPs when read out loud.

 On the other hand, the majority of the objections I saw here, glancing through the comments, boil down to either “boo-hoo, I disagree with his views, therefore this is a bad book” or “Pinker’s presentation is simplistic cherry-picking of straw-man arguments”. Well, one may disagree with what he’s saying, but Pinker does mention very specific sources and research his arguments lean on, and my humble academic experience with some of the opposition to his views leaves me inclined towards aligning with the theories presented herein. As for simplistic? Probably, but this is not a university textbook, so I don’t see the problem. He does what he meant to do, present an overall state of play in linguistics at the time of writing for a more-or-less lay audience. My edition also has a neat addendum at the end, where he looks back after more than a decade has passed, and discusses some of the changes and reactions to the contents of the book.
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 Krish
 23 reviews 5 followers
 January 23, 2019
 Main takeaways:
 - Language is an innate skill possessed by humans and not acquired artificially through teaching like writing, programming, etc.
 - Although innate, the skill can be automatically learnt only during the critical period of up to 6 years of age. Beyond this age, it has to be artificially acquired like a second language.
 - Just one generation of children brought up by adults who speak a "pidgin" (a language lacking grammar and consisting of mere words from a number of different languages) is enough to create a "creole" (a grammatically rich language which borrows the pidgin vocabulary)
 - All languages share a Universal Grammar (which is the part of language learning that's probably innate in humans). Each language follows the super-rules of this grammar but has its own values for the variable parameters depending on various cultural and environmental factors.
 - Rules of grammar are only useful as long as they help resolve ambiguity and enable effective communication among humans. Rules like "don't end a sentence with a preposition" and "use whom instead of who" are bookishly enforced and serve no practical purpose.
 - "English spelling could be better than it is. But it is already much better than people think it is. That is because writing systems do not aim to represent the actual sounds of talking, which we do not hear, but the abstract units of language underlying them, which we do hear."
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 Cynda
 1,238 reviews 140 followers
 September 19, 2016
 I so so so wanted to like this book. I took one linguistics class and did a number of rhetoric classes so I thought that I would find this book accessible. I did not. I recognize the Chomsky language trees. I did see why the trees were so important to discuss top and bottom sentences and to prove how all humans are hardwired for language so that babies simply learn if their family speaks top or bottom sentences and SVO or some other construction. Yet all human languaget is obviously human. I get that. I wonder why Pinker wrote such a detailed argument, so detailed that my attention derailed, and I cannot read one more page of this book.
 So why 3 stars when I seem to hate this book? I do not hate the book. I am frustrated by the details. I plan to retern to this book at a later date and to read one chapter at a time and then put the book away for a month and then repeat the process until I complete the book. I am simply on information overload. I will re-read this book and fully intend to rate it 4 or 5 stars.

 history language-writing medical-science
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 Ana
 2,346 reviews 316 followers
 January 1, 2018
 I don't know if I would've enjoyed this book half as much had I not listened to the audiobook, but it was a pleasant commute read.
 20th-century canadian-literature non-fiction
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 171 reviews 3 followers
 September 12, 2018
 This book is an excellent introduction into linguistics and language-related scientific fields (such as psycholinguistics, evolutionary linguistics, learning theory, etc), for someone like me who has been fascinated by the subject for a long time, but only had the chance to dabble a toe or two into one sub-area or another.
 It corrects many popular misconceptions about language and language learning, from the point of view of the author, based on the latest scientific concensus (at the time the book was written in 1994, though there's a section at the end of the 2007 edition with additions and corrections), such as the strong Whorf-Sapir hypothesis (which states that language determines thoughts) which discredits the possibility of the 1984 dystopian scenario with Newspeak (*sigh of relief*), the idea that some non-human members of the great apes could use "language" even remotely close in complexity to human language as claims have continuously been made over the years, or that parents speaking to their young children is essential for the later's ability to acquire language.
 It also presents Chomsky's hypothesis of Universal Grammar, which is a set of rules thought to be the backbone of all human languages, regardless of their apparent phonetics, vocabulary or grammatical rules, and a mirror image of the brain structures that might have evolved to allow complex language parsing and construction, as well as acquiring the native language during childhood.
 Considering Steven Pinker's simple and beautiful style, as well as clear and direct explanations (for the most part), I am certainly looking forward to reading the rest of his books.
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 Alatea
 484 reviews 41 followers
 November 4, 2017
 I usually "go with the feeling" when I review books, so it's really difficult to review non-fiction. But I'll try anyway.

 The language history was an easy, but satisfying popular-science read. I highly recommend it to everyone who is interested in linguistics or language in general.
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 Zsa Zsa
 342 reviews 61 followers
 June 18, 2016
 it took me a while to read it cause it got too scientific at times, but Pinker has tried to explain this as simple as he can and his humor makes it a good read. i recommend this to language lovers.
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 Elena
 130 reviews 38 followers
 March 9, 2017
 I really-really like my readings about languages (English and my native Russian), never bored with them, and this particular book was a treat. I’ll read other books of Steven Pinker for sure.
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 John Wiswell
 Author 43 books 373 followers
 October 3, 2009
 This review could be long or short. I wasn't sure if I wanted to waste the time, but it's a long book and there are some seriously interesting and seriously stupid things in it. It centers on the issue of language as learned or as instinct, which can be so fine an issue that most people really won’t care. For the short: it's very nice to see so much research on language presented and Pinker does a good job of explaining the often oversimplified theory that there is a genetic basis for understanding language (parts are probably split between your genetic code, but there is no one gene that controls all of it). But there is also some will-meltingly stupid material, like arguments that we can't have standards in our language because we can't judge whale songs and programming a useful speaking device wouldn't include commands like "don't split infinitives" because a screwdriver doesn't split infinitives. As he tries to illuminate how the brain creates language, the book is pretty interesting. As he tries to enforce his values, like that we shouldn't have any aesthetic consideration, he's worthless.

 Okay. That's the short one. Here’s a longer one.

 Pinker's central argument does nothing for me. That argument is that we have an instinct for creating language. You can construct sentences without thinking about the structure, and even when you babble you have a sense of when to pause for verbal grammar. Think of kids picking up swearing just by hearing it – they aren’t instructed in how to use it, but figure it out logically and intuitively. Since I already believe in this instinct and it seems pretty obvious that we do have it, an argument that it exists isn't impressive, though it was nice of him to collect so many anecdotes and studies that illustrate it to be the case. The best parts of the book are studies that show how versatile people are with language, like children picking up Pidgin or nonsense and converting them, within one generation, into grammatically sound modes of communication.

 The whole matter is kind of a bunk argument. Either our brains have an instinct for picking up and creating language, or we created languages that our brains are capable of picking up and using. If you think about it on those terms for so much as a minute, you'll get how silly the debate is. At best, both are partially true: we generate and imitate modes of expression that our brains can use readily. From the creation standpoint, why wouldn't we make something that's pretty close to what our brains can handle with unconscious ease? And from the instinct standpoint, why wouldn't we have instincts of some strength or other for the things that are created from inside our heads?

 Do we think about language or use it unconsciously? It’s obvious that we do both, though we wing it more than we plot it. It’s not an either/or problem, and that Pinker misses this almost entirely is sad. Parents help teach their children and foster language, from obvious examples like imparting the names for things and spelling of words, to what’s been found in recent scientific studies (not in this book) examining mastery of language in children who come from households with differing amounts of speech. Every day you probably struggle for words and consciously choose what to say at least some of the time – you know there is a conscious component to speech. There is unconscious and conscious education that he simply disregards because he's arguing for this instinct. Pinker choosing a side here feels like he's doing it for attention, and it's not as though this is the only time (in this book or academia in general) where it feels like his decision was unnecessary to the pursuit of truth.

 His side-arguments can get annoying. Sometimes he seems downright condescending on the intelligence of children and the deaf, and often he seems to skim rather than analyze evidence when it suits his arguments. For instance in the case of a Simon, a deaf boy whose deaf parents had improper signing that he did not pick up, Pinker makes serious assumptions about what he must have done with no evidence or even interviews with the boy in question to verify the conclusions. It’s not even anecdotal at that point; it’s conjecture, which does not belong next to the real research on Simon’s case. Conjecture is essential in analysis, but not like this, and not in making the ironclad decisions about the way minds work as Pinker does.

 By far his silliest argument is in favor of descriptivism over prescriptivism. Descriptivism is the school that describes how people speak; prescriptivism deals with how people ought to. Here, like in the bunk argument over using a language consciously or unconsciously, most intelligent people understand that language functions best when we mediate between the descriptive and prescriptive influences, changing the rules to better suit some things, but sticking to them for others. Being a scientist who observes, Pinker is interested in descriptivism as it shows the most about how we are inclined to speak and act in language. But being foolishly inclined to polar positions, he argues that we ought to only follows descriptivism and does it in downright stupid ways, like saying that we don't need a speaking machine is programmed to "not split infinitives" because screwdrivers already don't split infinitives. That’s moronic and if his opposition made a similar rhetorical move he would never allow it. His conclusions are that whatever we “get” by the language instinct should make up all the prescriptive rules, and that whatever we don’t make should constitute the rest. You know, in the way that we eat whatever tastes good, think whatever we like regardless of objective evidence and live in total anarchy without any government. Okay, those three examples are stupidity on my own part, but that’s what this pure-descriptive argument deserves. It comes from his oversimplified approach to language cognition, at first pretending that people don’t think or act in their education of language, and now proceeding that we shouldn’t think about how we’re going to use it or apply intentional value. That he quotes a Shakespearian character in defense his of anti-prescriptive campaign when that author taught writing seals the deal.

 Now before Pinker's fans get angry over the rating alone, if you hold your mouse button over the stars you see that each correlates to a statement. One star means "I didn't like it," and for the fascinating research in the book, Pinker became too annoying and questionable at too many points for me to like his book. So it gets one star because, you see, they have prescribed meaning and are not just whatever you want them to be.
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 May
 146 reviews 63 followers
 August 24, 2014
 I just finished reading the most challenging non-fiction leisure book I have ever read: Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct. It was a close call, but I'm relieved that I powered through.

 Before I dive into my review, I'd like to clarify that I found it challenging not because my knowledge of linguistics prior to reading this book was terribly basic, but rather because there is so much information packed into The Language Instinct. That is, however, its greatest merit - and the reason why my mind was being blown after every chapter.

 In The Language Instinct, Pinker argues that humans' ability to acquire language is not dependant on education or imitation. Rather, it's instinctual. It's "wired into our brains by evolution."
 According to Pinker, "evolution did not make a ladder. It made a bush." That is to say, Pinker disagrees with Darwin's theory that we evolved from Monkeys.

 That's why computers will never be able to learn language the way a child could, and also why apes will never be able to speak English or Learn American Sign Language. Indeed, Pinker's research shows that those who claimed that laboratory apes' gestures resembled sign language were actually overanalyzing what they observed.

 Of course, there are many Darwinists out there who would shake their heads at such a thought (Pinker, however, is pretty convincing). All it would take, however, is the discovery of an evolved trait for an aesthetic, and not pragmatic, purpose, to defy the theory of natural selection.

 Anyway - because Pinker is trying to prove that language is an instinct, he begins at the roots of language acquisition. There is a lot of research on children. Such research is especially interesting when Pinker discusses 'creoles,' mother tongues that are developed as a result of several languages meshed together. The possibility of such 'meshing' suggests that an universal grammar underlies all language.

 The existence of a "universal grammar," however, would not wholly verify that language is an instinct. After all, we have words for 'water' not because our DNA dictates it but because we need to refer to water. Neither is there a 'grammar gene - an American-born Chinese can just as easily learn English as his or her American peers. So, it seems that "complexity in the mind is not caused by learning; learning is caused by complexity in the mind."


 The Language Instinct is also in many ways a defense of language. Pinker argues that there is no reason to look down upon primitive dialects because primitive cultures have complex language systems and, after all, a language is also a dialect - just one with "an army and a navy."

 In his chapter on language mavens, a.k.a grammar nazis, Pinker also explains why certain grammatical errors are perhaps even preferable. For example, language mavens will argue that "Who did you see" should be "Whom did you see" or at least "Which person did you see" according to the rules of grammar. Yet can you imagine, Pinker asks, saying something like "Whom did you sound like?" Moreover, the final option ("which person") restricts the 'who' from being an animal or multiple people.

 The Language Instinct is an enlightening read that leaves reader with a deeper understanding, and growing curiosity, of language. Pinker writes in a clear and sometimes almost conversational way that renders a PhD-worthy subject into one that general audiences can grasp. Of course, certain sections are utterly perplexing and almost impossible to retain. Above all, however, Pinker convincingly presents the thesis that language - contrary to what many believe - is instinctual.


 As he says, "this is news." If language is innate, much more could be; such a revelation would revolutionize the way we consider education, study the human brain and even assess the validity of Darwin's theory of evolution!!

 Factoids:

 - We are told that a noun is the most important part of a sentence because it is the doer; however, a noun cannot operate without verb. So, the verb is the boss of a sentence
 - Mentalese: the hypothetical "language of thought, or representation of concepts and propositions in the brain in which ideas, including the meanings of words and sentences, are couched.
 - Listeme: an element of language that must be memorized because its sound or meaning does not conform to some general rule. All word roots, irregular forms and idioms are listemes.
 - When your tongue is high and at front of your mouth, you'll produce high-frequency sounds (e.g. e in teeny); when your tongue is low and at the back of your mouth, you'll produce low-frequency sounds (e.g. a in large). Now, this is especially fascinating when we consider words such as frobbing, twiddling and tweaking. To frob is to move a dial or switch by drastically adjusting its range; to twiddle is to adjust the switch by a smaller margin; to tweak is to adjust the switch by only a litte. Interestingly, it's always the word with the high front vowel that goes first in expressions such as ping-pong and chit-chat. Hip-hop, flip-flop, the list goes on...
 - English is an isolating language, meaning that you must say "to go" to indicate the act of going somewhere - two units are used to express one definition. The french aller, however, does the deed in one word.




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2,384 reviews33.9k followers     November 29, 2017   In my bookshop are lots of books like, 'First 100 Words' and "ABC with pictures", you know those sort of books. We talk to our babies in 'motherese' and we point to things and name them, but we do not teach our babies grammar. We say things like 'look at those puppies there, they are much smaller than these ones here'. We don't explain when to use words like 'those' or 'these' or 'there' and 'here' and where we put them in a sentence. We don't need to, Pinker says, Chomsky said, that grammar is built-in. That no matter what language a child learns, they will use the words grammatically without any instruction. And if a child learns wildly different languages as say Welsh, Spanish and English (there are many people who grow up speaking these particular three in Patagonia) they will use the correct grammar as well as words without any difficulty at all.__________ Notes on reading: What I've learned so far: that it takes only one generation to turn a pidgin into a creole (language). Immigrant workers in Hawaii, Japanese, Filipinos, Chinese, Koreans even Portuguese and Europeans spoke to each other in pidgin. Pidgin is a collection of words without any grammar. It's a bit like what most of us who are not linguistically-gifted speak when we travel. We mix the few words we know of the local language with English and (if British) shouted loudly and repetitively until the 'native' gets it.  The children of the immigrant workers were looked after together when their parents were in the fields and they, just like that, because of the instinct for language, for grammar, turned the pidgin into a creole, a language that could express anything and everything. Children never speak pidgin, their brains impose structure on words and they learn from each other. Sadly, the window for language acquisition closes as puberty approaches. After that it is only talented individuals who can acquire a foreign language with perfect grammar and accent.  Jamaican, which Jamaicans continually put down as the patois of the poor people', not proper 'standard English' is in fact a proper language with its own grammar, although a majority of the words are derived from English and Akan,  Pinker says he's not 100% behind Chomsky's theories. He's pretty close though. I got bored with the chapters on Chomsky's language trees, I'm more interested in how we produce language than the structure of it.  Great book, a difficult and academic read (at least to me) and boring in bits too but none of that takes away from opening up a new skein of thought for me, and I enjoy that more than anything else from a book.     10-star-books 2017-100-reviews 2017-read               Author  28 books13.4k followers     June 14, 2012   There's a joke in this book that linguists really like. An English woman has just got off the plane at Boston's Logan airport. She takes a cab, and starts questioning the driver about where to obtain various local delicacies."Oh yes," she says in her posh English accent. "Could you tell me where you can get scrod here?" And the driver replies, "You know, you don't often hear that in the pluperfect subjunctive!" __________________________________________ Another linguist joke, for people who haven't already heard it. The guy is visiting the university, and managed to get himself thoroughly lost. He goes up to an academic-looking type and asks politely, "Excuse me, do you know which building the linguistics department is in?" "It's generally considered incorrect to end a sentence with a preposition" replies the academic. "I'm sorry!" says the visitor. "I mean, do you know which building the linguistics department is in, asshole?" __________________________________________ An American grad student and a German grad student are talking about their dissertations. "I've nearly finished mine," boasts the German. "It's in four volumes!" "Wow!" says the American, impressed. "What are they?" "Well," says the German. "The first one is the background, the second is the experiments, and the third is the analysis." "What about the fourth?" asks the American. "Oh! That's just the verbs." [You may need to know something about German word-order to find this amusing.:] __________________________________________ It's the day after the Great Vowel Shift, and this guy goes into a bar. "Can I have an ale?" he asks.  And the barman replies, "I'm sorry sir, the fishmonger is next door." __________________________________________ I wondered where the Great Vowel Shift Joke came from, and - how could I not have guessed? - it turns out to be the work of the late, much-lamented James D. McCawley. Specifically, it comes from his piece "Linguistically Noteworthy Dates in May", which I reproduce here for your delectation: May 2, 1919. Baudouin de Courtenay concedes defeat in his bid for the presidency of Poland. May 3, 1955. Mouton &amp; Co. discover how American libraries order books and scheme to cash in by starting several series of books on limericks. The person given charge of this project mishears and starts several series of books on linguistics. No one ever notices the mistake. May 5, 1403. The Great English Vowel Shift begins. Giles of Tottenham calls for ale at his favorite pub and is perplexed when the barmaid tells him that the fishmonger is next door. May 6, 1939. The University of Chicago trades Leonard Bloomfield to Yale University for two janitors and an undisclosed number of concrete gargoyles.May 7, 1966. r-less pronunciation is observed in eight kindergarten pupils in Secaucus, N.J. The governor of New Jersey stations national guardsmen along the banks of the Hudson. May 9, 1917. N. Ja. Marr discovers ROSH, the missing link for Japhetic unity. May 11, 1032. Holy Roman Emperor Conrad II orders isoglosses erected across northern Germany as defense against Viking intruders. May 12, 1965. Sydney Lamb announces discovery of the hypersememic stratum, setting off a wave of selling on the NYSE. May 13. Vowel Day. (Public holiday in Kabardian Autonomous Region). The ceremonial vowel is pronounced by all Kabardians as a symbol of brotherhood with all speakers of human languages. May 14, 519 B.C. Birth of Panini. May 15, 1964. J. Katz and J. Fodor are separated in 5-hour surgery from which neither recovers. May 17, 1966. J. R. Ross tells a clean joke. May 18, 1941. Quang Phuc Dong is captured by the Japanese and interned for the duration of hostilities. May 19. Diphthong Day. (Public holiday in Australia) May 20, 473 B.C. Publisher returns to Panini a manuscript entitled Saptadhyayi with a note requesting the addition of a chapter on phonology. Panini begins struggling to meet the publisher's deadline. May 21, 1962. First mention of The Sound Pattern of English as ‘in press’. May 23, 38,471 B.C. God creates language. May 26, 1945. Zellig Harris applies his newly formulated discovery procedures and discovers [t]. May 27, 1969. George Lakoff discovers the global rule. Supermarkets in Cambridge, Mass. are struck by frenzied buying of canned goods. May 29, 1962. Angular brackets are discovered. Classes at M.I.T. are dismissed and much Latvian plum brandy is consumed. May 30, 1939. Charles F. Hockett finishes composing the music for the Linguistic Society of America's anthem, ‘Can You Hear the Difference?’ May 31, 1951. Chomsky discovers Affix-hopping and is reprimanded by his father for discovering rules on shabas.     linguistics-and-philosophy               Author  2 books848 followers     June 28, 2013   I have this incredible mental block about reviewing nonfiction. My formal linguistics experience is limited to exactly one History of the English Language class as a college junior (and it remains one of the most fascinating, satisfying and illuminating classroom experiences I've ever had, university-level or otherwise), which was about when I realized that the study of language was up there with the school paper and my creative-writing courses in terms of the all-over fulfillment I found in it. It helped that I had an enthusiastic professor whose wealth of knowledge and general zeal turned my disappointment in the English department's lack of additional linguistic offerings into a fervent hunt for extracurricular reading material regarding the topic, though I can't help but feel that my self-guided tour through the field isn't yielding the same benefits I'd've received from exploring the same terrain with an expert leading the way. Hence my concern that I'll sound like I'm trying to pretend that I know what I'm talking about on some deeper level when my background in the roots of language is far more recreational than academic. All's I can say for sure is that The Language Instinct was great fun, beautifully written and an absolute whirlwind of information that covers a dizzying array of unexpected but thought-provokingly relevant subjects. Oh, and that Steven Pinker has the most admirably disheveled hair since Georges Perec. Their locks are not to be trifled with, nor, clearly, are their minds.  The last language-centric book I read argued in favor of a point that had been laughed into noncredibility for years thanks to the implied racism it still carried from the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis days, which is that the world actually looks different based on one's view of the world based on his or her culture and language (Through the Language Glass, written by Guy Deutscher and published in 2010 -- and which I must admit to having read long enough ago that I have shamefully forgotten many of its finer details but do recall as having made a rather convincing argument, as it delved into stuff such as how a language can reflect a culture's attitude toward its women) -- an hypothesis that Pinker decried within the first 50 pages of this 1994 bestseller as "wrong, all wrong," as it is his view that "discussions that assume that language determines thought carry on only by a collective suspension of disbelief." My copy of The Language Instinct includes Pinker's chapter-by-chapter asides about updates in the many areas he explored in a book he published more than two decades ago, including the neo-Whorfism that has sprung up in recent years, a revival that allowed works such as Through the Language Glass to be taken more seriously because the misguided blinders and red herrings of the linguistic avenue of contemplation have finally fallen away and its points can be made in such a way to sidestep the unfortunate pitfalls of the past. Seeing the inverse of an argument made just as successfully as my initial exposure to it was what sucked me in for good with this book. The overlapping of an argument's two sides and seeing familiar names, familiar backgrounds, familiar failings and completely different conclusions were all strangely rewarding payoffs for my own curious, solitary explorations.  And that spark of recognition just kept cropping up in myriad forms as I read on and on (and on and on, as it took me, like, two months to finish this -- absolutely no fault of Pinker's, but rather that of my compulsion to juggle two and three books at once and work's nasty habit of reducing my reading time in two-week cycles). While the biology and neurobiology and child development and abnormal psych were all a bit of alien territory for me, Pinker presented them all in such accessible ways that my tactile-learner self was picking up everything he was putting down. Which made the friendlier faces I'd seen before all the more inviting: The progression of Old English to Middle English to Modern English was like having tea (or mead) with an old friend, reading about the Great Vowel Shift was like reminiscing with an old lover and wondering if maybe the stars are finally aligned in our favor, the uncanny commonalities between seemingly unrelated tongues was a kiddie ball pit wrapped in a trampoline for my brain, and the pages and chapters of grammatical theory? Be still, my pedantic heart! I didn't even mind, as a happily neurotic proofreader, when Pinker started asserting that maybe the Grammar Mavens have their priorities all wrong, that even nontraditional dialects have their merits, that "whom" ought to go the way of "ye" and its other equally antiquated brethren, that it's okay to hang on to the rules of usage for clarity's sake rather than browbeating those poor folks who don't work themselves into paroxysms of glee at the very notion of sentence diagrams over their truly nitpicky transgressions.  I had no idea the lengths and detail necessary in asserting that something so mind-bogglingly complex but is so universally taken for granted -- that is, human speech -- is a deep-seated biological impulse, hard-wired into our brains to the point that we are all, in fact, baby geniuses when it comes to sussing out most of the nuances of our diabolically tricky native languages by the age of three. I had no well-formed opinion on the matter of language as a learned habit versus a communicative imperative instilled in us via evolution before coming into this but did Pinker ever reel me in, hold my attention and make me want to delve deeper into his research, theories and positions regarding the language instinct. Bearing witness to the impressive lengths he goes to to cover all his ground from every angle is reward enough for hearing him out for nearly 500 pages, because Pinker's dedication to the language instinct is evident enough in the miles of homework he did to make his point with armfuls of wide-ranging detail and chapter upon chapter of some truly compelling writing.     2013 blogophilia head-in-the-clouds-nose-in-a-book               Author  27 books75 followers     February 25, 2009   A friend, a diplomat’s daughter, when asked how she had managed to master Dutch when she went to a school in Suriname, shrugged.“I don’t know. I remember being so confused during the first day, not understanding a single word. But not so long after that, I was able to speak in Dutch. I just spoke, I don’t know how.”That had happened years ago, when she was still very young. We have always wondered how come children are able to learn language easily, while many, if not most adults, find the task of learning a new language bewildering, bordering with the impossible. Plus, children are not just great imitators. If they were, we would only be repeating things our parents had told us when we were small. But we don’t. We don’t just mimic our parents’ words. Something in our neural circuitry does more than just copying; it analyses grammar, it finds for pattern, it composes new combination of words... frighteningly complex processes that, so far, cannot even be matched by the most advanced of AI. C3PO is still a long way to go. The ability of learning language is one of the many subjects covered by the book The Language Instinct, written by Steven Pinker, a psycholinguist in Harvard. (No, he’s not some crazy linguist who enjoys slaying people.) Language is probably the hallmark of human race. We boast our ability to communicate in words, a feature of our culture that no other living forms have. But Pinker shows us that far from being a cultural invention, language is actually an instinct. And because it is, then despite the doubts of the likes of Chomsky, it must be built gradually in the lineages one of which led to us thanks to natural selection. Aiming towards the goal of convincing us about that main point of language being an instinct, Pinker wove an abundance of evidence into this clear, mostly easy-to-swallow book. I said most, because to be frank at times I was lost among a wealth of linguistic terms that I had to crawl through, trying to just grab the general point of some parts. Nevertheless, I like Pinker’s book for dissecting language thoroughly. My favourite part is of course about the language mavens – people who think they have the task to safeguard the purity of language and grammar. Pinker showed us that many instances of ‘ungrammatical’ words or sentences according to those mavens, are actually grammatical according to how our brain works. Very enlightening, especially for someone like me who has for quite some time lost her faith in the tyranny of KBBI and EYD of the Indonesian language. (Our own language mavens, for instance, would waste their sweat telling us that the correct spelling for ‘lembab’ is ‘lembap’, though you understand that both mean the same anyway, and that you may not speak of ‘jam delapan’, but ‘pukul delapan’ instead.) But hey, if this sounds like telling us to ditch our dictionaries and standard spellings and pronunciation altogether, what am I doing, writing something in what, I hope, is a neat piece of review, instead 0f sumth1n l1k3 d33s? (You might even notice that I even care to hit the spacebar twice after a period, but only once after a comma.) Well, when I talk with my sister and brother, or with my bestfriends, sometimes we use words and phrases only we understand. (I wager none of you know what an ‘exedol’ is.) Sometimes we don’t even have to finish our sentences. Our experience together has created specific words and phrases and shaped the language that we use when we communicate with each other. But, when I write something, keeping a general reader in mind, I must be careful to use words and phrases most, if not all, readers would understand, presenting my thought clearly, preventing misunderstanding or confusion (except if that is exactly my intention, but Joyce I am not). Hence my writing style – but trust me, in verbal communication, I might sound very, very different. Language is far more interesting than filling up blanks on a question sheet with the right form of verbs, and Steven Pinker has a way of revealing to us how amazing our language and our brain are.     biology general-science language               583 reviews23 followers     May 2, 2011   I had The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language out of the library for the entire summer. I finally finished it by actively reading it on the train for a couple of weeks. It's interesting, don't get me wrong, it's just LONG and has enough dull/confusing stretches that I couldn't bring myself to read it in my free time - it was pretty much a train-only book.The book's underlying claim is that all human beings are born with something Pinker calls a Universal Grammar, which causes us to acquire language instinctively. Whether we are born into an English or Kinyarwandan or sign-language community affects only the details of our language acquisition - we are wired to understand the way language works. He makes many good points, and I learned a lot from reading this book, but something underlying the text was somewhat disturbing to me (and it's not just the way he seems to revere Noam Chomsky as a god, quoting him earnestly and often, and almost overemphasizing the one point where he disagrees with Chomsky as if to say, "Look, all you people who think I'm just digesting Chomsky for the masses - I DO have my own thoughts! So there!"). It's that Pinker is 100% an objectivist, believing that our language and culture don't really affect the underlying processes in our minds and that human beings are ultimately the same, whereas I can't see the world without some degree of relativity slipping in, thinking that we are all very very similar and are justified in acting as if we are all the same, but that there are subtle differences that we may not entirely be able to overcome. I think lanugage, at least to a small degree, does affect the way we think and process the world, even if the differences are mostly ones we can see past or work around when talking with others from a different language background. (I laughed every time I turned the book over and saw the quote on the back from William F. Buckley, Jr.: "Steven Pinker is, I think, engagingly wrong in some of his conclusions, but the operative word here is engagingly. He reminds us of the pleasures of reading about language, provided people like him are at the wheel.") A few details I really enjoyed about this book: Case studies and quotes from people with various neurological disorders affecting their language abilities. The detail to which Pinker addressed sign languages, showing how language acquisition follows the same steps whether it is spoken or gestured (deaf babies "babble" with their hands at the same age that hearing babies babble with their mouths). The linguistics primers, which had me making phoneme sounds and sticking my finger in my mouth to see how my tongue and lips were arranged (while on the train!). Reasons why the "language mavens" (people who bemoan the decline of English) are often wrong.  This is definitely a worthwhile read if you're interested in linguistics but haven't studied much on the topic yet. There's a lot of value in this book, even though some passages do get overwhelmingly dry or pedantic (pages of sentence diagramming scattered throughout the book, for example). I wouldn't recommend it to a casual reader, since I kind of had to will myself to finish reading the book, but I do think I learned a lot for sticking it out.      nonfiction               1,963 reviews675 followers      Read  October 9, 2010   Steven Pinker and I should be natural enemies. He's a representative of what I consider to be the smarmy, science-precludes-all-else school of hung-up modernist reductionists, while I fly the flag of what he considers to be the wishy-washy, Nietzsche-damaged academic Left. And yet it's difficult for me not to have some respect for his project.When he's not making potshots at relativism(s), he is generally quite lucid and charming, and throughout writes with a clear, approachable logic. By cogitating on the structure of Creole languages and the speech patterns of aphasics, he makes a very, very strong case for a universal grammar. While there are suggestions that certain features of universal aren't present in some languages, it seems to be a reasonable hypothesis. I will say, as an arch-empiricist and an arch-skeptic, that there's a very strong chance that grammatical structures quite likely have a social rather than a strictly evolutionary basis, but the idea is certainly thought-provoking. And, importantly for us moody relativists, he has convinced me (in a way that Peter Singer totally didn't) of the democratic potential of the notion of innate human nature.  I do feel that he utilizes a certain circular logic. In Pinker's view, morphemes fit into the framework of syntax, and therefore language is innate. What is a morpheme? Something that fits into the framework of syntax. Also, he largely relies on generalizations rather than universals. Oh, and he claims signifiers are arbitrary, even in the case of onomatopoeia. And yet he tries to claim that certain signifiers are non-arbitrary because we evolved in certain ways. This is just a glaring example that implies, to me, that Pinker used his data to fit his conclusion. Bad science booohissss. But while these problems call into question his work and method, it's still a work I have the utmost respect for, and that everyone interested in language, whether liquored-up French deconstructionist or icy positivist, needs to read.     scientific-nonfiction               801 reviews2,503 followers     April 10, 2010   Previously, I had read Steven Pinker's "The Stuff of Thought", which is also an excellent book. I enjoyed that book, so I next read this one--and I'm glad I did. "The Language Instinct" is an absolutely fascinating book! The author presents some very convincing arguments, that the acquisition of language is an instinct that has evolved over many generations, through natural selection. Steven Pinker is right on the money, when it comes to his analysis of evolution. Every chapter is compelling, and each chapter investigates language from a different perspective. In both this book, and in "The Stuff of Thought", Pinker investigates why so many seemingly irregular word usages are not irregular at all. Often we instinctively use words and phrases that seem illogical, just because "it sounds right." Pinker shows the logic underlying the usage--and each time, I just have to say, "oh-my-gosh--of course!"      linguistics nonfiction psychology               722 reviews168 followers     December 29, 2010   Pinker is as much of a twit as his hair suggests: The Language Instinct is a miserable pile of unsupported and unsupportable conclusions, straw man attacks, hypocrisy leap-frogging into doublethink, shoddy reasoning, knee-jerk contrarianism, indeliberate obtusity, and gut-feeling argumentation. Pinker tries to synthesize the ideas of people smarter than he is (Chomsky, mostly), and many of these are perfectly fine the way they were originally formulated; they no longer are after Pinker is through defending them, because he understands neither the ideas nor any arguments in their favour.As an example, do you remember the argument Dawkins once made, possibly in The Blind Watchmaker, about how very small changes can accumulate and turn into very significant results in a relatively small amount of time? He used a hypothetical population of mice that grew in average size by one percent every generation, and showed that within a few thousand generations — a mere couple of millennia! — those mice would be the size of elephants. Pinker tries to use this same story to show that small *selection pressures* can have significant results quickly:&gt; ``Imagine a mouse that was subject to a miniscule selection pressure for increased size—say, one percent reproductive advantage for offspring that were one percent bigger. Some arithmetic shows that the mouse's descendants would evolve to the size of an elephant in a few thousand generations, an evolutionary eyeblink.'' Which is obviously fractally incoherent, as he would have realised if he'd understood Dawkins's argument instead of just trying to repeat it to try to get a good review by him for the back cover (which he got), or even just tried to do said arithmetic. The sad part is that what he set out to argue is actually true; his bungled argument just undermined it.This is par for the course (there are more egregious examples, but this one stuck because it's Dawkins), and Pinker repeatedly fucks over his main thesis — that language is instinctive, which was as uncontroversial in 1994, when the book was written, as it is now — in the same way. Worse than that, though, he then tries to pretend that arguments in favour of this thesis mean that language is *nothing but* instinctive and, incidentally, uniquely human, and that ``therefore'' everything from linguistic prescriptivism to animal language to Sapir-Whorf to being interested in etymology is completely and utterly wrong-headed and obviously moronic, which he tries to back up by attacking caricatures of these things or, not infrequently, the character of the people involved. Anyway, other people have apparently done thorough jobs of taking apart The Language Instict, so I won't waste any more time on it. Not everything he says is wrong (stopped clocks and all that), and it's a lot like Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind in that some of the digressions are interesting enough, but the signal-to-noise ratio is so pathetically low that the book as a whole isn't worth your time. Read Chomsky instead; Pinker would claim he's saying the same things he is anyway, which demonstrates just how confused he is.Maybe it's just because TLI is his first book. Elsewhere in my to-read stack is his most recent one, The Stuff of Thought; we'll see how it compares. I'm not holding my breath. Ultimately, the problem isn't that he was new to writing, because he wasn't; it's that he's a psychologist, and not a real scientist.     biology language               150 reviews182 followers     March 27, 2015   In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin wrote, “Man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children; while no child has an instinctive tendency to bake, brew, or write.” The experimental psychologist, Steven Pinker, took this quote as the inspiration for his book on – what he considers – the idea that there exists an innate language instinct to be found across all cultures. Elaborating on the canonical linguistic ideas of Noam Chomsky, particularly in regard to Chomsky’s Universal Grammar, Pinker presents the lay reader with numerous examples of how language acquisition, grammatical comprehension, and the tendency to speak, are all aspects of an innate linguistic tendency that human beings share, regardless of cultural background or specific language.Though Pinker generally agrees with Chomsky’s work on Universal Grammar, The Language Instinct focuses primarily on the idea that thoughts create language, a mental process that Pinker refers to as “mentalese”. This theoretical linguistic perspective is diametric to that of the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, which suggests that language determines thought, and that the particular culture one belongs to is unique, in turn greatly affecting the way that a person communicates, utilizes language, and ultimately, perceives the world around them. 	In Chapter one, entitled “An Instinct to Acquire an Art”, Pinker covers the two opposing linguistic schools, and talks about Chomsky and his research on Universal grammar. Pinker begins his polemic on Whorfian claims about language coloring in human perspective by discussing Chomsky’s skepticism, concerning not merely the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, but the “Standard Social Science Model” (SSCM) in general. Pinker, siding with Chomsky, feels that, not only is the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis wrong, but the basic intellectual stance that “the human psyche is molded by the surrounding culture”, is a dramatic misconception inspired by the SSCM. However, as we see later in the book, Pinker will part ways with Chomsky, ideologically. Though they both feel that grammar is a discrete combinatorial system; and is also a soundly structured tool with words and rules that human beings have an innate tendency to acquire, Chomsky is apprehensive about whether or not this language instinct, or gene, is part of the process of evolutionary adaptation. Pinker feels that the language instinct is similar to the human eye in that it has the appearance of design. In other words, the eye, for human beings, is a tool engineered with a very specific purpose. It has the appearance of design, and elements of an engineered tool, just like a camera, or an engine. The significant point that Pinker does take from Chomsky’s work is his claim that “the same symbol-manipulating machinery, without exception, underlies the world’s languages.” 	A chapter by chapter synopsis of a book of such layered complexity would become tedious after chapter 5. Everything from Broca’s Aphasia (which can cause language impairment), to x-bar theory (a theoretical version of phrase structure proposed by Chomsky that compares common grammatical rules and structures across different languages), artificial intelligence, prescriptive vs. descriptive grammar, and language organs and grammar genes, is covered in this erudite defense of Universal Grammar. These examples are useful to Pinker because they assist him in elucidating his rational stance on a language of thought. Logic-heavy gems such as, “And if there can be two thoughts corresponding to one word, thoughts can’t be words”, are peppered throughout the book. When he talks about x-bar theory, he explains how, “A part of speech, then, is not a kind of meaning: it is a kind of token that obeys certain formal rules, like a chess piece or a poker chip.” Pinker’s strongest arguments for a Universal Grammar or a language of thought, primarily concern phrase structure within sentences.  Chomsky laid much of the ground on syntactic structures in his linguistic work in the 1960’s. But Pinker sees grammar as a technical aspect of language that “offers a clear refutation of the empiricist doctrine that there is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses.” So, again, the book is covering a lot of linguistic ground concerning academic debates about what language essentially is, but for Pinker, an unabashed devotee of Darwin, The Language Instinct is also about how language is an innate tendency that undergoes evolutionary adaptive processes. He disagrees with the Whorfians and cultural relativists in the sense that he sees grammatical comprehension and language acquisition as innate tendencies. It’s not that he disagrees with the claim that culture can occasionally influence how people speak, or the way a language sounds. Pinker simply believes that there is a common capacity for speech and language utilization across all cultures, and it’s not that different. Again, he refers to the apparent design of language toward the end of chapter 10, entitled “Language Organs and Grammar Genes”, when he reflects, “I would expect the basic design of language, from x-bar syntax to phonological rules and vocabulary structure to be uniform across the species; how else could children learn to talk and adults understand one another.”  	In the academic arena of linguistics, this debate between people arguing that language is an innate instinct and those that feel that language influences thought is slightly less prominent than it was in the past. In example, one of the strongest claims supporting the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis is that the speakers of the Piraha tribe of South America were incapable of using recursion (inserting embedded clauses within sentences ad infinitum) in their language. In 2004, Peter Gordon conducted an experiment consisting of various counting exercises in order to determine whether or not the Piraha were capable of counting exact cardinalities. He concluded that the Piraha had numbers for one, few, and many, but were incapable of remembering large exact numbers. Gordon’s experimental design was relatively crude, and he merely concluded that the Piraha couldn’t count that well under the conditions of the experiment. Since then, the linguist Andrew Nevins, along with his colleagues concluded that Piraha does allow for some recursive embedding using verb suffixes and conversions of nouns to verbs. It is also possible to conjoin propositions within a sentence, such as “We ate a lot of the fish, but there was some fish that we did not eat." The debunking of linguistic myths such as the apparent absence of recursion in the Piraha language, are concrete proof that Pinker is on to something profound when he suggests an underlying linguistic design in human nature. 	One might argue that, throughout The Language Instinct, Pinker attempts to insert too many anecdotes from technical linguistics as well as from popular culture. The Language Instinct was one of Pinker’s first popular science books. This onslaught of information is understandable as he is a trained experimental psychologist trying to make technical linguistic explanations understandable to a lay audience. He does so with flying colors. There is also his Darwinist bent, along with the genetic approach to language research, which many traditional linguists (especially academic Whorfians, clearly) might find a little too reductionist. What stands out in this wonderfully informative book is Pinker’s basic, non-threatening theoretical stance that language is part of an adaptive process in nature. There may be notable superficial distinctions across different languages, but the basic structure of language and its apparent design is something that is utilized across all cultures, regardless of location, history, or linguistic origin. For Pinker, culture is not to be devalued or overlooked, but when lost in the cacophonous babel of world languages he opines, “I imagine seeing through the rhythms to the structures underneath, and sense that we all have the same minds.”      cognitive-science linguistics-semiotics               1,209 reviews118 followers     October 7, 2021   I have great respect for Noam Chomsky's Theory of Universal Grammar, to the popularization of which Steven Pinker dedicates this work. The idea of a built-in mechanism of instinctive comprehension of language at the genetic level is a powerful incentive for those who want to study.It is sad that the time for activation is given only up to twelve years, but maybe it is somehow possible to activate after this period? Many literary translators, I know, came to serious studies at a much more mature age. And this means that we should not throw off the ship of modernity a functional and cognitive approach to linguistics, old-school and not as bright as Chomsky's generative linguistics, but explaining a lot in the mechanisms of conscious language acquisition. Moreover, to achieve a level of persuasiveness, as it was with "the best in us. Why there was less violence" this time Pinker failed. The book is extremely uneven in terms of style. All the time there was a feeling that he was spreading his thoughts along the tree, rushing in all directions, simultaneously arguing with opponents, sitting down to chat over a cup of tea with like-minded people (speaking the same language with him), continuing to explain what students did not fully understand during the special course, and only last of all remembers the reader himself.  Ваш великий и могучий Структуральнейший лингвист  Во все времена во всех человеческих сообществах язык изменялся, хотя разные части языка изменялись в разных человеческих сообществах по-разному. Есть у вас мечта нематериального свойства? В смысле, не яхта, Ferrari, отель в Дубае в собственность - не то, для чего нужны, главным образом, деньги. Я мечтала понимать сказанное-написанное на чужих языках и всегда думала, что это нереально, нужно с детства воспитываться в двуязычии и/или окончить языковую спецшколу, и/или долго жить в чужой стране с возможностью глубокого погружения. А без того, оставь надежду, всяк... Пока однажды не взяла себя в руки, хорошенько пнув собственную лень и неуверенность, и занялась, наконец, языками. Многими, за тот период прошла в общей сложности четырнадцать языковых курсов, в том числе т��кие не самые популярные, как португальский, датский, венгерский. На каждом стараясь прочитывать хотя бы небольшую книжку. Эксперимент длился три года с небольшим, оказался насыщенным, хотя непростым периодом личной истории. На испанском и английском я теперь читаю, польский понимаю с голоса, при необходимости пойму написанное на любом индоевропейском. Неожиданным побочным результатом стало быстрое чтение на русском. Это вступление было к тому, что , случись "Язык как инстинкт" со мной в тот период, книга наверняка произвела бы большее впечатление и послужила источником немалых читательских радостей. Подумать только, тебе авторитетно, на шести сотнях страниц объясняют, что язык встроен в человека врожденной функцией, как плетение паутины в паука и умение строить плотины в бобра. Как минимум, вдохновляющее чтение. Сегодня, когда роман с лингвистикой отошел в область нежных воспоминаний, я воспринимаю такого рода книги как занятный нон-фикшн, но с изрядной долей критичности. То есть, к Теории универсальной грамматики Ноама Хомского, популяризации которой Стивен Пинкер посвящает этот труд, я с большим уважением. Идея встроенного на генетическом уровне механизма инстинктивного постижения языка мощнейший стимул для желающих изучать. Печально, что времени на активацию отводится всего-то до двенадцати лет, но может быть как-то можно активировать и по истечении этого срока? Многие литературные переводчики, я знаю, приходили к серьезным занятиям в куда более зрелом возрасте. И значит, не стоит сбрасывать с корабля современности функциональный и когнитивный подход к лингвистике, олдскульные и не столь яркие, как порождающая лингвистика Хомского, но многое объясняющие в механизмах осознанного овладения языками. Тем более, что достичь уровня убедительности, как это было с "Лучшим в нас. Почему насилия стало меньше" на сей раз Пинкеру не удалось. Книга чрезвычайно неровная с точки зрения стиля. Все время не покидало чувство, что он растекается мыслию по древу, мечется во все стороны, одновременно полемизируя с оппонентами, присаживаясь поболтать за чашкой чая с единомышленниками (говорящими с ним на одном языке), продолжает объяснять не до конца понятое студентами в ходе спецкурса, и лишь в последнюю очередь вспоминает собственно о читателе. Еще один нюанс, исходя из которого я не рекомендовала бы этот томик русскому читателю, в то время, как англоязычному эта особенность подарит много радости. Книга выражено англизированная. Для иллюстрации своих идей автор приводит массу замечательно интересных примеров историко-географических, социально-обусловленных, стилистических трансформаций английского языка. Немало страниц посвящены восхитительным игрищам с идиомами, когда, буквализацией значения расхожие выражения доводятся до абсурда. Кроме того, "Язык как инстинкт" это еще и разговор о литературном стиле. Где наряду с универсальными советами о том, как следует работать с текстом, сколько раз вычитывать и редактировать его, немалую роль играют и такие специфически английские темы, как насколько приемлемо использование тех или иных слов и выражений. Вы найдете их полезными, если собираетесь писать книги на английском, в остальных случаях вряд ли.  Резюмируя: книга представляет интерес для очень ограниченной и специфичной читательской аудитории, и практически невозможна для адаптации к руксскоязычным реалиям.                   Author  17 books333 followers     April 10, 2010   Interesting for its discussion of language and language acquisition. But: too many people take Pinker's word as gospel, when in fact his theories are quite controversial. This book also bears a lot of responsibility for the rise of pop EvPsych. Evolutionary psychology is a field that has a few worthwhile observations mixed with an awful lot of BS used to justify all sorts of learned behavior. So, read this book with a very large grain of salt.    evolution linguistics non-fiction               805 reviews588 followers     September 7, 2017   A highly interesting book about how language came about in the human mind. It gets quite technical at times, but that's an added bonus for anyone who is truly interested in the subject.    absolute humour-me non-fiction               38 reviews27 followers     January 16, 2011   Given the current divide in linguistics between the Functional/Cognitive theoretical approach to language and the formalist, generative approach which Pinker supports and has largely popularized with this book, The Language Instinct is an intellectually irresponsible endeavor. He frames linguistic nativism as a non-negotiable fact when actually, there is a fierce debate within linguistics which is moving away from ideas of those like Steven Pinker and Noam Chomsky. The opposing school of thought argues that although the cognitive underpinnings of language are innate (having developed in evolutionary time), language itself is more like a new machine made out of old parts, which develops in social interaction and cannot be localized in any set of genes or related to any "instinct." Fraught with error, Pinker's pseudo-science is based on an approach that seeks not to fully understand the nature of real language as it exists, as it evolves over time, and as it is acquired by young children - but to rehash a pre-supposed view of language that was developed by "linguists" philosophizing as they sat in their armchairs in the 50s and 60s, fundamentally concerned with abstracting language into mathematical elegance rather than recognizing it for the complex system that it is. I highly recommend anyone who found themselves nodding at every turn as they read this book to read Tomasello's response "Language is not an Instinct" (to be found in full just by doing a google search). And I quote, "At heart, Chomskyan nativism is a philosophical endeavor to discern by means of logic what is uniquely and innately human. Cognitive and Functional approaches are scientific endeavors aimed at understanding how people learn and use natural languages." Couldn't have said it better myself. One star for effort, Pinky-Poo.     linguistics               4,138 reviews1,004 followers     July 24, 2014   When it comes to something I don't know much about, I'm pretty easily swayed by other people's arguments. Like, I finished this book feeling it was pretty intelligent and interesting, and then I read some criticisms and reviews and heck, I don't know what to think. Still, I did find it interesting, and while the book looks deceptively slim for how long it took me to get through it, Pinker expresses his arguments clearly, with examples and sourcing, etc. His basic argument is that we're hardwired for language. That, as with our sight, hearing, etc, we have a 'language sense'; if properly stimulated during the critical period, our brains quickly figure out how to parse language (at least, the language spoken around us when we are at that age, even if that language is sign language). We don't need to hear every word or possible sentence structure (couldn't possibly) to pick up on the rules of grammar and apply them, when speaking and when listening. This only refers to the critical period; a child will learn grammar instinctively on being exposed to a language, but an adult must learn it by rote, in the same way as you have to learn to process visual input during the critical period for that, or you'll never have the same visual acuity as someone who did. Thus far, I think I'm going along with him. I do have questions of a sort of chicken and the egg nature: which came first, the brain's Universal Grammar module, or language that necessitated it? I'm inclined to think that the structures that we now use to understand language were used for something else earlier in our evolution, and became co-opted into our communications array (so to speak) over time. Our brains formed language, and then the language formed our brains... All in all, I don't know whether Pinker's right, but I found his work convincing. Having read a couple of other books on language, including Guy Deutscher's 
 Through the Language Glass
, and applying what I know from those too, I find it hard to disagree with Pinker even where I want to, for example about relativism.     non-fiction science-fact               173 reviews53 followers     January 8, 2012   First of all, I am not a big fan of Steven Pinker. I found How the mind works erroneous on many accounts. That said, The Language Instinct is despite its uncompromising MIT cognitivist stance a fun and interesting read. To me, even the title reveals a general error; i.e. How the Mind Creates Language. The mind does not create language; human beings create language in an inter-subjective way. (Compare: brains do not think (except as metaphorical speech, not suitable for scientific writing) people think.) So be on your guard and do not accept mr. Pinker's arguments without reflecting upon them. This book is full of interesting facts and stories, but I would recommend anyone to pick up a copy of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations after having read Pinker in order to get a glance of the complicated reality outside the cognitivist nimbus cloud.    cognitive-science linguistics           June 2, 2010    Very interesting. Too long and technical for me. Most of the stuff I didn't care about. Not a criticism of the book but just a mismatch of interest.Middle was boring. Writing was good. Sharp style. Insults fools and posers. Funny. Charming. The perfect example is the beginning of chapter 11 pg 340. This is the way to argue. Funny, ridiculing, forceful and gets the message across. His metaphors are really good. Aspire to this. Language is built into the mind. It evolved by natural selection. It is not a cultural artifact. "Ghetto talk" is just as complex as perfect english. Perfect english is a collection of rules that were sold to allow new wealth from the industrial revolution seem classy. Quotes: "Simply by making noises with our mouths, we can reliably cause precise new combinations of ideas to arise in each other's minds." "Language is not a cultural artifact that we learn the way we learn to tell time or how the federal government works. Instead, it is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains. Language is a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the child spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal instruction, is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic, is quantitatively the same in every individual, and is distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently." "In many cases a pidgin can be transmuted into a full complex language in one fell swoop: all it takes is for a group of children to be exposed to the pidgin at the age when they acquire their mother tongue." "People store genes in their gonads and pass them to their children through their genitals; they store grammars in their brains and pass them to their children through their mouths. Gonads and brains are attached to each other in bodies, so when bodies move, genes and grammars move together. That is the only reason that geneticists find any correlation between the two." "The brute mathematical fact is that all things being equal, there is a better chance of being a young person than being an old person. So genes that strengthen young organisms at the expense of old organisms have the odds in their favor and will tend to accumulate over evolutionary timespans, whatever the bodily system, and the result is overall senescence." "Neuroscientists estimate that about thirty thousand genes, the majority of the human genome, are used to build the brain and nervous system." "Outwitting and second-guessing an organism of approximately equal mental abilities with non-overlapping interests, at best, and malevolent intentions, at worst, makes formidable and ever-escalating demands on cognition. And a cognitive arms race clearly could propel a linguistic one. Ina ll cultures, social interactions are mediated by persuasion and argument...evolving humans lived in a world in which language was woven into the intrigues of politics, economics, technology, family, sex, and friendship that played key roles in individual reproductive success." "All behavior is an interaction between nature and nurture, whose contributions are as inseparable as the length and width of a rectangle in determining its area." Beautiful    This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.     biology psychology               592 reviews1,378 followers     March 26, 2017   *Read for school* 2.5/3 stars  This was an okay read - very technical at some points, so those parts nearly lulled me to sleep. Honestly, I wouldn't have picked it up had it not been for my linguistics class - but i did learn about how languages formed, so in a way, it was pretty interesting.  Nothing remarkable, though.     3-stars nonfiction owned               147 reviews113 followers     May 20, 2017   There were some parts of this that were interesting and worth reading for, but overall it was a waffly and long winded book that I struggled to get through at some boring points.    cover-love language non-fic-blnk               Author  9 books98 followers     November 5, 2012   I had always supposed that linguists could not write clearly. Rather like psychiatrists who were mad, sociologists who couldn’t get on with people, and social anthropologists who were permanent outsiders, linguists, I supposed, devoted their adulthood overcoming their childhood difficulties with language. Here, however, I discover my prejudices overturned. Considering the inherent complexity of his topic, Steven Pinker’s book on language is witty, lucid and intelligible. Pinker’s theme is that people are born with an inherent capacity – an instinct – that enables them to construct language. In much the same way as they are programmed to learn, at appropriate ages, to walk, to tell jokes and to have sex, so people have an innate ability to learn to speak correctly. Around this central idea – derived from Chomsky’s studies of syntax – Pinker hangs a summary of some of the most important recent ideas in linguistics.  The book therefore doubles as a textbook for a first year linguistics student and a good general introduction for a mildly interested beginner (for somebody like me). It is also a polemical book, for Pinker is not afraid to ride hobby horses and proclaim his own vision of the one true linguistics. He delves into the mysteries of Chomskyan deep structure, explaining that the grammar of particular languages are constructed from the inbuilt language-structure that is common to every person and every language. He defies the linguistic relativism associated with the names of Sapir and Whorf. He explains how people and animals think without having a language. He tells the story of deaf children in Nicaragua who were thrown together with older children who knew bits and pieces of sign language from a variety of sources, but who, from these bits and pieces, were able to construct a sign language as coherent as any other. He casts doubt on the supposed ability of monkeys and whales to speak human languages. He explores the biology that explains – or might explain – the instinct for speaking. He opposes those who fight endless wars against the split infinitive, the greengrocer's apostrophe and the final participle, claiming that their own version of English is the only correct one. And he does much more.  The book is, in short, informative and intelligent. It is also a lot of fun. I see that a more recent book by Pinker has been nominated for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. Having just read this one, I am not at all surprised.      anthropology language useful               Author  8 books26 followers     June 15, 2018   A good portion of this book can be summed up in the relatively simple graph that was making the rounds on Twitter a while back: https://twitter.com/robdrummond/statu.... However, Pinker is a good enough writer that reading about the issue in book-length format rarely feels boring, as he throws about a plethora of interesting examples and anecdotes to illustrate the point. What’s more, the book skips around quite a bit, covering just about every aspect of general linguistics I could think of that actually interests me – how language works, how it was created, how the brain produces it, how various internal and external processes shape it, etc.I do have objections, of course, one of them being that for a book that very loudly proclaims to be about language in general, it retains a strong English-leaning slant – there is quite some talk, for instance, about how English spelling is an optimal system of representing speech vocalizations on paper, which comes off as a really weird claim to someone reared in a writing system with a phonetic alphabet/script (Serbian Cyrillic, and to an extent, Serbo-Croatian Latin). The segment on Chomsky and the structure of deep grammar/mentalese also suffers quite a bit in audiobook format. The narrator really makes an effort, but some of the structures described, while probably quite clear at a mere glance at a hand-drawn diagram, become an impenetrable forest of P(NP)VPs when read out loud. On the other hand, the majority of the objections I saw here, glancing through the comments, boil down to either “boo-hoo, I disagree with his views, therefore this is a bad book” or “Pinker’s presentation is simplistic cherry-picking of straw-man arguments”. Well, one may disagree with what he’s saying, but Pinker does mention very specific sources and research his arguments lean on, and my humble academic experience with some of the opposition to his views leaves me inclined towards aligning with the theories presented herein. As for simplistic? Probably, but this is not a university textbook, so I don’t see the problem. He does what he meant to do, present an overall state of play in linguistics at the time of writing for a more-or-less lay audience. My edition also has a neat addendum at the end, where he looks back after more than a decade has passed, and discusses some of the changes and reactions to the contents of the book.                   23 reviews5 followers     January 23, 2019   Main takeaways:- Language is an innate skill possessed by humans and not acquired artificially through teaching like writing, programming, etc.- Although innate, the skill can be automatically learnt only during the critical period of up to 6 years of age. Beyond this age, it has to be artificially acquired like a second language.- Just one generation of children brought up by adults who speak a "pidgin" (a language lacking grammar and consisting of mere words from a number of different languages) is enough to create a "creole" (a grammatically rich language which borrows the pidgin vocabulary)- All languages share a Universal Grammar (which is the part of language learning that's probably innate in humans). Each language follows the super-rules of this grammar but has its own values for the variable parameters depending on various cultural and environmental factors. - Rules of grammar are only useful as long as they help resolve ambiguity and enable effective communication among humans. Rules like "don't end a sentence with a preposition" and "use whom instead of who" are bookishly enforced and serve no practical purpose.- "English spelling could be better than it is. But it is already much better than people think it is. That is because writing systems do not aim to represent the actual sounds of talking, which we do not hear, but the abstract units of language underlying them, which we do hear."                  1,238 reviews140 followers     September 19, 2016   I so so so wanted to like this book. I took one linguistics class and did a number of rhetoric classes so I thought that I would find this book accessible. I did not. I recognize the Chomsky language trees. I did see why the trees were so important to discuss top and bottom sentences and to prove how all humans are hardwired for language so that babies simply learn if their family speaks top or bottom sentences and SVO or some other construction. Yet all human languaget is obviously human. I get that. I wonder why Pinker wrote such a detailed argument, so detailed that my attention derailed, and I cannot read one more page of this book.So why 3 stars when I seem to hate this book? I do not hate the book. I am frustrated by the details. I plan to retern to this book at a later date and to read one chapter at a time and then put the book away for a month and then repeat the process until I complete the book. I am simply on information overload. I will re-read this book and fully intend to rate it 4 or 5 stars.    history language-writing medical-science               171 reviews3 followers     September 12, 2018   This book is an excellent introduction into linguistics and language-related scientific fields (such as psycholinguistics, evolutionary linguistics, learning theory, etc), for someone like me who has been fascinated by the subject for a long time, but only had the chance to dabble a toe or two into one sub-area or another.It corrects many popular misconceptions about language and language learning, from the point of view of the author, based on the latest scientific concensus (at the time the book was written in 1994, though there's a section at the end of the 2007 edition with additions and corrections), such as the strong Whorf-Sapir hypothesis (which states that language determines thoughts) which discredits the possibility of the 1984 dystopian scenario with Newspeak (*sigh of relief*), the idea that some non-human members of the great apes could use "language" even remotely close in complexity to human language as claims have continuously been made over the years, or that parents speaking to their young children is essential for the later's ability to acquire language.It also presents Chomsky's hypothesis of Universal Grammar, which is a set of rules thought to be the backbone of all human languages, regardless of their apparent phonetics, vocabulary or grammatical rules, and a mirror image of the brain structures that might have evolved to allow complex language parsing and construction, as well as acquiring the native language during childhood.Considering Steven Pinker's simple and beautiful style, as well as clear and direct explanations (for the most part), I am certainly looking forward to reading the rest of his books.    above-150p-read format-paperback language-learning               484 reviews41 followers     November 4, 2017   I usually "go with the feeling" when I review books, so it's really difficult to review non-fiction. But I'll try anyway. The language history was an easy, but satisfying popular-science read. I highly recommend it to everyone who is interested in linguistics or language in general.                   342 reviews61 followers     June 18, 2016   it took me a while to read it cause it got too scientific at times, but Pinker has tried to explain this as simple as he can and his humor makes it a good read. i recommend this to language lovers.                  130 reviews38 followers     March 9, 2017   I really-really like my readings about languages (English and my native Russian), never bored with them, and this particular book was a treat. I’ll read other books of Steven Pinker for sure.                  Author  43 books373 followers     October 3, 2009   This review could be long or short. I wasn't sure if I wanted to waste the time, but it's a long book and there are some seriously interesting and seriously stupid things in it. It centers on the issue of language as learned or as instinct, which can be so fine an issue that most people really won’t care. For the short: it's very nice to see so much research on language presented and Pinker does a good job of explaining the often oversimplified theory that there is a genetic basis for understanding language (parts are probably split between your genetic code, but there is no one gene that controls all of it). But there is also some will-meltingly stupid material, like arguments that we can't have standards in our language because we can't judge whale songs and programming a useful speaking device wouldn't include commands like "don't split infinitives" because a screwdriver doesn't split infinitives. As he tries to illuminate how the brain creates language, the book is pretty interesting. As he tries to enforce his values, like that we shouldn't have any aesthetic consideration, he's worthless.Okay. That's the short one. Here’s a longer one. Pinker's central argument does nothing for me. That argument is that we have an instinct for creating language. You can construct sentences without thinking about the structure, and even when you babble you have a sense of when to pause for verbal grammar. Think of kids picking up swearing just by hearing it – they aren’t instructed in how to use it, but figure it out logically and intuitively. Since I already believe in this instinct and it seems pretty obvious that we do have it, an argument that it exists isn't impressive, though it was nice of him to collect so many anecdotes and studies that illustrate it to be the case. The best parts of the book are studies that show how versatile people are with language, like children picking up Pidgin or nonsense and converting them, within one generation, into grammatically sound modes of communication. The whole matter is kind of a bunk argument. Either our brains have an instinct for picking up and creating language, or we created languages that our brains are capable of picking up and using. If you think about it on those terms for so much as a minute, you'll get how silly the debate is. At best, both are partially true: we generate and imitate modes of expression that our brains can use readily. From the creation standpoint, why wouldn't we make something that's pretty close to what our brains can handle with unconscious ease? And from the instinct standpoint, why wouldn't we have instincts of some strength or other for the things that are created from inside our heads? Do we think about language or use it unconsciously? It’s obvious that we do both, though we wing it more than we plot it. It’s not an either/or problem, and that Pinker misses this almost entirely is sad. Parents help teach their children and foster language, from obvious examples like imparting the names for things and spelling of words, to what’s been found in recent scientific studies (not in this book) examining mastery of language in children who come from households with differing amounts of speech. Every day you probably struggle for words and consciously choose what to say at least some of the time – you know there is a conscious component to speech. There is unconscious and conscious education that he simply disregards because he's arguing for this instinct. Pinker choosing a side here feels like he's doing it for attention, and it's not as though this is the only time (in this book or academia in general) where it feels like his decision was unnecessary to the pursuit of truth. His side-arguments can get annoying. Sometimes he seems downright condescending on the intelligence of children and the deaf, and often he seems to skim rather than analyze evidence when it suits his arguments. For instance in the case of a Simon, a deaf boy whose deaf parents had improper signing that he did not pick up, Pinker makes serious assumptions about what he must have done with no evidence or even interviews with the boy in question to verify the conclusions. It’s not even anecdotal at that point; it’s conjecture, which does not belong next to the real research on Simon’s case. Conjecture is essential in analysis, but not like this, and not in making the ironclad decisions about the way minds work as Pinker does. By far his silliest argument is in favor of descriptivism over prescriptivism. Descriptivism is the school that describes how people speak; prescriptivism deals with how people ought to. Here, like in the bunk argument over using a language consciously or unconsciously, most intelligent people understand that language functions best when we mediate between the descriptive and prescriptive influences, changing the rules to better suit some things, but sticking to them for others. Being a scientist who observes, Pinker is interested in descriptivism as it shows the most about how we are inclined to speak and act in language. But being foolishly inclined to polar positions, he argues that we ought to only follows descriptivism and does it in downright stupid ways, like saying that we don't need a speaking machine is programmed to "not split infinitives" because screwdrivers already don't split infinitives. That’s moronic and if his opposition made a similar rhetorical move he would never allow it. His conclusions are that whatever we “get” by the language instinct should make up all the prescriptive rules, and that whatever we don’t make should constitute the rest. You know, in the way that we eat whatever tastes good, think whatever we like regardless of objective evidence and live in total anarchy without any government. Okay, those three examples are stupidity on my own part, but that’s what this pure-descriptive argument deserves. It comes from his oversimplified approach to language cognition, at first pretending that people don’t think or act in their education of language, and now proceeding that we shouldn’t think about how we’re going to use it or apply intentional value. That he quotes a Shakespearian character in defense his of anti-prescriptive campaign when that author taught writing seals the deal. Now before Pinker's fans get angry over the rating alone, if you hold your mouse button over the stars you see that each correlates to a statement. One star means "I didn't like it," and for the fascinating research in the book, Pinker became too annoying and questionable at too many points for me to like his book. So it gets one star because, you see, they have prescribed meaning and are not just whatever you want them to be.                   146 reviews63 followers     August 24, 2014   I just finished reading the most challenging non-fiction leisure book I have ever read: Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct. It was a close call, but I'm relieved that I powered through.Before I dive into my review, I'd like to clarify that I found it challenging not because my knowledge of linguistics prior to reading this book was terribly basic, but rather because there is so much information packed into The Language Instinct. That is, however, its greatest merit - and the reason why my mind was being blown after every chapter. In The Language Instinct, Pinker argues that humans' ability to acquire language is not dependant on education or imitation. Rather, it's instinctual. It's "wired into our brains by evolution."According to Pinker, "evolution did not make a ladder. It made a bush." That is to say, Pinker disagrees with Darwin's theory that we evolved from Monkeys. That's why computers will never be able to learn language the way a child could, and also why apes will never be able to speak English or Learn American Sign Language. Indeed, Pinker's research shows that those who claimed that laboratory apes' gestures resembled sign language were actually overanalyzing what they observed. Of course, there are many Darwinists out there who would shake their heads at such a thought (Pinker, however, is pretty convincing). All it would take, however, is the discovery of an evolved trait for an aesthetic, and not pragmatic, purpose, to defy the theory of natural selection. Anyway - because Pinker is trying to prove that language is an instinct, he begins at the roots of language acquisition. There is a lot of research on children. Such research is especially interesting when Pinker discusses 'creoles,' mother tongues that are developed as a result of several languages meshed together. The possibility of such 'meshing' suggests that an universal grammar underlies all language. The existence of a "universal grammar," however, would not wholly verify that language is an instinct. After all, we have words for 'water' not because our DNA dictates it but because we need to refer to water. Neither is there a 'grammar gene - an American-born Chinese can just as easily learn English as his or her American peers. So, it seems that "complexity in the mind is not caused by learning; learning is caused by complexity in the mind." The Language Instinct is also in many ways a defense of language. Pinker argues that there is no reason to look down upon primitive dialects because primitive cultures have complex language systems and, after all, a language is also a dialect - just one with "an army and a navy." In his chapter on language mavens, a.k.a grammar nazis, Pinker also explains why certain grammatical errors are perhaps even preferable. For example, language mavens will argue that "Who did you see" should be "Whom did you see" or at least "Which person did you see" according to the rules of grammar. Yet can you imagine, Pinker asks, saying something like "Whom did you sound like?" Moreover, the final option ("which person") restricts the 'who' from being an animal or multiple people. The Language Instinct is an enlightening read that leaves reader with a deeper understanding, and growing curiosity, of language. Pinker writes in a clear and sometimes almost conversational way that renders a PhD-worthy subject into one that general audiences can grasp. Of course, certain sections are utterly perplexing and almost impossible to retain. Above all, however, Pinker convincingly presents the thesis that language - contrary to what many believe - is instinctual. As he says, "this is news." If language is innate, much more could be; such a revelation would revolutionize the way we consider education, study the human brain and even assess the validity of Darwin's theory of evolution!! Factoids: - We are told that a noun is the most important part of a sentence because it is the doer; however, a noun cannot operate without verb. So, the verb is the boss of a sentence- Mentalese: the hypothetical "language of thought, or representation of concepts and propositions in the brain in which ideas, including the meanings of words and sentences, are couched.- Listeme: an element of language that must be memorized because its sound or meaning does not conform to some general rule. All word roots, irregular forms and idioms are listemes. - When your tongue is high and at front of your mouth, you'll produce high-frequency sounds (e.g. e in teeny); when your tongue is low and at the back of your mouth, you'll produce low-frequency sounds (e.g. a in large). Now, this is especially fascinating when we consider words such as frobbing, twiddling and tweaking. To frob is to move a dial or switch by drastically adjusting its range; to twiddle is to adjust the switch by a smaller margin; to tweak is to adjust the switch by only a litte. Interestingly, it's always the word with the high front vowel that goes first in expressions such as ping-pong and chit-chat. Hip-hop, flip-flop, the list goes on... - English is an isolating language, meaning that you must say "to go" to indicate the act of going somewhere - two units are used to express one definition. The french aller, however, does the deed in one word.
The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5755.The_Language_Instinct
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35696171-enlightenment-now
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humani…
2018-02-27
Author
<div><div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/62787798-bill-gates"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>9 books505k followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2394544581">May 17, 2018</a></section><div><p>For years, I’ve been saying Steven Pinker’s <i>The Better Angels of Our Nature</i> was the best book I’d read in a decade. If I could recommend just one book for anyone to pick up, that was it. Pinker uses meticulous research to argue that we are living in the most peaceful time in human history. I’d never seen such a clear explanation of progress.<p>I’m going to stop talking up <i>Better Angels</i> so much, because Pinker has managed to top himself. His new book, <i>Enlightenment Now</i>, is even better.</p><p><i>Enlightenment Now</i> takes the approach he uses in <i>Better Angels</i> to track violence throughout history and applies it to 15 different measures of progress (like quality of life, knowledge, and safety). The result is a holistic picture of how and why the world is getting better. It’s like <i>Better Angels</i> on steroids.</p><p>I read the book slowly since I loved it so much, but I think most people will find it a quick and accessible read. He manages to share a ton of information in a way that’s compelling, memorable, and easy to digest.</p><p>It opens with an argument in favor of returning to the ideals of the Enlightenment—an era when reason, science, and humanism were touted as the highest virtues.</p><p>I’m all for more reason, science, and humanism, but what I found most interesting were the 15 chapters exploring each measure of progress. Pinker is at his best when he analyzes historic trends and uses data to put the past into context. I was already familiar with a lot of the information he shares—especially about health and energy—but he understands each subject so deeply that he’s able to articulate his case in a way that feels fresh and new.</p><p>I love how he’s willing to dive deep into primary data sources and pull out unexpected signs of progress. I tend to point to things like dramatic reductions in poverty and childhood deaths, because I think they’re such a good measure of how we’re doing as a society. Pinker covers those areas, but he also looks at more obscure topics.</p><p>Here are five of my favorite facts from the book that show how the world is improving:</p><p><b>1. You’re 37 times less likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning than you were at the turn of the century</b>—and that’s not because there are fewer thunderstorms today. It’s because we have better weather prediction capabilities, improved safety education, and more people living in cities.</p><p><b>2. Time spent doing laundry fell from 11.5 hours a week in 1920 to an hour and a half in 2014.</b> This might sound trivial in the grand scheme of progress. But the rise of the washing machine has improved quality of life by freeing up time for people—mostly women—to enjoy other pursuits. That time represents nearly half a day every week that could be used for everything from binge-watching <i>Ozark</i> or reading a book to starting a new business.</p><p><b>3. You’re way less likely to die on the job.</b> Every year, 5,000 people die from occupational accidents in the U.S. But in 1929—when our population was less than two-fifths the size it is today—20,000 people died on the job. People back then viewed deadly workplace accidents as part of the cost of doing business. Today, we know better, and we’ve engineered ways to build things without putting nearly as many lives at risk.</p><p><b>4. The global average IQ score is rising by about 3 IQ points every decade.</b> Kids’ brains are developing more fully thanks to improved nutrition and a cleaner environment. Pinker also credits more analytical thinking in and out of the classroom. Think about how many symbols you interpret every time you check your phone’s home screen or look at a subway map. Our world today encourages abstract thought from a young age, and it’s making us smarter.</p><p><b>5. War is illegal.</b> This idea seems obvious. But before the creation of the United Nations in 1945, no institution had the power to stop countries from going to war with each other. Although there have been some exceptions, the threat of international sanctions and intervention has proven to be an effective deterrent to wars between nations.</p><p>Pinker also tackles the disconnect between actual progress and the perception of progress—<a href="https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Some-Good-News-For-Once?WT.mc_id=05_20_2018_00_EnlightenmentNow_BG-GR_&amp;WT.tsrc=BGGR">something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about</a>. People all over the world are living longer, healthier, and happier lives, so why do so many think things are getting worse? Why do we gloss over positive news stories and fixate on the negative ones? He does a good job explaining why we’re drawn to pessimism and how that instinct influences our approach to the world, although I wish he went more in depth about the psychology (especially since he’s a psychologist by training). The late Hans Rosling explains this more fully in his excellent new book <i>
 <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/34890015.Factfulness_Ten_Reasons_We_re_Wrong_About_the_World___and_Why_Things_Are_Better_Than_You_Think"> Factfulness</a>
</i>.</p><p>I agree with Pinker on most areas, but I think he’s a bit too optimistic about artificial intelligence. He’s quick to dismiss the idea of robots overthrowing their human creators. While I don’t think we’re in danger of a <i>Terminator</i>-style scenario, the question underlying that fear—who exactly controls the robots?—is a valid one. We’re not there yet, but at some point, who has AI and who controls it will be an important issue for global institutions to address.</p><p>The big questions surrounding automation are proof that progress can be a messy, sticky thing—but that doesn’t mean we’re headed in the wrong direction. At the end of <i>Enlightenment Now</i>, Pinker argues that “we will never have a perfect world, and it would be dangerous to seek one. But there is no limit to the betterments we can attain if we continue to apply knowledge to enhance human flourishing."</p><p>The world is getting better, even if it doesn’t always feel that way. I’m glad we have brilliant thinkers like Steven Pinker to help us see the big picture. <i>Enlightenment Now</i> is not only the best book Pinker’s ever written. It’s my new favorite book of all time.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/31506695-david-wineberg"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>2 books662 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2278090193">February 17, 2018</a></section><div><p>You’ve never had it so good, and Steven Pinker has the stats and charts (over 70!) to prove it. Wars are fewer and less severe, homicides are down, racism is in decline, terrorism is a fading fad, democracy rules, communicable diseases and poverty are on their way out. Life expectancy is up, and police are killing fewer people, both black and white. Even the poor have refrigerators. Inequality is a requisite sign of success. So appreciate the wonderful state of affairs you find yourself in. This is the message of Enlightenment Now, with a title that sounds like a protest placard, but which is actually a survey of the world by the statistics that states collect.<p>We’re so “progressive”, we’re beating back entropy itself. Steven Pinker takes 500 pages to create a world where everything is so fabulously much better than it ever has been, that anyone who says different is perpetuating an intellectual lie. This is why it is your enlightenment. The book is an endless, uplifting editorial. If you’re buying.</p><p>He’s at his best criticizing politics and science. He shows precisely how our biases prejudice our most thoughtful conclusions, and bemoans the lack of respect for science and the humanities. He says science is presented in some schools as “just another narrative, or myth”. Humanities are in danger of extinction, and they are critical to progress.</p><p>Pinker has a nice tendency to support his arguments with examples and charts. Unfortunately, he balances this with a tendency to ignore states or countries that don’t conform to his claims, and he swings numbers around to make them look better. He claims when he measures what people consume as opposed to what they earn, the poverty rate in the USA is 3%. So really, everyone is thriving. Even if they’re visibly not. </p><p>I fully realize Pinker is untouchable and slated for sainthood, but many things he says don’t add up, and a lot of it is just outrageous on its face. Let him speak for himself:</p><p>-On war: “Virtually every acre of land that was conquered after 1928 has been returned to the state that lost it.” (Something must have happened in 1927 for him to pick 1928, but he doesn’t say). Where do you even begin to refute this? Kaliningrad? Mauritania? The South China Sea? Crimea? Donbass? Palestine?</p><p>-He defends the demolition of the middle classes in the West. Yes, a hundred million Americans are worse off. But a billion Chinese are better off. “The tradeoff is worth it,” he says. That the extremely rich got fabulously more rich is fine with him, too. </p><p>-On terrorism’s “decline”, Pinker points to recently low numbers of victim deaths to show how safe we really are. He doesn’t mention all the freedom of movement, assembly and privacy we have lost to the terrorists. He’s satisfied they don’t kill that much, and that they will eventually fade away. </p><p>-On the mellowing of war: “Weapons don’t come into existence just because they are conceivable or physically possible.” Yes, they do. And worse, everything can be weaponized, from food to mouseclicks. Pinker goes even further, claiming “most historians” don’t think the atomic bombings caused Japan to surrender in three days, but rather it was the potential of Russia turning its attention from west to east.</p><p>-There is a great deal of nonsense about how much cheaper life is today. The provision of a light indoors would have cost the equivalent of £40,000 in the middle ages (if anyone could read), while today, lights cost fractions of pennies. And 100 years ago it took 1800 hours’ work to afford a refrigerator (among too many more such examples). But Pinker never bothers with the other side of the coin. That today, everyone must spend $150 a month on cable, $125 on phone (after purchasing a phone every two years, with each costing more than the fridge), a $20,000 car, a mortgage, and $50,000 in school debt (none of which were factors in the cost of living in the middle ages ) or be unable to function in society. His endless comparisons are pointless.</p><p>-He keeps repeating that because even the poor have flush toilets and refrigerators, they are much better off today than ever. He says even the fabulously wealthy Rothschilds didn’t have a washing machine like nearly everyone (80%) now supposedly has. </p><p>Pinker dismisses ecology as a pastime of the affluent. The more educated and wealthy we become, the more eco-conscious we become, so everything works out. He completely ignores the fact we have crossed the red line. That the oceans are toxic, that there is trash and plastic everywhere, that the carbon levels are at unseemly record levels. That the Paris Accord has not dented the damage one bit. But, he says, the air over London is no longer purple every day. </p><p>The book ends with an interminable bashing of religion, which Pinker considers “intellectually bankrupt”. He cites all the usual contradictions and hypocrisy, narrow-mindedness and longing for a cleaner era that never existed. Basically, religion and enlightenment are oil and water.</p><p>So you can look at Enlightenment Now in two ways, according to your own various biases. Either the greater message of positivism is too important (and correct) to criticize Pinker’s maddening claims, or the maddening claims make the whole exercise suspect.</p><p>David Wineberg</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6243880-gary-beauregard-bottomley"></a></section><section><p>935 reviews556 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2295958591">February 14, 2018</a></section><div><p>When this book was not boring me it was irritating me. <p>All of the author’s anecdotes I had read elsewhere. Science is good. I don’t need convincing. Vaccines work. Poverty is bad and is getting better throughout the world. Everyone who wants to know this stuff already knows it.</p><p>Why equate Al Gore with Theodore Kaczynski (The Unabomber) as the author seems to do regarding the environment? Is Fox News really right when they said the poor can’t be poor because they have cell phones and air conditioning today? The author defended that absurdity though he doesn’t mention that Fox used to argue that when Obama was president. </p><p>And why did the author make a false equivalence between Bernie Sanders and Trump? Sanders didn’t believe ‘climate change is a Chinese Hoax’, or pick someone in his cabinet who thinks vaccines cause autism, or wanted to build a wall and claim Mexico will pay for it, or feed our hate against Muslims, Browns, Asians or anyone who strikes his fancy for the day even kneeling football players. </p><p>This author always seemed to have some pie in the sky anti-humanist post-modernist Strawman he was easily demolishing for some reason I couldn’t figure out. He mentioned the in-gratitude were in the 9th circle of hell and implied Dante had a point and people most of us have never heard of such as Heidegger, Adorno, and Neitzsche, and I think he also mentioned Marcuse belonged there for their in-gratitude. (I’m going to venture a guess, since I didn’t read all of the book: the author doesn’t like ‘identity politics’ and gets bothered by ‘political correctness’ and thinks ‘both sides’ are to blame. I don’t know if that’s where he was going, but I wasn’t going to find out by wading thru a familiar story I’ve read better told in other books).</p><p>The author is completely out of his depth on economics and inequality. I suggest you read Piketty’s book instead of this author’s poorly constructed deconstruction of Piketty’s wonderful book, and then tell me again why inequality is not real or not a big deal! His Enlightenment and Romanticism knowledge seemed superficial. Of the 8 or so Voltaire quips he provided, I had heard them all elsewhere. </p><p>I stopped this book after 5 hours. I got my credit back from Audible. I seldom do that. This author was teaching me nothing I didn’t already know, and worse than that seemed to have a disregard for the truth by trying to defend his own thesis beyond what the facts would take a reasonable person.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/78485297-mario-the-lone-bookwolf"></a></section><section><p>733 reviews3,397 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2649262004">April 23, 2020</a></section><div><p>This concoction and Roslings´ similar „Go on, everything is super.“ Factfulness were the reasons for me to leave the soft space of some humanities that are nothing more than appeasement, belittlement, and deception. <p>A mix of different quotes from the book and thoughts and impressions I had while consuming this fairytale. Some points might be redundant, sorry for that, but this is what happens when taking notes about a book that is nonsense: </p><p>1.	He´s attacking the ones who aren´t grateful, says everything is fine, takes the premise that because some things became better everything is great, based on unbearable pseudoscience. <br />2.	Hey, what about talking just about the positive things and avoiding anything negative or controversial?<br />3.	Of course, there is only the great Western way of living, capitalism ineluctably always leads to the best society in the world.<br />4.	If some things have become better thanks to technology in the last hundred years, there is of course everything great and no more problems with anything. <br />5.	Wait a moment, what exactly is Pinkers´ legitimation to talk about those topics, he must be an expert, maybe a unique ingenious polymath, in many different fields to make serious prognosis, not just assumptions, no even certainties about the whole society and the future? Oh yes, he is a linguist and cognitive psychologist that wrote some good works in his field and thought after that: „Hm, why not write some happy go lucky books based on nothing except what media, government, and the economy want me to highlight to boost my sales.“<br />6.	One of the funniest things about such books is that they are close to impossible to suss if one has not read some progressive, alternative literature in contrast to what is permanently repeated in mainstream media and science.<br />7.	Sweatshops aren´t that bad.<br />8.	Capitalism already solved and will solve the few, little problems it created. Sure, a problem repairs the problems it creates instead of creating greater problems.<br />9.	He finds the fact that people call humans under the current economic system a malady to the planet evil, discriminating, hateful, and wrong, although it´s the truth.<br />10.	He is biased, does the ultimate replication crisis demonstration.<br />11.	Philosophical, out of context, bla yada drivel that isn´t even close to the real philosophers, but fine tuned and modified to fit to the agenda and dogma of this book.<br />12.	„Peak car“. Why, show me the extrapolations.<br />13.	He ignores so much hard based science that doesn´t fit to the conclusions he wants that it´s hard to endure.<br />14.	He states that richer states have less environmental pollutions and get cleaner. So let´s go jogging in an industrial center and go swimming in the local lake afterward. Who survives can pick some berries and vegetables grown outdoors and will be gone soon too. <br />15.	He compares the environmental protection movement with extremists, calling it „misanthropic environmentalism“. He does as if the wide consense about habitat destruction and the sixth extinction doesn´t exist and compares it to pessimistic people who spread viral fake news ideas.<br />16.	He loves to use those techniques:<br />17.	<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_techniques">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaga...</a><br />18.	<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_manipulation">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychol...</a><br />19.	<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_manipulation">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_m...</a><br />20.	He praises science, knowledge, wisdom, creativity, intelligence as wordy as possible while being an ignorant apologist for the perfect, current system, ignoring and attacking any other opinion than his own.<br />21.	His arrogance, joviality, condescension, and belittlement in his writing and in interviews are disgusting.<br />22.	There is no problem with distributive justice, everything is fine because so many people aren´t extremely poor anymore, but now just poor or close to poverty.<br />23.	He talks about ideas, concepts, humanities, avoiding anything substantial, profound, and hard science-based.<br />24.	He and Rosling have the same concept: „Look, stupid people of the world, here is the manipulated data you are too dumb to understand in the way I want you to understand it, so let me explain it you while warmongering and hate trolling against anything that doesn´t confirm my opinion.“<br />25.	He keeps repeating general knowledge about many things that have improved, stating that it will continue to get better. <br />26.	He picks any person, anecdote, or fact out of context to mostly demonstrate a pro capitalistic world-view. <br />27.	He knows everything about the climate, he is a weather God. Nobody else, thousands of scientists aren´t sure what will happen with climate change, global warming, how earths´ systems and the sun really function, and how bad it will become, but Pinker knows that everything will be fine now, in 100 years, always and forever. The sun always tells him how it will shine. <br />28.	„Combat poverty instead of reducing inequality.“ Of course, give a man a fish a day instead of showing him how to angle or allowing him at least to fish, but the lake and the sea are privatized, sorry. Give tiny parts of wealth to the poor instead of changing a dysfunctional system.<br />29.	Overconsumption and consumerism are absolutely no problems, we should just reduce the environmental damage it does by…magic and positive thinking and not listening to the lies those pesky pessimists are telling.<br />30.	In this so called age of new enlightenment anything progressive, alternative, or different of the dogmas is deemed a conspiracy theory. He got me, I also never quote or show the hard facts, links, I am inventing any review because the secret reptilian overlords are telling me to do it, I am completely bonkers because I am a dirty leftist inventing conspiracy theories about military industrial complexes and post democracy and you don´t want to know what else, it´s terrible for the kids.<br />31.	The compulsion to have a positive mentality of being mindful, calm, meditating, and not negative and pessimistic. Forced happiness without reason and logic.<br />32.	Much talk about the sock puppets of politics he doesn´t like, no meta analysis or mentioning of the puppetmasters or politicians he likes.<br />33.	Extremism is caused by a power vacuum of disinterest in politics and the ideals that made democracy so great and it´s the peoples´ fault who are used to this and don´t appreciate it and has nothing to do with the system.<br />34.	He calls marxism a pseudo fringe science. Oh wait, and of course, because of this socialism is pseudo too and capitalism is based on hard science or what? <br />35.	He doesn´t understand that faith and dictatorships that were criticized by the thinkers of the true enlightenment have been turned in our economic system that does exactly the same, but more perfidious and mendacious. And that he´s actively attacking and denying the thesis of the ones who work for a new enlightenment.<br />36.	Truth can´t be constructed. Wait, why do you do it yourself Mr Pinker, if it´s impossible?<br />37.	He uses data, sources, graphs, statistics out of context or out of unscientific sources, sometimes relating to just one article, book, study, that is highly controversial.<br />38.	He bashes anything left or progressive in science, education, and universities, but doesn´t mention the overwhelming right-conservative majority in politics, governments, and economics with a single word.<br />39.	Black people are not more likely to be shot by police than white people in the US.<br />40.	He is great at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_psychology">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular...</a>.<br />41.	The evil news media are always hyping about crises and problems that don´t really exist.<br />42.	He says that there is far less violence (for privileged people in rich states and rich people in poor countries), but he should ask a prison inmate, the impoverished population of Western countries or the poor majority of the worlds´ population in Afrika, Asia, and Latin Amerika. I am sure that they are enthusiastic about the fact that there are fewer wars driven by political and economic interests of wealthy nations and they now just have to deal with crime, starvation, illness, extreme poverty and violence, and very low life expectancy. Oh, and of course with the regular financial crisis, land grabbing, and trade wars fought on and for their territory.<br />43.	„The rate of extinctions has been reduced by 75 %.“ What, I thought the contrary was the case and that we don´t even know how many species we exterminate on a daily basis because we don´t know how many exist.<br />44.	Osama bin Laden owned a copy of a Chomsky book. So left, socialist, ecosocial is the devil, don´t you understand?<br />45.	Progressivism, activism, scientific results he doesn´t like, are described as useless. <br />46.	He is switching his opinions, saying that something is bad if it´s a point he doesn´t like, changing to great about the same thing, institution, philosophical concept, science, if it´s something he likes, mixing it with psychobabble and worst bad pseudo fringe science lying with statistics stuff. And he doesn´t even seem to recognize that he is contradicting himself because the book is a collection of such inconsistencies, it´s not even logical drivel.<br />47.	He is not even mentioning that some of his crude theories could be wrong, as any good scientist I´ve read does in humility and self- criticism, instead, he deems himself all knowing and is vilifying any opposition, using subtle hate speech.</p><p>It´s so bizarre because of the combination of points I´ve already mentioned: He is no specialist in any of the fields the talks about and it would need a few of them to draw a realistic and objective picture. Or at least an author who does his research and combines all points to an objective overview. Instead, he believes to reach god mode by combining cherrypicking, mentioned replication crisis, wrong attacks against anyone saying he is wrong, integrating anectotism instead of long-time data, and mixing it up to a numbing phantasmagoria of an idyllic world that is, in reality, breaking in pieces. </p><p>What shocks me the most and what is the worst thing a scientist can do, is that he integrates this hallucinations in the minds of intelligent, literate, educated people who infect others with this viral garbage, so that they stop activism and avoid progressive, alternative thinking and real, productive contentions about the topic, instead telling each other how great Pinker is and which of his amazing, brilliant ideas they find most astonishing. Possibly they should combine it with Roslings´ pseudo Factfulness for the full dosage of brainwashing and leave reality forever.</p><p>It´s sad that Pinker started as a real scientist with his first books and switched to writing disinformation nonsense with „The better angels of our nature“, that seems so follow the same pattern of empty yada bla gossip. He quickly got richer, but lost his reputation forever.</p><p>Alternative economists and political scientists with ideas that could really change the world aren´t read because of stuff like this. </p><p>Continued in the comments, because there is no space left here.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/78485297?shelf=facepalm-trash-bin">facepalm-trash-bin</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/4622890-emily-may"></a></section><section><p>1,921 reviews290k followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2392893334">July 3, 2018</a></section><div><p>Steven Pinker makes a strong argument for enlightenment principles and, essentially, not giving up on the world because Donald Trump is president. We are not, contrary to popular belief, going backwards, and have in fact made astounding progress in all measurable areas, such as wealth, health, safety, education and equality.<p>Faced with the numbers, it's hard to disagree, though I went into this fairly convinced already. We do not, by any measure, live in a great world, but we do live in a better world than we did fifty, one hundred, one thousand years ago. Pinker presents this information, using charts and tables, in this extensively-researched book.</p><p>However, some of his claims are not really backed up by the evidence, either because he uses limited sources or engages in some avoiding the issue fallacies. The lengthy breakdown of how much things cost compared to how much they cost in, say, the Middle Ages, is irrelevant to the discussion of wealth because Pinker doesn't consider new kinds of expenses - mortgages, insurance, electric, gas and phone bills (etc.). </p><p>I also looked up a couple of the references he uses and now I'm skeptical about the others. </p><p>One example I checked on was his source for the claim that black people are no more likely to be shot by police than white people in America. Obviously, this is a hot topic and a controversial claim to make. His single source for such a bold claim - <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/upshot/police-killings-of-blacks-what-the-data-says.html">here</a> - actually found that black people <i>were</i> more likely to be shot by police than white people, but offered an opinion as to why this might be. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/11/arent-more-white-people-than-black-people-killed-by-police-yes-but-no/?noredirect=on&amp;utm_term=.6c1233b1ad4b">Other pieces disagree</a>.</p><p>He arrives at a number of these grand conclusions based on a single article, which is often an opinion piece. He cherry-picks information to suit his argument and relies on the unlikelihood that anyone will go check his sources. </p><p>It's a shame, to be honest, because I think the central argument is a strong one: that we are indeed making progress. There's a whole lot to suggest that the world isn't going to hell in a handbasket. But Pinker actually risks fuelling a bleak opposite of societal pessimism. While I don't disagree that we are faced with a lot of doom-foreshadowing news stories, there is also an ever-growing misconception that inequality is over. That our society is colourblind and that women are now treated no different to men. Pinker's distortion of facts often supports this theory and it is incorrect.</p><p>Things <i>are</i>, overall, getting better, but over-exaggerating the extent to which improvements have been made does not help anyone. Well, other than making rich white men feel better about the state of the world they rule over.</p><p><a href="http://emilymay.me/">Blog</a> | <a href="https://www.facebook.com/thebookgeekreviews">Facebook</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/thebookgeek01">Twitter</a> | <a href="http://instagram.com/emleemay">Instagram</a> | <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/EmilyMayTheBookGeek">Youtube</a></p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/4622890?shelf=2018">2018</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/4622890?shelf=nonfiction">nonfiction</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/155663-david-rubenstein"></a></section><section><p>801 reviews2,502 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2292209235">September 7, 2018</a></section><div><p>A few months ago, I heard Steven Pinker give a talk about this book. I must say that his speaking skill did not impress me. However, his writing skill is brilliant. This is a very important book--epic in scope, comprehensive, well thought-out and structured, incredibly well researched, and full of some very important messages.<p>The book begins with a student's question <i>"Why should I live?"</i> To which Pinker answers with a profound interpretation of the "meaning of life". I won't repeat his complete answer, but he writes, </p><blockquote> [You have] the ability to like, love, respect, help and show kindness--and you can enjoy the gift of mutual benevolence with friends, family, and colleagues ... You can foster the welfare of other sentient beings by enhancing life, health, knowledge, freedom, abundance, safety, beauty, and peace.</blockquote> Pinker writes that the Enlightenment helped us escape from superstition and ignorance. It increased our understanding of ourselves through science. Also, Humanism is a secular foundation for morality. And, it is individuals who are sentient, not the tribe. The Enlightenment helped to abolish cruel punishments and slavery. Also, Humanism helped bring about an increase in peace.<p>The Enlightenment has helped to eradicate some terrible diseases. Science is the most unambiguous achievement by mankind. Science helped to eradicate smallpox, a painful and disfiguring disease that killed 300 million people in the 20th century. And, we have forgotten that on April 12, 1955, "people observed moments of silence, rang bells, honked horns, ... took the day off, closed schools, ... and forgave enemies." That was the day that Jonas Salk's polio vaccine was declared to be safe. </p><p>Pinker extols the virtues of genetic engineering, that can accomplish in days what farmers accomplished over millennia, and what Norman Borlaug took years of "mind-warping tedium" to accomplish. Hundreds of studies, every major health and science organization, and over a hundred Nobel laureates have testified to the safety of transgenic crops. Nevertheless, some traditional environment groups persist in denying them to the world.</p><p>I just loved this quote from the book: </p><blockquote>In 1976, Mao single-handedly and dramatically changed the direction of global poverty with one simple act: he died.</blockquote><p>Pinker devotes chapters to improvements in the environment, and the problem of climate change. He shows that there is virtually no dissension among scientists that climate change, and specifically global warming, is a significant problem. However, he is optimistic that these issues can, in principle be solved by courageous governmental action.</p><p>The book describes the growth of democracy around the world--not steadily, but in waves. Democratic countries have higher rates of economic growth, fewer wars and genocides, better-educated citizens, and almost no famines. The best reason for democracy, stated by Karl Popper, is that it is a solution to the problem of how to dismiss bad leadership without bloodshed. And, it gives people the freedom to complain.</p><p>Pinker shows how disbelief in human-caused climate change is not correlated with scientific illiteracy, but is due to allegiance to values held by one's social circle. Political tribalism is decried as the most insidious form of irrationality today. And this tribalism exists on the left and the right sides of the political spectrum. Pinker writes, </p><blockquote>American conservative politics has become steadily more know-nothing, from Ronald Reagan to Dan Quayle to George W. Bush to Sarah Palin to Donald Trump.</blockquote> Pinker lists all of the ways in which President Trump has resisted progress, and backtracks to a less advanced way of life: Reversal of health care, reversal of globalism, reversal in the growth of wealth, reversal of the environment, safety, law and order, international trade, equal rights, tolerance, and the judicial system. The president has all the hallmarks of a dictator; he is impulsive and vindictive. <p>The last chapter of the book is about humanism; the chapter starts out well, but then briefly becomes too philosophical and abstract for my taste. Then the chapter returns to a more accessible, concrete structure. It becomes obvious that Pinker is an atheist. He writes that the "existence of the God of scripture is a perfectly testable scientific hypothesis." And, he list some experiments that could be performed to test the hypothesis. He also shows how the religiosity of nations, and even from region-to-region within the United States, is inversely related to happiness and well being. The United States, being more religious on the whole than West European countries, has higher homicide rates, abortion, STD's, child mortality, obesity, educational mediocrity, and premature deaths. And, Pinker points out that non-religious people in the U.S. tend not to vote--that helps explain why we have Trump in office today.</p><p>This is such a fascinating book; it takes up arguments where his earlier book <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/13543093.The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature_Why_Violence_Has_Declined">The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined</a> leaves off. This is the seventh book that I have read by Steven Pinker--and this one is just as wonderful as his previous books.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/155663?shelf=ethics">ethics</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/155663?shelf=evolution">evolution</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/155663?shelf=history">history</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/22127141-rhys"></a></section><section><p>685 reviews91 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2518910116">November 15, 2018</a></section><div><p>A paean to the status quo that can be summarized in four words: ‘don’t worry, be happy’. (Actually five words, as one is contracted). This book will no doubt earn the author a lanyard to every corporate boardroom and conservative think tank in the country.<p>His thesis is that Enlightenment principles must be defended – but not against mindless consumerism, not against the growing disparities of wealth, not against the disruption of earth systems. No, the Enlightenment must be defended against The Strawman. </p><p>The author lets the cat out early in the book: “Intellectuals hate progress” [p.39]. Later, Pinker says: “An axiom of progressive opinion, especially in universities, is that we continue to live in a deeply racist, sexist, and homophobic society – which would imply that progressivism is a waste of time, having accomplished nothing at decades of struggle” (p.215). Did your jaw just drop, too? This is a recurring theme in the book – binary positions. If you feel that we have a ways to go regarding bigotry, then you are just not appreciative enough of the gains: intellectuals and progressives are anti-Enlightenment. Just five pages later, he says that “heightened concern … is not futile moralizing but has brought measurable progress – which means that continuing this concern can lead to greater progress still” (p.220). Yes, the idea of progressive thinking is that maintaining a heightened level of concern can motivate greater gains towards Enlightenment ideals – unless, that is, you are an 'intellectual' who, when maintaining a heightened level of concern, is just being unappreciative of the meaty bone the status quo has already thrown you.</p><p>Pinker says “police shoot too many people, but it’s not primarily a racial issue”. I wonder if the number of people who are shot with their empty hands in the air is a racial issue - maybe a nice chart on that one would be interesting. Maybe he should interview groups of people who live in fear of the police – of being carded while walking, of being stopped on the road because of their appearance.</p><p>In his effort to make all of his graphs show diminishing bads over time, he has to fudge GHG emissions to show GHG emissions / GDP. This is a favourite trick of those who wish to delay any meaningful efforts to face climate change – the atmosphere doesn't care how many goods and services an economy creates. Emissions are continuing to increase as our economy expands. Diluting this value with a GDP measure of ‘dematerialized’ services is more of an indicator of what public and personal work has been devoured by The Market than anything to do with emissions. In plain words, it is disingenuous.</p><p>Probably the most distressing aspect of this book is Pinker’s unwillingness to engage in a meaningful critique of left intellectuals who he seems to despise. His references to them involve either gross, dog-whistle caricatures, the butt of a Russian peasant joke, or a cheap pot shot – Osama Bin Laden owned a copy of a book by Noam Chomsky … really?! Who cares? </p><p>And then he misrepresents Deconstruction and post-modernism as the heartbeat of anti-Enlightenment thought, heirs of the anti-rational Romantic thinkers of the past. Any ‘intellectual’ who explores truth-making (like the Continental philosophers) or challenges the big, empty narratives around freedom, truth, right, etc. becomes anti-rational. Then Pinker unloads the big cliché that you can’t make a rational statement about ‘truth’ being socially constructed, which to Pinker means that what is meant is that there is no truth (binary thinking again), and therefore anti-rational – for a page or two he dances around the logical impossibility of making a rational statement about an anti-rationalist position … as if anyone really holds this position. But when it comes to his tribe, he says in italics: “no Enlightenment thinker ever claimed that humans were consistently rational”. It’s surprising that author could not see that this sentiment cuts both ways? Eg. ‘no postmodernist thinker ever claimed that humans were consistently irrational’ … </p><p>“The left, too, has missed the boat in its contempt for the market and its romance with Marxism.” What does this even mean? What ‘Marxism’ – the critique of capital? I think this is most revealing, as Pinker dodges any reference to capitalism, or more accurately, a critique of capitalism. The ‘romance with Marxism’ is a sign of Enlightenment principles at work, as opposed to a dogmatic adherence to Capitalism as the best system in the past, and by extrapolation the best system forever. In addition to this bias, Pinker is quick to point out what he considers bad about ‘communist or leftist’ governments, without evaluating their successes and failures on the same principled measures as he applies throughout the book: for example, rather than a chauvinistic dismissal of Venezuela under Chavez, measure his gains or failures in child mortality, longevity, homicides, poverty, literacy and so on. He critiques the numbers of ‘left-intellectuals’ in the academy – a place where ambiguity, honest analysis, and critique is fostered – but doesn’t conduct a similar survey of the ratio of left-to-right thinkers in positions of power - in public office or corporate boardrooms, not to mention the academy. </p><p>Later, during his analysis of Islam, he quotes ‘ex-Muslim activist Sarah Haider’ who says: “'Religions are just ideas and don’t have rights.' Criticizing the ideas of Islam is no more bigoted than criticizing the ideas of neoliberalism or the Republican Party Platform” (p.442). I wonder if he feels this way about other, non-Muslim, faith-based states in the region – replace ‘Islam’ with another faith and I wonder what sort of reception his book would have received.</p><p>I could go on and on, as every page packs a groaner. Overall, Pinker loses the gist of his thesis in a stew of gross generalizations and what I would consider a contempt for the Enlightenment project as it relates to preserving open discussion of ideals and efforts against the reification of power-structures and narratives that hinder progress. Has humanity come a long way? Sure – who really doubts that? Do we have more work to do? Yes we do – but you wouldn’t feel any urgency to do so from this book.</p><p>Pinker says: “Instead, their reputations hinge on their ability to entertain, titillate, or shock; on their ability to instill confidence or fear (in the hopes that a prophecy might be self-fulfilling or self-defeating); and on their skill in galvanizing a coalition and celebrating its virtue.” I would say this is a good description of the author of <i>Enlightenment Now</i>.</p><p>Just to be clear: I didn't like this book.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/10407443-ross-blocher"></a></section><section><p>429 reviews1,336 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2339992471">March 26, 2018</a></section><div><p>Everyone should read <i>Enlightenment Now</i>. It seems odd to require a defense of reason, science, humanism and progress, but we suffer if we do not understand how far humanity has come by application of these principles. Steven Pinker has done us the favor of chronicling that progress, with data, in a compellingly written volume that challenges common assumptions. The news cycle and many prominent intellectuals would have us think that the world is becoming a darker, scarier place; yet the opposite is true. While pessimism makes for good news coverage and stokes political fires, denying progress causes us to mistrust the systems we've put in place. Combine that mistrust with a lack of understanding of WHY we put those systems in place, and you get setbacks like a Trump presidency, a burgeoning flat earther movement, and anti-vaccine advocacy. Acknowledging humanity's successes is not foolishly optimistic or defeatist; rather, it should inspire us to work toward an even better future, because we know our efforts will not be in vain. This is not a Panglossian "best of all possible worlds"; rather, it is ackowledgement that we live in the best world... SO FAR. A quote from Barack Obama summarizes this view: "If you had to choose a moment in history to be born, and you did not know ahead of time who you would be - you didn't know whether you were going to be born into a wealthy family or a poor family, what country you'd be born in, whether you were going to be a man or a woman - if you had to choose blindly what moment you'd want to be born, you'd choose now."<p>This account of progress plays out on a variety of quantifiable measures, and it's not just good news for denizens of first world countries. Pinker is careful to tease apart the trends that typically begin in developed countries and then spread globally. Average life expectancy worldwide was stalled at 30 years until the late 1800s, but has now skyrocketed to 71. Child mortality has plummeted. "For an American woman, being pregnant a century ago was almost as dangerous as having breast cancer today." Infectious diseases are being driven to extinction (and many already have). Caloric intake has increased across the world, even as population continues to grow, to the point that in many countries the poorest people are over-fed rather than under-fed. Undernourishment is fast becoming a thing of the past, and famines are now incredibly rare and lack the destructive potential of their predecessors even a century ago. All people are becoming, on average, wealthier (wealth inequality is a separate topic that is also addressed, but the trend is still positive across the world), and have more disposable income and opportunities to learn and travel. Literacy has grown, and with it IQ. Work hours have decreased, and child labor is in steep decline. Violence and death are down across almost every single measure (as Pinker detailed in another book, <i>The Better Angels of Our Nature</i>, and expands on here). Representative government has spread to a majority of the world's countries and individuals. These improvements, surprisingly, also play out in sustainability (a chapter in particular that challenged many of my assumptions), energy use, pollution, and population growth. Pinker is no Pollyana: he does carefully address some of our most pressing problems, namely climate change and the threat of nuclear war. Even for these serious quandaries, he provides cause for optimism and some potential answers.</p><p>All these charts and trends have ragged trajectories that dip and rise along their paths. None of these improvements come all-at-once or unceasingly. As Pinker says, that would be magic... and science isn't magic. There are reasons for these improvements - and those reasons can be applied to solving new problems. Pinker also unpacks the importance of appealing to reason, the power of scientific thinking, and a basis for secular morality that transcends religious identity. He identifies and argues against the worldviews that oppose the ideals of the Enlightenment. This is a long book, but it is important, timely, and a delight to read.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/5856054-alex-macmillan"></a></section><section><p>141 reviews50 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2295370883">February 23, 2018</a></section><div><p>In his newest book, <i>(Neoliberalism) Now: The Case for (Positivism), Scien(tism), (Atheism), and (Globalization)</i>, Steven Pinker seeks to cash in on the Trump election by rushing out what is mostly a rehash of material from his previous book, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/265199091">The Better Angels of Our Nature</a>. His method of reasoning and tone of argument seeks to preach to the choir rather than persuade the unaffiliated. Unlike his classic works, <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/5752.The_Blank_Slate_The_Modern_Denial_of_Human_Nature">The Blank Slate</a> and <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/20821371.The_Sense_of_Style_The_Thinking_Person_s_Guide_to_Writing_in_the_21st_Century">The Sense of Style</a>, this book will not be something we return to decades from now, except as a time capsule into the conventional wisdom of <i>Economist</i>-reading Davos attendees during the early 21st century. <p>The book is divided into three parts: <br /><b>Part I</b>: This would make a great TedTalk. </p><p><b>Part II</b>: Where it doesn't lift entire sections from <i>Better Angels</i>, this is Pinker's longwinded literature review of the work of economic historians. If you are interested in learning about humanity's recent exponential growth in material wellbeing, there are much better books on the subject that I highly recommend to you instead, such as <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/479342526">Bourgeois Dignity</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/187471459">The Rational Optimist</a>, <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/101235.The_Ultimate_Resource_2">The Ultimate Resource</a>, or <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/384310.The_Skeptical_Environmentalist_Measuring_the_Real_State_of_the_World">The Skeptical Environmentalist</a>.</p><p><b>Part III</b>: Pinker uses pop psychology to pathologize anyone who disagrees with him politically. (He strangely criticizes social science departments for lacking ideological diversity only a few pages after having relied on the studies produced by these same departments to smugly dismiss opposing viewpoints.) Pinker's key syllogism appears to be that "If you're not a global citizen who completely prioritizes humanity's material wellbeing over the interests of your community or country, then you're a benighted bigot, as whatever maximizes global utility is progress."</p><p>Pinker's strawman of what constitutes "progress" (who <i>isn't</i> in favor of progress?) allows him to avoid having to seriously contend with the core anxieties about the pace of globalization that underlie populist movements on the left and right. For example, his chapter about rising economic inequality has an elephant-shaped graph showing how globalization has occurred at the expense of people in developed nations who lack college degrees. This fact suggests a rational basis for Sanders and Trump supporters to intuit that the idea of "a common market, with open markets and open borders" may have reached the point of diminishing returns. Pinker does not have a rejoinder to the arguments of cultural pessimists like <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/12031563.Coming_Apart_The_State_of_White_America__1960_2010">Charles Murray</a> other than that governments should further expand the welfare state to compensate the losers from free trade. Pinker's hoped-for future where the majority of Americans are living on the dole, mollified by painkillers and online entertainment, is not "progress," no matter what Pinker <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/810688393">and other technophiles</a> may think.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/5648532-atila-iamarino"></a></section><section><p>411 reviews4,359 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2316599279">March 13, 2018</a></section><div><p>Tudo o que esperava e um pouco mais. O livro é uma continuação do <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/17599514.Os_Anjos_Bons_da_Nossa_Natureza_Por_Que_a_Viol_ncia_Diminuiu">Os Anjos Bons da Nossa Natureza: Por Que a Violência Diminuiu</a>, onde o Pinker escreve porque a humanidade está progredindo em quase todos os sentidos, apesar de termos a impressão do contrário.<p>Para alguém como eu, que não tem a menor bagagem filosófica, esta obra foi excelente. Pinker explica muito bem o que foi o Iluminismo (na interpretação dele) e porque o humanismo foi tão importante para mudarmos conceitos éticos, políticos e culturais. Na argumentação dele, ainda estamos surfando as mudanças trazidas pelo humanismo e os métodos nos quais ele passa a se basear (como a ciência). E o livro traz uma discussão sobre todo tipo de índice de desenvolvimento, econômico, de saúde, de violência, de educação, etc. para mostrar que esse é o caso.</p><p>Grande parte do miolo do livro funciona como uma repetição do <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/17599514.Os_Anjos_Bons_da_Nossa_Natureza_Por_Que_a_Viol_ncia_Diminuiu">Os Anjos Bons da Nossa Natureza</a> que, na minha opinião, dispensa a leitura do livro anterior. Traz também avanços em democracia, saúde, ambiente e desigualdade que não lembro muito de aparecerem no livro anterior. Se você não leu Anjos Bons, parta direto para este que traz uma lição mais abrangente e mais bem argumentada, ainda que menos detalhada, sobre como a humanidade está avançando a passos cada vez mais rápidos.</p><p>O destaque para mim ficou com a parte 3 onde ele combina ciência, razão e conhecimento para argumentar por onde poderíamos caminhar para avançar ainda mais rápido. É a área que ele mais domina e traz contribuições que achei muito mais pertinentes do que autores mais ligados à humanidades que já li. </p><p>É uma das obras que coloco como recomendadíssimas para qualquer um. Sapiens me explicou muito bem como chegamos aqui, Homo Deus para onde vamos. Este livro me explicou muito bem onde estamos.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1651956-riku-sayuj"></a></section><section><p>653 reviews6,927 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2464848140">January 22, 2021</a></section><div><p>Single Quote Counter-Review:<blockquote><i>Science tells us how to heal and how to kill; it reduces the death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war; but only wisdom—desire coordinated in the light of all experience—can tell us when to heal and when to kill.<p>~ Will Durant</p></i></blockquote><i>
</i></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1651956?shelf=big-data">big-data</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1651956?shelf=conservative">conservative</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1651956?shelf=history">history</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/9628169-charles-haywood"></a></section><section><p>488 reviews677 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2297689799">February 16, 2018</a></section><div><p>As with Steven Pinker’s earlier "The Better Angels of Our Nature," of which this is really an expansion and elucidation, I was frustrated by this book. On the one hand, Pinker is an able thinker and clear writer, free of much of the ideological cant and distortions of vision that today accompany most writing about society (for society is what this book is about), and he is mostly not afraid to follow his reasoning to its conclusions. His data on human progress is voluminous, persuasive, and extremely interesting. On the other hand, Pinker regularly makes gross errors about history, some of little import, but some that undermine the entire thesis of his book—which is that that the Enlightenment is the sole cause of the human progress he illustrates.<p>I like Pinker for his clarity of mind. And since I have been reading a steady diet of books whose central claim is that the Enlightenment was a mistake, and moreover I am personally enamored of Reaction, the idea of creating a new thing by reference to the old, it is only fair that I consider the opposite ideas presented as well as possible. Moreover, this book claims to answer exactly a current question of mine—is the material marvel that is the modern world the child of the Enlightenment? I was not disappointed; this book is just what the doctor ordered, at least to clarify my own thoughts, though probably not with the result Pinker intended. He wants to prove the Enlightenment is responsible for everything that is good in the modern world, and every good thing that will be in the future, but he ends up, for the most part, refuting himself on all his key claims. Still, the ride is interesting enough and that alone makes his book worth reading.</p><p>On the second page of his book, Pinker enunciates the core of his argument, by referring to “the Enlightenment principle that we can apply reason and sympathy to enhance human flourishing.” The next sentence, by implication, defines the Enlightenment further as “the ideals of reason, science, humanism, and progress.” The following paragraph says the Enlightenment is “also called humanism, the open society, and cosmopolitan or classical liberalism.” All this creates a somewhat confused definition, but once you read the whole book, it’s evident that to Pinker, the middle sentence is the key—the Enlightenment consists in the primacy to human societies of “reason, science, humanism, and progress.” His book revolves around these four concepts, and we will return to each of these concepts in turn.</p><p>Pinker divides his book into three parts. The first, shortest, part expands on what Pinker means by “the Enlightenment.” Here, Pinker begins by turning to the driver of all the progress that he details at great length later in the book, namely, the Scientific Revolution. “The Enlightenment is conventionally placed in the last two-thirds of the 18th century, though it flowed out of the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Reason in the 17th century.” Given that the term “Age of Reason” is only used in one other place in this book, at the very end in a similar context, while the terms “Enlightenment” and “Scientific Revolution” are used continuously, it seems fair to conclude that Pinker believes that the Scientific Revolution (actually beginning in the 1500s, and possibly earlier, not “in the 17th century”) was the necessary first step that combined with the Enlightenment to produce the benefits of the modern world. Pinker reinforces this conclusion by summarizing the modern understanding of scientific progress to include entropy, evolution, and information. Grasping these three underlying drivers of scientific progress, Pinker tells us, allows a more complete approach to scientific understanding, and thus of the Enlightenment.</p><p>All this is true. The problem with this definition of the Enlightenment, though, is that it is all about the Scientific Revolution, from its inception to today, and when you look closely at it, has nothing to do with the Enlightenment. The Scientific Revolution led to technology, which ultimately (with some other drivers that are endlessly debated) led to the Industrial Revolution, which created nearly all the progress Pinker spends the second part of his book documenting. But this eliding of the Enlightenment with the Scientific Revolution is the fatal error of Pinker’s entire book—every chapter, and practically every page, is shot through with it. Pinker claims for the Enlightenment, a system of political and philosophical principles with a nearly exclusive focus on increasing liberty, the advantages of created by the Scientific Revolution, a pre-Enlightenment happening whose success, and whose single-handed creation of the modern world, had essentially nothing to do with the Enlightenment. Pinker does this because he wishes to advocate for Enlightenment principles (in particular, emancipation and atheism), but justify those principles almost wholly by reference to the achievements of the Scientific Revolution. This is a neat parlor trick, but intellectually dishonest. I cannot tell whether Pinker realizes the dishonesty, or merely has wandered so far into the weeds he cannot think clearly. In either case, the effect is to make some parts of the book fascinating, and others risible.</p><p>There are many, many claimed reasons for why the Industrial Revolution occurred, and why it only occurred in the West. But no serious historian claims that it was the Enlightenment that caused the Industrial Revolution, which is no doubt why Pinker glosses over the supposed linkage and offers no citations tying the Enlightenment to the Industrial Revolution (or, for that matter, to the Scientific Revolution). For a man dedicated to carefully parsing the evidence and linking causal chains through reasoning, this is a glaring omission. Fortunately for the reader, though, these first philosophical musings, or ramblings, only take up the first thirty-five pages of the book. The next 300 are an endless, and endlessly fascinating, series of statistical analyses about various forms of (mostly material) progress. In the final sixty pages, the last third of the book, Pinker returns to philosophy, attempting to synthesize the progress he has demonstrated with his other claimed keystones of the modern world, reason, science, and humanism.</p><p>Pinker’s basic point about progress is a broadening of his claims about peace in "The Better Angels of Our Nature"—that those who think the world is getting worse are wrong, not (mostly) from malice, but from various forms of psychological bias, such as the “Optimism Gap” (people see their own lives as better than other people’s); “Availability Bias” (we make decisions based on data easily available to us, which is often weighted toward the negative); and “Negativity Bias” (it’s easier to imagine how things could be dramatically worse than how they could be dramatically better). To prove this, Pinker offers fourteen separate chapters, each covering a totally different area of progress, demonstrating that since the Scientific Revolution human conditions have gotten better.</p><p>Pinker starts with Life—he shows how life expectancy, both at birth and at later periods of life, has dramatically increased over time—or, rather, since the Industrial Revolution in the West, and since the early twentieth century in much of the rest of the world. Next is Health, to much the same effect. In both chapters, Pinker relies heavily on Nobel Prize-winner Angus Deaton’s "The Great Escape," a fascinating book. But Pinker’s philosophical confusion shows up every time he makes other than statistical claims—for example, he tells us that “Deaton notes that even the idea that lies at the core of the Enlightenment—knowledge can make us better off—may come as a revelation” to some (i.e., the non-Western) parts of the world. There are two problems with this. First, that is not the “idea that lies at the core of the Enlightenment,” it is in an idea that, in the West, far pre-dated the Enlightenment, as I discuss further below. More to the immediate point, that’s not what Deaton says (since I have a copy of his book, I checked). What Deaton actually says is that people in poor countries are often satisfied with their health, not knowing it can be better. He saying nothing about the Enlightenment, or knowledge in general. Unfortunately, such appeals to authority are common in Pinker’s book (surprising, since appeal to authority has been identified as a basic logical fallacy for millennia), and when the authority is mis-cited, it makes matters worse. (The reader’s suspicion is further exacerbated by Pinker’s frequent habit of not offering page cites, just footnotes to books as a whole, though he does give a page cite to Deaton’s book.)</p><p>Anyway, Pinker next turns to food (Sustenance), where he again talks about the Scientific Revolution (including its modern continuation in Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution) feeding the world, and then tries to claim that it was an accomplishment of the Enlightenment, and failure to feed people as shown by Stalin’s terror famines was because (supposed) Enlightenment values weren’t honored. That’s a stretch. Next is wealth, where Pinker focuses on GDP per capita, showing the takeoff since the Industrial Revolution in the West and more recently in some Asian countries, and the reductions in extreme poverty in other countries that have not experienced the same kind of takeoff.</p><p>Following is Inequality, which Pinker acutely and subtly analyzes (channeling Thomas Sowell in some cases—you can tell that Pinker is, in many areas, broad-minded by the several times he cites Sowell for different propositions, since Sowell is anathema to doctrinaire leftists). Then Environment, noting that other than global warming, the environment is doing just fine and shows every sign of doing better in the future, on every metric. In particular, he notes how resource apocalypses, from Peak Oil to supposed shortages of rare earth elements, are invariably falsified, by technology in general and by hard work enabling us to produce better things with less material. He also covers Peace, updating his earlier book Better Angels, and Safety, noting the declines in homicides and accidents. He quickly dismisses Terrorism as a tempest in a teapot.</p><p>It’s not just material progress that Pinker covers, although that’s the focus. It’s also moral progress—we are, among other things, nicer to people. Less torture, fewer executions, more value assigned to human life and happiness. True enough, but a necessary leg of Pinker’s entire argument is that there was no significant moral progress prior to the Enlightenment, since prior progress would disprove the causation he claims. But prior progress in the West was very great, as anyone with any grasp of history knows. Christianity immediately obviated many of the worst moral behaviors of the Ancient World (variants of which are still common in non-Christian cultures), from infanticide to the Roman practice of starving children to death in sight of a banquet, to distill their organs into love potions that would enhance desire. Christianity further led to the rule of law and was instrumental in the creation of the institutions that made possible the Scientific Revolution. All these moves forward, as Pinker documents while glossing over their cause, led to further moral gains. To hide his embarrassment at these pre-Enlightenment advances, Pinker chants, over and over again, the same trite phrases about “endless religious wars” and repeats boring anecdotes about witchcraft and bearbaiting.</p><p>After these convincing chapters (convincing for their substance, at least), Pinker covers some softer topics, somewhat less successfully. Generally, the less harder-edged and susceptible to statistical analysis the topic, the worse Pinker does in showing that actual progress is being made. In fairness, though, it is true these softer topics, to the extent one agrees they constitute actual progress comparable to that covered in the earlier chapters, are more tied to actual Enlightenment ideas.</p><p>First up is Democracy, which he claims is increasing, but Pinker helps himself over the finish line by defining democracy as basically any good government, one which “threads the needle, exerting just enough force to prevent people from preying on each other without preying on the people itself.” That, along with other definitional broadening from Karl Popper and John Mueller, means that democracy is redefined as any government with the rule of law and some responsiveness to public opinion. But in any case, there’s more democracy, however defined, and that’s Progress. Next is Equal Rights, where Pinker goes full Left, trumpeting all emancipation as good for what ails a society, and all failure to emancipate as evil incarnate (although he seems confused, since what is evil, anyway, to someone who denies the reality of moral abstractions other than utilitarian ones?) He does try to give a scientific gloss to his philosophical attachment to emancipation, ascribing it to more wealth means more people seek self-actualization, and want the same for others. This he then extrapolates to a claim that liberal values are spreading everywhere, with a lot of graphs (though we’re never told what “liberal values” are being measured, but by implication they overlap with “emancipative values”).</p><p>Then Knowledge (we know more, and we’re getting smarter); Quality of Life (we work less and both the necessities and luxuries of life are cheaper); and Happiness (we are happier, largely because we’re richer, though Deaton covers this much better and more subtly). Along with Daniel T. Rodgers, Pinker huffily rejects Robert Putnam and others who point to the atomization of American lives as a problem, with the flip response that “Users of the Internet and social media have more contact with friends” and they “remain as satisfied with the number and quality of their friendships as in the decade of Gerald Ford and Happy Days.” But this is obtuse. Putnam’s claim wasn’t that people didn’t have friends anymore, it was that the intermediary institutions that were the entire basis of the success of any successful, and in particular, the successful American, society had been completely destroyed, resulting in the cascading baleful effects that Tocqueville and Robert Nisbet had earlier identified and feared. Pinker totally fails to make this connection, or more likely deliberately obfuscates it (which is probably why he refers to fears of social atomization as a “hysterical misconception”—that’s protesting too much). Not to mention that Putnam would have told him, too, that the problem was well under way by the time of Gerald Ford, so the 1970s are probably not the best comparison decade to today.</p><p>Finally, Pinker points out that Existential Threats, from Y2K to bioterror, are grossly exaggerated. Sure, we can’t know the future, but on balance, we’re not all likely to wink out of existence next week, or next millennium. Of the supposed threat from artificial intelligence, he says “the scenario makes about as much sense as the worry that since jet planes have surpassed the flying ability of eagles, someday they will swoop out of the sky and seize our cattle.” Ha ha. He’s also heinously sexist. “There is no law of complex systems that says that intelligent agents must turn into ruthless conquistadors. Indeed, we know of one highly advanced form of intelligence that evolved without this defect. They’re called women.”</p><p>I like all this, and agree with much of it (although I could do without the constant references to Mama Cass and the Beatles, reminding me Pinker is stuck, in many ways, in the 1960s). I am mostly a techno-optimist myself. However, Pinker’s greatest technical error, as opposed to failure of vision, is to believe (like Joseph Tainter) that if it can’t be quantified, it doesn’t exist. I’m a quantitative guy, personally—I have an MBA with finance and accounting concentrations from the Booth School of Business, and my wife correctly says I view the world as Neo does in the last scenes of "The Matrix"—as cascading columns of numbers underlying the perceived, but merely surface, reality of things. Certainly, non-quantifiable views of human flourishing are subject to errors of perception, which is probably why Pinker repeatedly excoriates the Romantics. But Pinker is too quick to reject that humans seek transcendence, and all the new flavors of Doritos and life extension in the world isn’t going to change that. “Man shall not live by bread alone.” Pinker is fond of quoting Jesus, always with a sneer, but he does not offer us that truth, because it scares him, since it cannot be quantified.</p><p>But the unquantifiable aspects of progress are a topic too long to get into in this review. Pinker wraps up Progress by talking about its future. He does this by making totally unsupported claims about the origin of Progress. “Since the Enlightenment unfolded in the late 18th century, life expectancy across the world has risen from 30 to 71, and in the more fortunate countries to 81.” “The Enlightenment is working: for two and a half centuries, people have used knowledge to enhance human flourishing.” Therefore, it’s going to continue, don’t you know? No logic is offered, just repetition of the mantra of “knowledge” and trying to tie the Enlightenment to the Scientific Revolution by repeatedly mentioning them in the same breath. It’s not convincing; in fact, it comes across as desperate.</p><p>Embedded within all this proof of progress (for proof is what it is—we can quibble, or call it incomplete, but only a fool would say that material progress since the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution has not been immense), is the truth, difficult for some to accept, that all this progress was caused purely by, and until recently only affected, the West. It is the Western world has gotten better—and finally, after 400 years, some of those benefits have been adopted by others. That’s it. This is not a global phenomenon in cause, and it may not be a global phenomenon in effect, if the inferior cultures of the world, for whatever reason, refuse to accept the gifts offered by the Western Scientific Revolution. Pinker doesn’t make this point, either, though I can see why—it’s inflammatory and distracts from his argument. (He does admit that his first love, the Enlightenment, was a wholly Western phenomenon, a topic he shuffles away from quickly, mumbling about how ideas have no home, which may be true, but they do have a birthplace.)</p><p>[Review continues as first comment.]</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/3897817-morgan-blackledge"></a></section><section><p>551 reviews1,857 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2382323768">June 3, 2018</a></section><div><p>If you had to chose a time to be alive, and (here’s the catch) you couldn’t pick what race, sex, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status or nationality you were. You’d be flat wrong if you chose any other time than right fuckin’ now! <p>Skeptical? </p><p>Steven Pinker would like to convince you otherwise. </p><p>According to Pinker. Humans (on average) have never had it so good. And he’s got 500(+) pages and 75(+) graphs and charts that illustrate exactly that. </p><p>And quite convincingly so. </p><p>My favorite part is. </p><p>He’s an equal opportunity hate hater. </p><p>Pinker takes aim at both the far left and alt right in an all out data rich blitz attack on the histrionic, anti-intellectual fear-mongering both sides of the American political divide reliably trade in. </p><p>Pinker argues that DJT’s populist uprising was a direct result of these exact misinformation wars. </p><p>According Pinker’s diverse compilation of world health data, beginning in the mid nineties and continuing to the present and foreseeable future, global life spans, individual purchasing power, heath and wellbeing (by a multitude of measures) are all hella on the rise, while violent crime, poverty and disease are on the yard dart (see footnote at end of review) like trajectory nose dive decline. </p><p>That being said, the average ideologue of either flavor very reliably believes that things are going to heck in a hatbox (to put it nicely).</p><p>WTF?</p><p>Pinker posits that precisely this ‘armageddon is upon us’ style sentiment enabled Donald Twitler’s P. T. Barnum style ascent, lending support to the O.G.’s (difficult at this particular historical juncture to deny) assertion that there’s ‘a sucker born ever minute’.</p><p>Pinker invites us all to simply stop watching cable news (the overwhelmingly ‘uge’ beneficiaries of the Trumpster fire none of us can easily take our eyes off of) and have a look at some Good Organized Data (GOD). </p><p>His point is not to inspire pollyannish optimism, but rather to stimulate (i) critical thinking and (ii) a commitment to solving the problems we face rather than trying to scare the undecideds into action, with the unintended, but predictable effect of scarring people into paralysis. </p><p>People of the world: ideology is mental illness. Cable news is for retards. Our best (no only) hope is to figure out what kind of life we all want, and adopt a data driven, rational, naturalistic, pragmatic, realistic approach to getin’ er done. </p><p>In a nutshell, Pinker urges us to recommit to enlightenment ideals e.g. science and humanism, and ditch the bleeding and leading hokum drizzled in snake-oil sauce pumped at us by the 24/7 alternative fact machines on both sides of the ideological sinkhole. </p><p>I LOVE THIS BOOK!!!!!</p><p>FOOT NOTE: for those of you too young to remember yard darts. It was this insanely dangerous lawn game that was comprised of two hula hoops laying on the grass at about 10 yards apart, and these approximately 5-7 pound mettle darts with a heavy sharp end, that you chucked underhanded up in the air and attempted to land in the other persons hoop. The SHUNK sound they made when they pierced the lawn was SO satisfying it defies words. And they were hugely popular in the 70’s. But they were eventually banned because of the (retrospectively obvious but at the time not so much) danger that you could hit your pal in the top of the dome with one of those bad boys and, well, if they didn’t die on impact, it’s all but certain they would be severely brain damaged. It is entirely plausible that the increase in lifespan indicated in Pinker’s research was significantly positively effected by the entirely rational ban of this ridiculously lethal toy.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/2456656-jillian-doherty"></a></section><section><p>340 reviews58 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2070379249">August 11, 2017</a></section><div><p>Ever since Bill Gates tweeted his endorsement for Pinker's Better Angels, fans have rushed to support his writing of big ideas by big thinkers!<p>Enlightenment Now illustrates Pinker's practical yet tangible style, but is freshly positive as well. His explosive understanding toward social science and political empathy will appeal to all big thinkers and affirmative readers alike.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/20749430-maria-espadinha"></a></section><section><p>1,002 reviews351 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2980147820">April 6, 2020</a></section><div><p>Progress Where Are Thou?<p>“Here's the shocking fact: The world has made fantastic progress on all indicators of human welfare. A second shocking fact: Virtually no one knows this.“</p><p>Bad news are always extremely loud. Just by reading those huge headlines we’ll instantly know how sick is the world we live in!</p><p>On the other hand, good news are usually silent. So silent that a good new is — most of the times — a no new. <br />That’s why this book was born — to be the voice of those silent news!</p><p>Surprise, Surprise, Guys:<br />The world is turning into a better place and we didn’t even know about it! 😉 😂👍</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/76203549-nika"></a></section><section><p>116 reviews115 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3742731266">March 17, 2022</a></section><div><p>3.5 stars<p>"<i>
 <b>The appeal of regressive ideas is perennial, and the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress always has to be made</b>
</i>."</p><p>Steven Pinker focuses on the welfare of humankind and progress that it has made in the last 250 years. The book covers many aspects of progress, such as life expectancy, provision of food, healthcare, access to education and world literacy rates, human rights, the long-term decline of violence against women, the victimization of children, hate crimes, and interstate wars.</p><blockquote>But even if they are not wiped off the face of the earth, they can be reduced further, including violence against women and children, hate crimes, civil war, and homicide.</blockquote><br />Not only has violence declined, but the attitude to it has changed. Today we are much less tolerable towards images containing violence, etc.<br />After the end of WWII the world entered the period that has been called the Long Peace, something that most people in the 19th century would have thought improbable.<br />After analyzing a large amount of statistical data, Pinker is convinced that the life of a typical modern human being is apriori better than that of a typical man or woman, say, 100 years ago.<br />Figures show that life has gotten “longer, healthier, richer, safer, happier, freer, smarter, deeper, and more interesting.” <p>Pinker admits that there are some parts of the world where the situation may become and sometimes does become worse, but that’s how global trends work. <br />For example, as the data show, world literacy rates have been steadily increasing over the last 50 years. However, in some regions, the indicators have fallen during this period.<br />But such contrasting with the overall picture facts do not countermand the positive trend according to which people across societies are becoming more literate and educated. <br />Setbacks and periods of stagnation may happen and usually do not negate overall progress. </p><p>Pinker disavows certain myths that are present in our collective consciousness. <br />The number of people who consider themselves religious is declining in the modern world.<br />Contrary to common belief, the rate of suicides across the world is also on the decline.</p><p>I liked how Pinker commented on contemporary media and its current role in society. They often exploit one of the manifest features of the human brain. <br />According to cognitive scientists, we tend to pay more attention to nasty things than to good and happy ones. As a result, hardly anyone speaks of the plunging number of people living in extreme poverty or of increasing literacy rates worldwide.<br />Instead, content creators focus mainly on sad events, such as terrorist attacks and the victims of car crashes. We are flooded with catchy headlines promising to inform us of some violent event in one or another part of the world.</p><p>Talking about the growing gap between the rich and the poor, the author does not regard income inequality as a factor that hinders progress. According to him, the fact that the rich are getting rich does not mean that the poor stay poor. </p><p>Certain comparisons look dubious. For ex., his statement that conditions even in the poorest parts of the world are now somewhat similar to those in the rich developed countries 70 years ago. <br />At times the author seems to simplify the complex processes that shaped our current world.</p><p>Among the existential threats, Pinker names climate change, but even that could be dealt with given that the world work in concert (well, subjunctive here becomes an imperative). <br />One may ask whether it is correct statistics-wise to approximate a large set of data, say from 1300 to our days, as the author does in his charts. One need not be a statistician to suggest that the data available for the year of 1350 must be much less complete than those available for 2015.</p><p> A lot of problems exist today, and problems will always remain. But Enlightenment with its four ideals - reason, science, humanism, and progress - teaches us that most problems are solvable. <br />As Pinker himself puts it, progress is demonstrable through figures, but, of course, it does not apply to all. If everyone in the world were touched by progress, it would be a miracle, but progress does not equal miracles. Progress does not mean that everything starts being better for everyone everywhere. <br />The positive trends the world enjoys today may be reversed in the future. No one can guarantee constant progress.<br />We must continue to apply knowledge to enhance human flourishing.</p><p>Despite some qualifications, Pinker’s ideas sound too optimistic to me. Perhaps, one might say that Pinker is on the bright side of modern intellectual life. <br />Not all agree with Pinker’s theories. Some argue that his graphs and statistics are not often reliable. For example, they believe that he gives an unduly optimistic picture concerning famine and other similar measurable indicators. Some think that he focuses too much on developed countries with rich populations. <br />My knowledge does not permit me to decide which side is closer to the truth - Pinker or his opponents - but I find at least one of his ideas relevant and helpful.<br />He insists on progress and its feasibility. The author proves his point with figures and graphs because he wants to show humanity that its problems could be solved by using knowledge and reason, or at least they could be significantly diminished.<br />Pinker warns against the dangers of what he calls thoughtless or fact-free pessimism. If humanity is doomed, as some skeptics tend to believe, why should anyone bother to make an effort to improve the human condition?</p><p><b>To sum up</b>, almost all measurable elements that define the quality of life, such as sustenance, health, life expectancy, peaceful relations between countries, lowering of crime rates, gender equality, literacy, and the protection of childhood, have been improving over the last decades.<br />According to Pinker, these measurements point to socio-economical, political, and moral progress.</p><p>I would like to end this review with the following quote.<br />“<i>
 <b>Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these</b>
</i>.”<br />Steven Pinker? Bill Gates?.. Ovid.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/76203549?shelf=non-fiction">non-fiction</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/12800930-bharath"></a></section><section><p>547 reviews424 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2367557318">January 24, 2021</a></section><div><p>The short summary of this book is that despite the considerable negative news we are subjected to every day, life is progressively getting better and for people at large. Though some of the inferences are simplistic and also unreliable, this is an intellectually stimulating book. <p>The point Steven Pinker makes is that though some political leaders claim that the situation is deteriorating in terms of prosperity, safety and well-being, that is not really the case. He has a lot of data &amp; references to make his case, including an analysis of news coverage over the years. The coverage we are exposed to is far more negative than in the past decades. He makes the point that capitalism and free markets have created wealth and in turn improved quality of life, health, safety, knowledge and made people happier. The Enlightenment ideals anchored by reason and science are the way forward, and people &amp; nations who pursue that agenda are surging ahead. </p><p>At a broad level, there is not too much to debate with the data or the reasoning which Pinker presents. Quite clearly, global poverty has dipped and living standards have improved. Pinker does concede that aggregates can hide pockets where things have not improved much. The book, however, steers clear of discussing these areas. At one point Pinker suggests a pandemic is very unlikely – after all there is the leap needed from animals to humans – a bet he has clearly lost in the circumstance. Pinker in his narrative also ignores the fact that there is a power structure in the world order which decides who will be heard and who will not. This allows a lot of rulers to stay secure that their military &amp; economic power ensures that they will never be called out for serious censure. Also, though there is a lot of data, not all of it is reliable. Since years, I have read summaries of reports published on human rights, media freedom etc which either rely on poor media coverage or are influenced by powerful sponsors. In many cases, a local school going kid would have provided a more reliable perspective of the countries referenced. I also read the critical essays of Nassim Taleb on the data &amp; analysis Pinker presents. That said, there is not too much which changes in the aggregate picture which Pinker paints though and I see little purpose in quibbling over individual data points. Some of the correlation Pinker suggests around wealth, happiness, religion, science is a stretch, but that scientific temper and reasoning should be held paramount is obviously something most of us would agree with. While the early sections with the data points are important, I actually found the latter sections which debate political alignment, science, etc to be more interesting.</p><p>Things are better than they were say a century ago, yes – and yet that is not a reference point most of us hold day to day. If the world can get so much better with such inconsistent co-operation, groupism among nations and luck, what can it be if nations actually planned for the future to be better collectively?</p><p>While there is quite a bit of the book which I obviously can debate about and some which I do not agree with, these are important matters which actually should find more coverage among the political leadership, academia and many of us. This is a book which substantially elevates the level of discourse, and for that I strongly recommend it for reading. </p><p>My rating: 4.5 / 5.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1-otis-chandler"></a></section><section><p>385 reviews112k followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2276904936">January 8, 2019</a></section><div><p>An eye-opening book. I picked this up because I saw the authors <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_is_the_world_getting_better_or_worse_a_look_at_the_numbers?language=en">TED talk</a>, and then <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2394544581">Bill Gates called it the best book he's read in a decade (his review is worth reading)</a><p>The book starts with a premise that many people generally have an impression that the world is full of of serious crises. </p><p><a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_is_the_world_getting_better_or_worse_a_look_at_the_numbers?language=en">"Magazine covers warn us of coming anarchies, plagues, epidemics, collapses, and so many “crises” (farm, health, retirement, welfare, energy, deficit) that copywriters have had to escalate to the redundant “serious crisis.” Whether or not the world really is getting worse, the nature of news will interact with the nature of cognition to make us think that it is. News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen."</a></p><p>Basically, we worry a lot. A LOT. We live in dark times (with a scary president), etc. Pinker points out why we worry so much: the news. The news cycle is designed to play on our fears, and thus it is largely negative, focusing on all the bad things that are happening in the world. And we are consuming more news than ever in human history! And if the news focused on all the good things, the ratings would plummet, after all. But one of my favorite lines in the book points out that we would be hard pressed to find negative news if we were covering the last 100 years, instead of the last day.</p><p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/notes/35968998-enlightenment-now/1-otis-chandler/4cdec1f0-e2ab-4ab2-9d2c-d9bef5bf545d?ref=rnlp">"Bad things can happen quickly, but good things aren’t built in a day, and as they unfold, they will be out of sync with the news cycle. The peace researcher John Galtung pointed out that if a newspaper came out once every fifty years, it would not report half a century of celebrity gossip and political scandals. It would report momentous global changes such as the increase in life expectancy."</a></p><p>And that was the eye opening thing about the book - if you take a long term view, every metric you can find has gotten better. Life expectancy, health, extreme poverty, prosperity, peace, freedom, safety, literacy, leisure, and even happiness - he has chapters and graphs for each of them, showing them vastly improving over the past centuries and usually with most gains in the past century. An interesting point is that most graphs show third world countries only being ~20-30 years behind first world countries, but the shape of the graphs looks the same in terms of the rate of progress. I won't recap all the graphs and numbers, but here is a small example of how life has gotten better.</p><p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/notes/35968998-enlightenment-now/1-otis-chandler/f140df08-074a-4b6d-aceb-4bbf80dc3230?ref=rnlp">"In the mid-19th century it took twenty-five men a full day to harvest and thresh a ton of grain; today one person operating a combine harvester can do it in six minutes."</a></p><p>This is not to say that there aren't still large problems in all of those areas left to solve. Nor that we haven't created other problems - the book has chapters on some of those, notably climate change and nuclear war - but again there we have actually made progress. For some reason I haven't quite fully fathomed, Pinker and this book have gotten <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2018/5/17/17362548/pinker-enlightenment-now-two-cultures-rationality-war-debate">a lot of criticism</a>. I think some of this is from people who object to him saying "the world is great" because there is so much progress left to be made - yet Pinker often admits that in the book. Or from people who think he is measuring progress along the wrong metrics, and we are all headed for an apocalypse. Certainly, there are <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/apocalypse">lots of books about apocalypse</a>, but it's much more pleasant to be an optimist, and believe that as long as we keep applying reason and science and making progress, the world will keep getting better.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1?shelf=economics">economics</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1?shelf=history">history</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1?shelf=philosophy">philosophy</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/13162061-amirography"></a></section><section><p>198 reviews123 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2301027428">April 29, 2018</a></section><div><p>This book is a sequel to Steven Pinker's other book "The Better Angels of our nature". The "The Better Angels of our nature" is a detailed comparison of violence in history. And how it reduced. The reasons for reduction and existence of these violences was covered.<br /> But "Enlightenment now" Covers other topics such as health, wealth, knowledge and many more. <br />These two books have changed my mind about many of my core beliefs such as anarchism, nuclear energy, and endless other topics. </p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/13162061?shelf=2018-priorities">2018-priorities</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/13162061?shelf=favorites">favorites</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/13162061?shelf=philosophy">philosophy</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/15682129-fadi"></a></section><section><p>53 reviews30 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3198039783">February 24, 2020</a></section><div><p>OK, Boomer!<br />-----------------------------------------------------<br />“Evolutionary thinkers who insist on a moralizing orientation when considering a complex biocultural phenomenon such as religion are not meaningfully advancing their field. But Pinker makes matters worse by compounding ideological bias with historical ignorance.” ~Modernity &amp; Cultural Decline.</p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/49521790-ayse"></a></section><section><p>155 reviews71 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2463557089">July 28, 2018</a></section><div><p>Enlightening indeed! Very uplifting reading, especially for pessimists like me. He clearly points out the effect of distorted/exaggerated news, the negative bias of people, dirty politics and the lack of reason behind all the sky-is -falling attitude that seems to dominate communities.<p>I have learned so many good facts from this book that helped me view things differently such as the global Cosmopolitanism, 8x increase in number of countries ruled by democracy within the last 50 years, the increased life quality and expectancy.</p><p>He believes in our ability to create solutions and adapt. He pinpoints the evidence that we are evolving to a better vision of ourselves despite the fluctuations that may seem like a step-back at times. Lets hope the carbon emission will be under control soon..AND that the people will trust in science more than their own beliefs and superstitions. (and act accordingly)</p><p>Great book, I am so glad I read it.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/49521790?shelf=favorites">favorites</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/49521790?shelf=mind-expansion">mind-expansion</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/49521790?shelf=reviews">reviews</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/24035606-ryan-boissonneault"></a></section><section><p>183 reviews1,943 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2279343525">February 17, 2018</a></section><div><p>Francis Bacon once said that “some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.” This is one of the few.<p>The main thesis of the book is that the enlightenment values of reason, science, and humanism have led to scientific and moral progress and that the embrace of these values will continue the trend. This, as opposed to counter-enlightenment values (religious faith, nationalism, tribalism, relativism, declinism), is the recipe for the maximization of human flourishing and the minimization of human suffering. </p><p>Pinker defends this thesis with massive amounts of data demonstrating that just about every meaningful dimension of human well-being has improved since the Age of Enlightenment. He also describes the drivers of progress and provides highly rational and sometimes unexpected conclusions about a variety of issues including climate change, artificial intelligence, and income inequality. </p><p>The data, ideas, and philosophy in this book are extremely important, but unfortunately, people’s natural aversion to the concept of progress leads to some common objections that I’d like to address. </p><p><b>Common Objections</b></p><p><i>Objection #1: I already know all of this</i></p><p>No, you don’t, and you almost certainly haven’t read the book if you say this. This massive undertaking examines the progress of human welfare in almost all aspects of life, and covers the most pressing questions about health, income, inequality, violence, safety, democracy, freedom, human rights, knowledge, happiness, climate change, artificial intelligence, and more. </p><p>To claim that you know all of this is the epitome of hubris by suggesting that you already have figured out the best ways to think about and handle the world’s toughest challenges. IF you read the book, you will learn something. Not to mention Pinker is a skilled writer, the content is interesting, and the history of progress is history we should be proud of. </p><p><i>Objection #2: Bad things still happen so isn’t progress an illusion?</i></p><p>Pinker never makes the claim that violence, death, disease, suffering, or poverty has or ever will reach zero instances. This is not a book about achieving some kind of utopia. But pointing out specific examples of bad things that still happen does nothing to refute the overall thesis that astronomical progress has been made over the last few centuries since the Enlightenment.</p><p>You can’t measure progress by citing specific examples or anecdotes. For example, the worldwide poverty rate has fallen from 43 percent just in 1990 to 21 percent in 2011. That’s a lot of people that have escaped poverty, and pointing out the people that are still poor says nothing about the trend. </p><p>Pinker uses 70+ graphs and an overwhelming amount of statistics to make his case, so I’m sure if you wanted to you could find something to nitpick at. But you’ll also probably lose sight of the big picture and the more important numbers, trends, and points. </p><p>Also keep in mind that the most troubled parts of the world prove Pinker’s point rather than refute it, as the most violent parts are also the least secular, democratic, literate, educated, and wealthy and embody counter-enlightenment ideals.</p><p><i>Objection #3: Ok, so material well-being has increased, but the world is in no better shape spiritually. Pinker’s view of the world is materialist and reductionist.</i></p><p>This objection usually comes from the religiously-inclined. It results from the false assumption that if you’re not religious you’re a reductionist or that you practice “scientism.”</p><p>Science may not be able to determine our values, but philosophy, particularly Enlightenment philosophy, can. With its emphasis on human well-being and flourishing, Enlightenment philosophy sets the agenda to make us healthier, wealthier, wiser, freer, and happier.</p><p>And once we all agree that life is better than death, wealth is better than poverty, and well-being is better than suffering, science can help us get there, which it already has and which is painstakingly documented in this book.</p><p>The conditions for happiness are available to most of the world’s population. And as for higher purpose, plenty of people find great satisfaction in charity work, championing worthwhile social causes, pursuing meaningful work, spending time with friends and family, enjoying culture, traveling, and taking advantage of unprecedented amounts of leisure time. We’re responsible for creating our own meaning and we now have a plethora of choices in how to achieve this.</p><p>Inexplicably, this still leaves some people cold. In the words of Pinker:</p><p>“The idea that the ultimate good is to use knowledge to enhance human welfare leaves people cold. Deep explanations of the universe, the planet, life, the brain? Unless they use magic, we don’t want to believe them! Saving the lives of billions, eradicating disease, feeding the hungry? Bo-ring. People extending their compassion to all of humankind? Not good enough—we want the <i>laws of physics</i> to care about us! Longevity, health, understanding, beauty, freedom, love? There’s got to be more to life than that!”</p><p><i>Objection #4: It’s naive to think progress will continue.</i></p><p>Pinker distinguishes between two kinds of optimism. The first is <i>complacency optimism</i>, whereby you expect a positive outcome without extending any effort to influence the outcome. The second is <i>conditional optimism</i>, whereby you directly influence an outcome by identifying problems and proposing solutions. </p><p>Pinker is of the second variety. He admits that progress is by no means guaranteed, but at the same time human history has been defined by its ability to identify and solve problems. This is productive optimism and makes you wonder what the benefit of pessimism is, exactly.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/24035606?shelf=favorites">favorites</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/20749430-maria-espadinha"></a></section><section><p>1,002 reviews351 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2979412145">September 18, 2019</a></section><div><p>Levanta-te e Anda...<p>No Humanismo integram-se a solidariedade, a compaixão, a empatia,...<br />É o respeito pelo indivíduo como indivíduo e não como membro dum grupo determinado por crenças religiosas, cor da pele, etc, etc,...<br />Somos todos humanos e é quanto basta!...</p><p>E sempre que o Humanismo se alia à Ciência, obtemos Progresso.</p><p>Os media tendem a bombardear-nos com o Negativo em detrimento do Positivo, e este livro propõe-se actuar como contra-peso, reunindo factos e estatísticas que comprovam o Progresso como um aqui e agora presente, e não como fantasma dum devir à la longue ...</p><p>“Eis o facto chocante: O mundo conseguiu um progresso fantástico em todos os indicadores do bem-estar humano. Um segundo facto chocante: Praticamente ninguém sabe isto.”</p><p>Animem-se que o Mundo está a melhorar, é a mensagem positiva (e comprovada) que iremos encontrar neste livro!<br />A continuar assim, daqui por mais um século ou dois (mais coisa, menos coisa), já a Mafalda poderá contar a toda a gente que o Mundo está curado, e finalmente, com o maior cuidado, chutá-lo para fora do leito!... 😜</p><p>Força nisso, Mundo: Levanta-te e Anda!... 😜<br />Cristo já não está cá para dizê-lo, mas legou-nos a sua milagrosa frase 😉</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/69551184-michael-sebastian"></a></section><section><p>10 reviews4 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2632022491">January 5, 2019</a></section><div><p>Steven Pinker's book, Enlightment Now, has a pretty basic premise. Things have gotten better as a whole for humanity in the past century, especially compared to the conditions in which most people lived not that long ago. For some reason though, Pinker not only needs to make the case that life has gotten better, but, because most things are better, <b>everything</b> must be great. A good chunk of this book is spent chastising people that are trying to make the world better for not being "grateful" enough, and downplaying things that are real problems. One of the examples that stood out to me the most was his defense of sweatshop labor, saying: "while working on the factory floor is often referred to as sweatshop labor, it is often better than the grandaddy of all sweatshops working in the field as an agricultural day worker."<br />This seemed like an extreme claim to me, so I did a little digging and found <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/27/opinion/do-sweatshops-lift-workers-out-of-poverty.html">this article</a> in the New York Times that talks about this same subject. From the article:<br /><i><br />People who worked in agriculture or market selling earned about as much money as they could have at the factory, often with fewer hours and better conditions. We were amazed: By the end of a year only a third of the people who had landed an industrial job were still employed in the industrial sector at all. It would be easy to see this as the normal trial-and-error of young people starting out careers, but actually the factory jobs carried dangerous risks. Serious injuries and disabilities were nearly double among those who took the factory jobs, rising to 7 percent from about 4 percent. This risk rose with every month they stayed. The people we interviewed told us about exposure to chemical fumes and repetitive stress injuries.<br /></i><br />Quite a different picture than the one given by Pinker in his book. There are definitely positives to a country becoming more industrialized, and I think there is a valid argument to have on the sacrifices that need to be made to get to a point where the society can benefit from that industrialization. But Pinker completely glosses over the real suffering of people in these sweatshops so that he can pretend that the entire process is amazing. This is disingenuous and doesn't help anyone, but when it comes to other issues, like race, he misleads in even more blatant ways:<p>"The data suggest that the number of police shootings has decreased, not increased in recent decades, and three independent analyses have found that a black suspect is no more likely than a white suspect to be killed by the police"</p><p>On face value that claim seems absurd, but even <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/upshot/police-killings-of-blacks-what-the-data-says.html">the article</a> he cites for this information confirms that what he's saying is wildly misleading: "According to the F.B.I.’s Supplementary Homicide Report, 31.8 percent of people shot by the police were African-American, a proportion more than <b>two and a half times</b> the 13.2 percent of African-Americans in the general population."</p><p>The article goes on to say that this is the case because black people have more encounters with the police. Pinker never mentions that blacks are over represented in police homicide by <b>two and a half times</b>, he only cherry picks what he wants from the article, and discards the part that's inconvenient to the story that he's trying to tell. It's hard for me to imagine that he read that article, and what jumped out to him was "a black suspect is no more likely than a white suspect to be killed by the police" instead of "31.8 percent of people shot by the police were African-American, a proportion more than two and a half times the 13.2 percent of African-Americans in the general population." It's pretty blatant misrepresentation and really made me question all of the other "facts" he put into the book. </p><p>Another argument made in this book is that economic inequality isn't really a problem: "The confusion of inequality with poverty comes straight out of the lump fallacy--the mindset in which wealth is a finite resource... As we just saw, wealth is not like that: since the Industrial Revolution, it has expanded exponentially. That means that when the rich get richer, the poor can get richer, too."</p><p>But the <a href="http://undocs.org/A/HRC/38/33/ADD.1">United Nations report on Extreme Poverty in the United States</a> seems to tell a different story. From the report: </p><p>"But its immense wealth and expertise stand in shocking contrast with the conditions in which vast numbers of its citizens live. About 40 million live in poverty, 18.5 million in extreme poverty, and 5.3 million live in Third World conditions of absolute poverty. It has the highest youth poverty rate in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the highest infant mortality rates among comparable OECD States."</p><p>It seems to directly contradict Pinker's assessment that the richest country in the world has the highest youth poverty rate in the OECD. If "when the rich get richer, the poor can get richer, too" then this wouldn't be the case. Aside from the dubiousness of the claim that a rising tide lifts all boats, Pinker doesn't seem to understand the full extent of how inequality damages a society. He thinks that people raising issues about economic inequality see wealth as a finite resource, but he doesn't take the next step and address the fact that <b>power</b> is a finite resource. From the UN report again: </p><p>"What extreme inequality actually signifies is the transfer of economic and political power to a handful of elites who inevitably use it to further their own self-interest, as demonstrated by the situation in various countries around the world." </p><p>There is never any serious conversation in this book about the power the ultra rich have gained over our society. Not only in the private sector, but their ability to influence the democratic sector as well. Pinker has a chapter about democracy as a liberating force in modern society, but ignores some of the fundamental ways it's undermined by the concentration of power in the hands of a few.</p><p>I have more issues with this book, but it would require a lot more text than this to rebut every single claim. There's a pretty good response to his critique of environmentalists <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/07/environmental-calamity-facts-steven-pinker">here</a>. In terms of "facts", it's hard to trust a lot of the claims that this book makes, and I think someone would be better off doing the research on their own or just reading another book. Some of the stuff in here is blatant misinformation, but a lot of it is just manipulated to match the author's own personal biases. I don't even disagree that the world has gotten better for most people in the past century, but sugar coating it's current problems isn't helping anyone. Not only is it actively standing in the way of people making a better world, but it could push the world into even worse situations if some of these festering problems aren't addressed.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1662632-richard"></a></section><section><p>1,131 reviews1,006 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2296338698">October 2, 2018</a></section><div><p>Pinker’s latest is getting a lot of press, of course.<p>Here are a few links:</p><p>His own synopsis at the Wall Street Journal: <i>
 <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-enlightenment-is-working-1518191343">The Enlightenment Is Working</a>
</i> (paywall; try Googling <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=wsj+The+Enlightenment+Is+Working&amp;ie=UTF-8">wsj The Enlightenment Is Working</a> and clicking through from Google, maybe into “private browsing mode”. Works sometimes.)</p><p>Ezra Klein of Vox is a pretty good interviewer, and he hooked up with Pinker <a href="https://www.vox.com/ezra-klein-show-podcast">at his podcast.</a> I <i>
 <b>really</b>
</i> liked that they both name-dropped Dan Kahan's work at his <a href="http://www.culturalcognition.net/">Cultural Cognition Project</a> at Yale Law School. Even though Kahan's research has a slightly skewed focus on risk, that he points to "identity-protective cognition" is central how I perceive the tribal partisanship our country is in. The compound adjective is key; many folks now believe that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Motivated_reasoning">motivated reasoning</a> can create an intrinsic cogntive bias, but far fewer realize how it is typically used: subconsciously, in protection of part of a person's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Social_identity_theory">social identity</a>.</p><p>It's also kinda cool that this is now officially Bill Gate's "<a href="https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Enlightenment-Now">new favorite book of all time</a>". I'm ambivalent about Gates. On the negative side, I still despise how Microsoft, under his control, violated so many norms of fair play in pursuit of monopoly. And I know he's just doing that thing that plutocrats always do once making more money seems fruitless: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Carnegie_library">build libraries</a>. Oh, sorry that was the similarly amoral robber baron Andrew Carnegie. Same difference, right? But then I recall that Gates seems to be doing good things (as did Carnegie), while some <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Political_activities_of_the_Koch_brothers">others</a> use their wealth in ways I mostly dislike. So: ambivalence.</p><p>Will I read it? Dunno. I really liked his <i>Better Angels</i>, but my gut reaction is that his argument is facile: technically correct, but overlooks too much. For example, there's <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/the-terrifying-future-of-fake-news">this</a>, which is scary even before that whole identity-protective motivated reasoning thing is added in. Maybe Pinker addresses that, though.</p><p>And frankly, there’s just so much more to read out there. I know I'll be reading <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/35356384.How_Democracies_Die_What_History_Reveals_About_Our_Future">How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future</a> before Pinker.</p><p>Update 19-Apr-2018—</p><p><a href="https://www.economist.com/blogs/openfuture/2018/04/economist-asks">Pinker’s short interview with the Economist</a> was well done, and made me think some about what I think his argument is, and why I think it’s flawed. The crux is this: Pinker is mostly dealing with materialist goals and the progress we are making in meeting them. To that extent, he’s undoubtedly correct. What we learned due to the Enlightenment has done marvels in gradually pulling us into a better future than Pangloss could have imagined (he refers Pangloss in his interview response).</p><p>The problem is that he doesn’t perceive a deeper problem: that the Enlightenment did <i>not</i> provide us with a sense of meaning, purpose, or any hints about how to find them elsewhere (other than “hey, just make up your own!”). I ended <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/102880724">my slam</a> of Matt Ridley’s similar (but much more amateurish effort), <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/7776209.The_Rational_Optimist_How_Prosperity_Evolves">The Rational Optimist</a>. Here’s the text from that review — if you yank out Ridley and insert Pinker, I strongly suspect my critique of <i>Enlightenment Now</i> would be congruent:</p><blockquote><b>Materialism</b><p>Ridley points out that humans have evolved into incredibly efficient organisms at solving the problems our paleolithic ancestors faced. Most humans alive today have access to food, health and a length of life that would astonish even our great-grandparents.</p><p>And given how important those things are in our life, I’m also optimistic that we’re going to keep getting better at them. Given the staggering amount of research that’s going on, it would be very surprising if the coming decades don’t provide continuing delights at keeping people healthier and living longer.</p><p>But here’s the problem: when I look around me, most of the people I see are already pretty satisfied on those counts. Sure, it’ll be really sweet when we finally cure cancer, and when we can reliably prevent Alzheimer’s, etc., etc. But the existential threats that drove paleolithic existence aren’t reflected on most folks’ day-to-day anxiety list, are they?</p><p>The upshot of this is a little tricky: if the existential threats present during evolutionary time aren’t what drives us today… what does? Something I think is important to realize is that no matter what the answer is to that question, it isn’t embedded in our nature, at least certainly not in the same way as the old threats. Which means it is a very flexible thing, informed by culture, preference, and contingency. And that means individual and societal choices will vary widely, and might often contradict each other. I can easily imagine some of those drives being cause for pessimism — whether they be growth-for-growth’s sake of the capitalist, or the holy wars of various religious extremists. Those mimetic constructs could, in turn, put a damper on the pollyannaish future presented here.</p><p>Since Ridley merely examines how good we are at meeting the materialistic goals of cavemen, he really never gets it. The pessimism of the post-modern isn’t about Malthusian crises, but about the lack of focused direction for our post-materialist civilization to take.</p><p>Ridley doesn’t see that problem, and his book is fundamentally flawed.</p></blockquote>My complaint has broadened in the eight years since I reviewed that book, because it has been informed by the social crises we face today, especially regarding how social identity in the modern world has become a more salient dividing point between populations, despite the astonishing fact that it is often quite arbitrary. Modernity has a whole host of problems which are becoming ever more germane.<p>So now I’m a bit more curious, and might have to read this to see if Pinker even notices that a whole host of new problems face humanity.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/31384949-ian"></a></section><section><p>693 reviews65 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2381766449">March 3, 2020</a></section><div><p>Prof. Pinker points out early in this book that people have a tendency to marshal evidence that confirms their convictions whilst dismissing evidence that contradicts them. I’m as guilty of that as most people, and on the evidence of this book, my own convictions are similar to the author’s. Prof. Pinker’s book largely provides me with reinforcement for my pre-existing opinions and on that basis it’s not surprising I rate it highly. <p>A large part of the book is taken up with the author arguing that the ideals of the Enlightenment have led to levels of health, wealth, human rights, peace and security, and all-round happiness that were unimaginable to people in the pre-Enlightenment age. Also part of his argument is an attack on the surprisingly common belief that the world was a better place in the past than it is today. I’ve always felt that rose-tinted views of the past fly in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and overwhelming evidence is what Prof. Pinker provides, with a barrage of statistics and graphs about how the world has changed since the Enlightenment era. I had a few minor quibbles about some of his arguments, but nothing that affected the overall merits of his case.</p><p>Of course, saying that things are far better than they were is not to say that we live in Utopia. Prof. Pinker would be the first to say that the world still faces many problems, and he addresses those that could reverse the gains of modernity. The hoary old chestnuts of resource depletion and “the Population Bomb” are despatched without much ado. He’s completely dismissive of the Elon Musk/Stephen Hawking arguments about the threat of AGI, (which made me feel rather foolish, since on this website I’ve previously written a favourable review of a book which articulates those fears). He does rate climate change and nuclear war as potentially serious threats (though again, if you had asked political commentators in the 1950s or 1960s about the chances of getting to 2018 without nuclear weapons ever being used, most would have rated the chances as close to zero).</p><p>I’m a little less sanguine than Prof. Pinker when it comes to the threats to progress posed by nationalism, populism, political extremism (of the left and right) and religious fanaticism, all of which seem to be on a world-wide upswing at the moment. Prof. Pinker seems to be think that we’re just going through a bit of a bad patch and that it’ll all turn out right in the end. I hope he’s right. </p><p>I had to take my time reading this book, as I had to consider the arguments carefully, and also because I kept stopping to read the references. They’ve given me a few ideas for future reading material. Overall for me this was a 4.5 star rating, but objectively it deserves 5 stars.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/31384949?shelf=5-star-non-fiction">5-star-non-fiction</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/31384949?shelf=science">science</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/31384949?shelf=society">society</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/957634-daniel-clausen"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>9 books455 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3465779836">July 28, 2020</a></section><div><p>In many ways, reading this book was similar to reading Pinker's book "Better Angels of our Nature." The theory of the book was straight-forward, the evidence was well-organized, and the insights from the data were presented clearly. The first drawback to reading this book is that it covers a lot of the same ground as "Better Angels of our Nature." The second drawback to this book is that...well, even if the conclusions of this book aren't common sense, to people who are roughly familiar with enlightenment ideals and are fairly well-read on current affairs, it sort of is common sense. That's a nice way of saying that there are few ideas in this book that will leave you awe-struck. <p>That's not to see that Pinker isn't capable of writing such a book. I found "The Blank Slate" to be just such a book. That book remains one of my favorite books to this day. That is also the book I point to when I want to convince people what a great thinker Pinker is. </p><p>Pinker's argument is straightforward and comes in the preface: "I will present a different understanding of the world, grounded in fact and inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment: reason, science, humanism, and progress. Enlightenment ideals, I hope to show, are timeless, but they have never been more relevant than they are right now." (page 12). </p><p>If Enlightenment ideas are timeless, then why do they need a defense? Pinker's answer: "The ideals of the Enlightenment are products of human reason, but they always struggle with other strands of human nature: loyalty to tribe, deference to authority, magical thinking, the blaming of misfortune on evildoers" (page 18).</p><p> In many ways, "Enlightenment Now" is similar to "Factfullness" in its use of quantitative data to make the case that life is indeed getting better. Pinker's earlier book "Better Angels of our Nature" was also a book that relied heavily on quantitative data. However, by my recollection, that book did a better job of reflecting on how the numbers were arrived at. I think numeracy is an important skill, and too often it is easy to be wowed by numbers without realizing how they are produced and the difficulty of getting reliable numbers in certain contexts -- for example, the distant past and developing countries. My recollection of "Better Angels" is a few years removed, but I seem to remember Pinker doing a better job with educating readers on how numbers were arrived at. Having said that, I do think the graphs are presented in a useful and simple way. Often, the data comes in the form of time series line charts. I think the repeated use of these kinds of statistics is great for more casual readers who need to be convinced. </p><p>Another drawback to this book is that it tends to ignore and short-change the possibility of cataclysmic blowups. The discussion of the disruptive power of AI is discussed briefly, but pales in seriousness to Yuval Harari's analysis in "21 Lessons for the 21st Century." The benefits of enlightenment are discussed abundantly, but Frankenstein monsters like mortgage-backed securities are barely mentioned. In addition, one of the most important trends of the 21st century, the explosion of debt is barely discussed. The looming debt crisis (or, I should say crises since we are talking about various kinds of debts, government, municipal, shadow banking, and private) as well as other potential crises with systemic implications -- climate change, the growing use of social media, the introduction of disruptive technologies -- are under-discussed in this book. And because these systemic crises are under-discussed, Pinker fails to deal with the mother of all questions about modernity. </p><p>Does modernity increase the risk of catastrophic blow-ups? </p><p>Since nuclear war, climate change, and contagious financial panics are the product in one way or another of modernity, science, and globalization, is there a likelihood that more potentially catastrophic phenomena could be birthed from them? And, if so, what can we do to prevent potential catastrophic blow-ups from occurring? </p><p>Another way to think about the question is this way: In what ways is modern progress like a financial bubble? </p><p>For me, a high point of the book was its discussion of tribal epistemology. I have read short articles on tribal thinking, but the review of the literature here was excellent. And for those who are searching for literature that discusses this topic, the book can make for an effective gateway. </p><p>This was written in the Guardian about this book: "More pertinently, the failed 2016 campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Remain demonstrated that, in the eyes of many people, “progress” simply meant more of the same. When people feel trapped and patronised by progress, then any alternative – even regress – will feel like freedom. Informing them that the policies of the past 40 years are still the best available starts to sound hopeless." (Full review here: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/14/enlightenment-now-steven-pinker-review">https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...</a>)</p><p>Perhaps that's another way of saying that technocratic modernity (complete with its wonky charts) can feel emotionally ungratifying. Instead of gradual improvements and progress by a thousand nudges, there is a part of the soul that yearns for liberation, heroism, and love. People like stories with heroes and villains. Enlightenment often sees the world in terms of mechanical and quasi-mechanical cause and effect relationships. Heroism seems less like heroism when it requires design and system-thinking rather than great sacrifices. </p><p>Nassim Taleb, another writer whose work I admire, steeps his writing in decidedly non-modern ideas and sentiments -- his thinking perhaps is best described as classical and romantic. I believe anyone who reads this book ought to put it in conversation with some of Taleb's writing (one or two books is enough). </p><p>I'm sure each of the authors would hate to hear it, but I'll say it anyway -- they are better read together than separately. The unabashed modernist/enlightenment thinker is better with a classical/romantic counterpart and vice versa. </p><p>I will repeat this: People who are only familiar with Pinker for "Better Angels" and "Enlightenment Now" ought to read his earlier work "Blank Slate." That book, more than his more recent works, demonstrates that he is a true thinker and not simply a chart-jockey or dataphile. </p><p>Overall, even if you do not need to be convinced of the merit of enlightenment ideas and ideals, this is a wonderful book to read. </p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/957634?shelf=books-of-2020">books-of-2020</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/957634?shelf=top-books">top-books</a></ul></section></section></article></div></div>||||I|||| * Home
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 Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

 Steven Pinker

 4.21
 27,662 ratings 3,138 reviews
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 Goodreads Choice Award
 Nominee for Best Nonfiction (2018)
 If you think the world is coming to an end, think again: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science.

 Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data: In seventy-five jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. It is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing.

 Far from being a naïve hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense. The Enlightenment project swims against currents of human nature–tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, magical thinking–which demagogues are all too willing to exploit. Many commentators, committed to political, religious, or romantic ideologies, fight a rearguard action against it. The result is a corrosive fatalism and a willingness to wreck the precious institutions of liberal democracy and global cooperation.

 With intellectual depth and literary flair, Enlightenment Now makes the case for reason, science, and humanism: the ideals we need to confront our problems and continue our progress.
 Genres Nonfiction Science Philosophy History Psychology Politics Sociology
 ...more

 576 pages, Hardcover

 First published February 27, 2018

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 About the author

 Steven Pinker

 66 books 9,341 followers
 Steven Arthur Pinker is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science. Pinker is known for his wide-ranging explorations of human nature and its relevance to language, history, morality, politics, and everyday life. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as the New York Times, Time, and The New Republic, and is the author of numerous books, including The Language Instinct , How the Mind Works , Words and Rules , The Blank Slate , The Stuff of Thought , The Better Angels of Our Nature , The Sense of Style , and most recently, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress .

 He was born in Canada and graduated from Montreal's Dawson College in 1973. He received a bachelor's degree in experimental psychology from McGill University in 1976, and then went on to earn his doctorate in the same discipline at Harvard in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, then became an assistant professor at Harvard and then Stanford University. From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. (Except for a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1995-6.) As of 2008, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard.

 Pinker was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in 2004 and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in 2005. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv, McGill, and the University of Tromsø, Norway. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003. In January 2005, Pinker defended Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, whose comments about the gender gap in mathematics and science angered much of the faculty. On May 13th 2006, Pinker received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.

 In 2007, he was invited on The Colbert Report and asked under pressure to sum up how the brain works in five words – Pinker answered "Brain cells fire in patterns."

 Pinker was born into the English-speaking Jewish community of Montreal. He has said, "I was never religious in the theological sense... I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew." As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969. His father, a trained lawyer, first worked as a traveling salesman, while his mother was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has two younger siblings. His brother is a policy analyst for the Canadian government. His sister, Susan Pinker, is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and the author of The Sexual Paradox and The Village Effect .

 Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too divorced. He is married to the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, the author of 10 books and winner of the National Medal of the Humanities. He has no children.

 His next book will take off from his research on "common knowledge" (knowing that everyone knows something). Its tentative title is: Don't Go There: Common Knowledge and the Science of Civility, Hypocrisy, Outrage, and Taboo .

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 Bill Gates
 Author 9 books 505k followers
 May 17, 2018
 For years, I’ve been saying Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature was the best book I’d read in a decade. If I could recommend just one book for anyone to pick up, that was it. Pinker uses meticulous research to argue that we are living in the most peaceful time in human history. I’d never seen such a clear explanation of progress.

 I’m going to stop talking up Better Angels so much, because Pinker has managed to top himself. His new book, Enlightenment Now , is even better.

 Enlightenment Now takes the approach he uses in Better Angels to track violence throughout history and applies it to 15 different measures of progress (like quality of life, knowledge, and safety). The result is a holistic picture of how and why the world is getting better. It’s like Better Angels on steroids.

 I read the book slowly since I loved it so much, but I think most people will find it a quick and accessible read. He manages to share a ton of information in a way that’s compelling, memorable, and easy to digest.

 It opens with an argument in favor of returning to the ideals of the Enlightenment—an era when reason, science, and humanism were touted as the highest virtues.

 I’m all for more reason, science, and humanism, but what I found most interesting were the 15 chapters exploring each measure of progress. Pinker is at his best when he analyzes historic trends and uses data to put the past into context. I was already familiar with a lot of the information he shares—especially about health and energy—but he understands each subject so deeply that he’s able to articulate his case in a way that feels fresh and new.

 I love how he’s willing to dive deep into primary data sources and pull out unexpected signs of progress. I tend to point to things like dramatic reductions in poverty and childhood deaths, because I think they’re such a good measure of how we’re doing as a society. Pinker covers those areas, but he also looks at more obscure topics.

 Here are five of my favorite facts from the book that show how the world is improving:

 1. You’re 37 times less likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning than you were at the turn of the century —and that’s not because there are fewer thunderstorms today. It’s because we have better weather prediction capabilities, improved safety education, and more people living in cities.

 2. Time spent doing laundry fell from 11.5 hours a week in 1920 to an hour and a half in 2014. This might sound trivial in the grand scheme of progress. But the rise of the washing machine has improved quality of life by freeing up time for people—mostly women—to enjoy other pursuits. That time represents nearly half a day every week that could be used for everything from binge-watching Ozark or reading a book to starting a new business.

 3. You’re way less likely to die on the job. Every year, 5,000 people die from occupational accidents in the U.S. But in 1929—when our population was less than two-fifths the size it is today—20,000 people died on the job. People back then viewed deadly workplace accidents as part of the cost of doing business. Today, we know better, and we’ve engineered ways to build things without putting nearly as many lives at risk.

 4. The global average IQ score is rising by about 3 IQ points every decade. Kids’ brains are developing more fully thanks to improved nutrition and a cleaner environment. Pinker also credits more analytical thinking in and out of the classroom. Think about how many symbols you interpret every time you check your phone’s home screen or look at a subway map. Our world today encourages abstract thought from a young age, and it’s making us smarter.

 5. War is illegal. This idea seems obvious. But before the creation of the United Nations in 1945, no institution had the power to stop countries from going to war with each other. Although there have been some exceptions, the threat of international sanctions and intervention has proven to be an effective deterrent to wars between nations.

 Pinker also tackles the disconnect between actual progress and the perception of progress— something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about . People all over the world are living longer, healthier, and happier lives, so why do so many think things are getting worse? Why do we gloss over positive news stories and fixate on the negative ones? He does a good job explaining why we’re drawn to pessimism and how that instinct influences our approach to the world, although I wish he went more in depth about the psychology (especially since he’s a psychologist by training). The late Hans Rosling explains this more fully in his excellent new book Factfulness .

 I agree with Pinker on most areas, but I think he’s a bit too optimistic about artificial intelligence. He’s quick to dismiss the idea of robots overthrowing their human creators. While I don’t think we’re in danger of a Terminator -style scenario, the question underlying that fear—who exactly controls the robots?—is a valid one. We’re not there yet, but at some point, who has AI and who controls it will be an important issue for global institutions to address.

 The big questions surrounding automation are proof that progress can be a messy, sticky thing—but that doesn’t mean we’re headed in the wrong direction. At the end of Enlightenment Now , Pinker argues that “we will never have a perfect world, and it would be dangerous to seek one. But there is no limit to the betterments we can attain if we continue to apply knowledge to enhance human flourishing."

 The world is getting better, even if it doesn’t always feel that way. I’m glad we have brilliant thinkers like Steven Pinker to help us see the big picture. Enlightenment Now is not only the best book Pinker’s ever written. It’s my new favorite book of all time.
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 David Wineberg
 Author 2 books 662 followers
 February 17, 2018
 You’ve never had it so good, and Steven Pinker has the stats and charts (over 70!) to prove it. Wars are fewer and less severe, homicides are down, racism is in decline, terrorism is a fading fad, democracy rules, communicable diseases and poverty are on their way out. Life expectancy is up, and police are killing fewer people, both black and white. Even the poor have refrigerators. Inequality is a requisite sign of success. So appreciate the wonderful state of affairs you find yourself in. This is the message of Enlightenment Now, with a title that sounds like a protest placard, but which is actually a survey of the world by the statistics that states collect.

 We’re so “progressive”, we’re beating back entropy itself. Steven Pinker takes 500 pages to create a world where everything is so fabulously much better than it ever has been, that anyone who says different is perpetuating an intellectual lie. This is why it is your enlightenment. The book is an endless, uplifting editorial. If you’re buying.

 He’s at his best criticizing politics and science. He shows precisely how our biases prejudice our most thoughtful conclusions, and bemoans the lack of respect for science and the humanities. He says science is presented in some schools as “just another narrative, or myth”. Humanities are in danger of extinction, and they are critical to progress.

 Pinker has a nice tendency to support his arguments with examples and charts. Unfortunately, he balances this with a tendency to ignore states or countries that don’t conform to his claims, and he swings numbers around to make them look better. He claims when he measures what people consume as opposed to what they earn, the poverty rate in the USA is 3%. So really, everyone is thriving. Even if they’re visibly not.

 I fully realize Pinker is untouchable and slated for sainthood, but many things he says don’t add up, and a lot of it is just outrageous on its face. Let him speak for himself:

 -On war: “Virtually every acre of land that was conquered after 1928 has been returned to the state that lost it.” (Something must have happened in 1927 for him to pick 1928, but he doesn’t say). Where do you even begin to refute this? Kaliningrad? Mauritania? The South China Sea? Crimea? Donbass? Palestine?

 -He defends the demolition of the middle classes in the West. Yes, a hundred million Americans are worse off. But a billion Chinese are better off. “The tradeoff is worth it,” he says. That the extremely rich got fabulously more rich is fine with him, too.

 -On terrorism’s “decline”, Pinker points to recently low numbers of victim deaths to show how safe we really are. He doesn’t mention all the freedom of movement, assembly and privacy we have lost to the terrorists. He’s satisfied they don’t kill that much, and that they will eventually fade away.

 -On the mellowing of war: “Weapons don’t come into existence just because they are conceivable or physically possible.” Yes, they do. And worse, everything can be weaponized, from food to mouseclicks. Pinker goes even further, claiming “most historians” don’t think the atomic bombings caused Japan to surrender in three days, but rather it was the potential of Russia turning its attention from west to east.

 -There is a great deal of nonsense about how much cheaper life is today. The provision of a light indoors would have cost the equivalent of £40,000 in the middle ages (if anyone could read), while today, lights cost fractions of pennies. And 100 years ago it took 1800 hours’ work to afford a refrigerator (among too many more such examples). But Pinker never bothers with the other side of the coin. That today, everyone must spend $150 a month on cable, $125 on phone (after purchasing a phone every two years, with each costing more than the fridge), a $20,000 car, a mortgage, and $50,000 in school debt (none of which were factors in the cost of living in the middle ages ) or be unable to function in society. His endless comparisons are pointless.

 -He keeps repeating that because even the poor have flush toilets and refrigerators, they are much better off today than ever. He says even the fabulously wealthy Rothschilds didn’t have a washing machine like nearly everyone (80%) now supposedly has.

 Pinker dismisses ecology as a pastime of the affluent. The more educated and wealthy we become, the more eco-conscious we become, so everything works out. He completely ignores the fact we have crossed the red line. That the oceans are toxic, that there is trash and plastic everywhere, that the carbon levels are at unseemly record levels. That the Paris Accord has not dented the damage one bit. But, he says, the air over London is no longer purple every day.


 The book ends with an interminable bashing of religion, which Pinker considers “intellectually bankrupt”. He cites all the usual contradictions and hypocrisy, narrow-mindedness and longing for a cleaner era that never existed. Basically, religion and enlightenment are oil and water.

 So you can look at Enlightenment Now in two ways, according to your own various biases. Either the greater message of positivism is too important (and correct) to criticize Pinker’s maddening claims, or the maddening claims make the whole exercise suspect.

 David Wineberg
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 Gary Beauregard Bottomley
 935 reviews 556 followers
 February 14, 2018
 When this book was not boring me it was irritating me.

 All of the author’s anecdotes I had read elsewhere. Science is good. I don’t need convincing. Vaccines work. Poverty is bad and is getting better throughout the world. Everyone who wants to know this stuff already knows it.

 Why equate Al Gore with Theodore Kaczynski (The Unabomber) as the author seems to do regarding the environment? Is Fox News really right when they said the poor can’t be poor because they have cell phones and air conditioning today? The author defended that absurdity though he doesn’t mention that Fox used to argue that when Obama was president.

 And why did the author make a false equivalence between Bernie Sanders and Trump? Sanders didn’t believe ‘climate change is a Chinese Hoax’, or pick someone in his cabinet who thinks vaccines cause autism, or wanted to build a wall and claim Mexico will pay for it, or feed our hate against Muslims, Browns, Asians or anyone who strikes his fancy for the day even kneeling football players.

 This author always seemed to have some pie in the sky anti-humanist post-modernist Strawman he was easily demolishing for some reason I couldn’t figure out. He mentioned the in-gratitude were in the 9th circle of hell and implied Dante had a point and people most of us have never heard of such as Heidegger, Adorno, and Neitzsche, and I think he also mentioned Marcuse belonged there for their in-gratitude. (I’m going to venture a guess, since I didn’t read all of the book: the author doesn’t like ‘identity politics’ and gets bothered by ‘political correctness’ and thinks ‘both sides’ are to blame. I don’t know if that’s where he was going, but I wasn’t going to find out by wading thru a familiar story I’ve read better told in other books).

 The author is completely out of his depth on economics and inequality. I suggest you read Piketty’s book instead of this author’s poorly constructed deconstruction of Piketty’s wonderful book, and then tell me again why inequality is not real or not a big deal! His Enlightenment and Romanticism knowledge seemed superficial. Of the 8 or so Voltaire quips he provided, I had heard them all elsewhere.

 I stopped this book after 5 hours. I got my credit back from Audible. I seldom do that. This author was teaching me nothing I didn’t already know, and worse than that seemed to have a disregard for the truth by trying to defend his own thesis beyond what the facts would take a reasonable person.
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 Trevor
 1,279 reviews 21.3k followers
 Read
 September 16, 2021
 Why I won't be reading this:

 https://www.theguardian.com/commentis...
 not-to-read
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 Mario the lone bookwolf
 733 reviews 3,397 followers
 April 23, 2020
 This concoction and Roslings´ similar „Go on, everything is super.“ Factfulness were the reasons for me to leave the soft space of some humanities that are nothing more than appeasement, belittlement, and deception.

 A mix of different quotes from the book and thoughts and impressions I had while consuming this fairytale. Some points might be redundant, sorry for that, but this is what happens when taking notes about a book that is nonsense:

 1. He´s attacking the ones who aren´t grateful, says everything is fine, takes the premise that because some things became better everything is great, based on unbearable pseudoscience.
 2. Hey, what about talking just about the positive things and avoiding anything negative or controversial?
 3. Of course, there is only the great Western way of living, capitalism ineluctably always leads to the best society in the world.
 4. If some things have become better thanks to technology in the last hundred years, there is of course everything great and no more problems with anything.
 5. Wait a moment, what exactly is Pinkers´ legitimation to talk about those topics, he must be an expert, maybe a unique ingenious polymath, in many different fields to make serious prognosis, not just assumptions, no even certainties about the whole society and the future? Oh yes, he is a linguist and cognitive psychologist that wrote some good works in his field and thought after that: „Hm, why not write some happy go lucky books based on nothing except what media, government, and the economy want me to highlight to boost my sales.“
 6. One of the funniest things about such books is that they are close to impossible to suss if one has not read some progressive, alternative literature in contrast to what is permanently repeated in mainstream media and science.
 7. Sweatshops aren´t that bad.
 8. Capitalism already solved and will solve the few, little problems it created. Sure, a problem repairs the problems it creates instead of creating greater problems.
 9. He finds the fact that people call humans under the current economic system a malady to the planet evil, discriminating, hateful, and wrong, although it´s the truth.
 10. He is biased, does the ultimate replication crisis demonstration.
 11. Philosophical, out of context, bla yada drivel that isn´t even close to the real philosophers, but fine tuned and modified to fit to the agenda and dogma of this book.
 12. „Peak car“. Why, show me the extrapolations.
 13. He ignores so much hard based science that doesn´t fit to the conclusions he wants that it´s hard to endure.
 14. He states that richer states have less environmental pollutions and get cleaner. So let´s go jogging in an industrial center and go swimming in the local lake afterward. Who survives can pick some berries and vegetables grown outdoors and will be gone soon too.
 15. He compares the environmental protection movement with extremists, calling it „misanthropic environmentalism“. He does as if the wide consense about habitat destruction and the sixth extinction doesn´t exist and compares it to pessimistic people who spread viral fake news ideas.
 16. He loves to use those techniques:
 17. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaga...
 18. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychol...
 19. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_m...
 20. He praises science, knowledge, wisdom, creativity, intelligence as wordy as possible while being an ignorant apologist for the perfect, current system, ignoring and attacking any other opinion than his own.
 21. His arrogance, joviality, condescension, and belittlement in his writing and in interviews are disgusting.
 22. There is no problem with distributive justice, everything is fine because so many people aren´t extremely poor anymore, but now just poor or close to poverty.
 23. He talks about ideas, concepts, humanities, avoiding anything substantial, profound, and hard science-based.
 24. He and Rosling have the same concept: „Look, stupid people of the world, here is the manipulated data you are too dumb to understand in the way I want you to understand it, so let me explain it you while warmongering and hate trolling against anything that doesn´t confirm my opinion.“
 25. He keeps repeating general knowledge about many things that have improved, stating that it will continue to get better.
 26. He picks any person, anecdote, or fact out of context to mostly demonstrate a pro capitalistic world-view.
 27. He knows everything about the climate, he is a weather God. Nobody else, thousands of scientists aren´t sure what will happen with climate change, global warming, how earths´ systems and the sun really function, and how bad it will become, but Pinker knows that everything will be fine now, in 100 years, always and forever. The sun always tells him how it will shine.
 28. „Combat poverty instead of reducing inequality.“ Of course, give a man a fish a day instead of showing him how to angle or allowing him at least to fish, but the lake and the sea are privatized, sorry. Give tiny parts of wealth to the poor instead of changing a dysfunctional system.
 29. Overconsumption and consumerism are absolutely no problems, we should just reduce the environmental damage it does by…magic and positive thinking and not listening to the lies those pesky pessimists are telling.
 30. In this so called age of new enlightenment anything progressive, alternative, or different of the dogmas is deemed a conspiracy theory. He got me, I also never quote or show the hard facts, links, I am inventing any review because the secret reptilian overlords are telling me to do it, I am completely bonkers because I am a dirty leftist inventing conspiracy theories about military industrial complexes and post democracy and you don´t want to know what else, it´s terrible for the kids.
 31. The compulsion to have a positive mentality of being mindful, calm, meditating, and not negative and pessimistic. Forced happiness without reason and logic.
 32. Much talk about the sock puppets of politics he doesn´t like, no meta analysis or mentioning of the puppetmasters or politicians he likes.
 33. Extremism is caused by a power vacuum of disinterest in politics and the ideals that made democracy so great and it´s the peoples´ fault who are used to this and don´t appreciate it and has nothing to do with the system.
 34. He calls marxism a pseudo fringe science. Oh wait, and of course, because of this socialism is pseudo too and capitalism is based on hard science or what?
 35. He doesn´t understand that faith and dictatorships that were criticized by the thinkers of the true enlightenment have been turned in our economic system that does exactly the same, but more perfidious and mendacious. And that he´s actively attacking and denying the thesis of the ones who work for a new enlightenment.
 36. Truth can´t be constructed. Wait, why do you do it yourself Mr Pinker, if it´s impossible?
 37. He uses data, sources, graphs, statistics out of context or out of unscientific sources, sometimes relating to just one article, book, study, that is highly controversial.
 38. He bashes anything left or progressive in science, education, and universities, but doesn´t mention the overwhelming right-conservative majority in politics, governments, and economics with a single word.
 39. Black people are not more likely to be shot by police than white people in the US.
 40. He is great at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular... .
 41. The evil news media are always hyping about crises and problems that don´t really exist.
 42. He says that there is far less violence (for privileged people in rich states and rich people in poor countries), but he should ask a prison inmate, the impoverished population of Western countries or the poor majority of the worlds´ population in Afrika, Asia, and Latin Amerika. I am sure that they are enthusiastic about the fact that there are fewer wars driven by political and economic interests of wealthy nations and they now just have to deal with crime, starvation, illness, extreme poverty and violence, and very low life expectancy. Oh, and of course with the regular financial crisis, land grabbing, and trade wars fought on and for their territory.
 43. „The rate of extinctions has been reduced by 75 %.“ What, I thought the contrary was the case and that we don´t even know how many species we exterminate on a daily basis because we don´t know how many exist.
 44. Osama bin Laden owned a copy of a Chomsky book. So left, socialist, ecosocial is the devil, don´t you understand?
 45. Progressivism, activism, scientific results he doesn´t like, are described as useless.
 46. He is switching his opinions, saying that something is bad if it´s a point he doesn´t like, changing to great about the same thing, institution, philosophical concept, science, if it´s something he likes, mixing it with psychobabble and worst bad pseudo fringe science lying with statistics stuff. And he doesn´t even seem to recognize that he is contradicting himself because the book is a collection of such inconsistencies, it´s not even logical drivel.
 47. He is not even mentioning that some of his crude theories could be wrong, as any good scientist I´ve read does in humility and self- criticism, instead, he deems himself all knowing and is vilifying any opposition, using subtle hate speech.

 It´s so bizarre because of the combination of points I´ve already mentioned: He is no specialist in any of the fields the talks about and it would need a few of them to draw a realistic and objective picture. Or at least an author who does his research and combines all points to an objective overview. Instead, he believes to reach god mode by combining cherrypicking, mentioned replication crisis, wrong attacks against anyone saying he is wrong, integrating anectotism instead of long-time data, and mixing it up to a numbing phantasmagoria of an idyllic world that is, in reality, breaking in pieces.

 What shocks me the most and what is the worst thing a scientist can do, is that he integrates this hallucinations in the minds of intelligent, literate, educated people who infect others with this viral garbage, so that they stop activism and avoid progressive, alternative thinking and real, productive contentions about the topic, instead telling each other how great Pinker is and which of his amazing, brilliant ideas they find most astonishing. Possibly they should combine it with Roslings´ pseudo Factfulness for the full dosage of brainwashing and leave reality forever.

 It´s sad that Pinker started as a real scientist with his first books and switched to writing disinformation nonsense with „The better angels of our nature“, that seems so follow the same pattern of empty yada bla gossip. He quickly got richer, but lost his reputation forever.

 Alternative economists and political scientists with ideas that could really change the world aren´t read because of stuff like this.

 Continued in the comments, because there is no space left here.
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 Emily May
 1,921 reviews 290k followers
 July 3, 2018
 Steven Pinker makes a strong argument for enlightenment principles and, essentially, not giving up on the world because Donald Trump is president. We are not, contrary to popular belief, going backwards, and have in fact made astounding progress in all measurable areas, such as wealth, health, safety, education and equality.

 Faced with the numbers, it's hard to disagree, though I went into this fairly convinced already. We do not, by any measure, live in a great world, but we do live in a better world than we did fifty, one hundred, one thousand years ago. Pinker presents this information, using charts and tables, in this extensively-researched book.

 However, some of his claims are not really backed up by the evidence, either because he uses limited sources or engages in some avoiding the issue fallacies. The lengthy breakdown of how much things cost compared to how much they cost in, say, the Middle Ages, is irrelevant to the discussion of wealth because Pinker doesn't consider new kinds of expenses - mortgages, insurance, electric, gas and phone bills (etc.).

 I also looked up a couple of the references he uses and now I'm skeptical about the others.

 One example I checked on was his source for the claim that black people are no more likely to be shot by police than white people in America. Obviously, this is a hot topic and a controversial claim to make. His single source for such a bold claim - here - actually found that black people were more likely to be shot by police than white people, but offered an opinion as to why this might be. Other pieces disagree .

 He arrives at a number of these grand conclusions based on a single article, which is often an opinion piece. He cherry-picks information to suit his argument and relies on the unlikelihood that anyone will go check his sources.

 It's a shame, to be honest, because I think the central argument is a strong one: that we are indeed making progress. There's a whole lot to suggest that the world isn't going to hell in a handbasket. But Pinker actually risks fuelling a bleak opposite of societal pessimism. While I don't disagree that we are faced with a lot of doom-foreshadowing news stories, there is also an ever-growing misconception that inequality is over. That our society is colourblind and that women are now treated no different to men. Pinker's distortion of facts often supports this theory and it is incorrect.

 Things are , overall, getting better, but over-exaggerating the extent to which improvements have been made does not help anyone. Well, other than making rich white men feel better about the state of the world they rule over.

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 David Rubenstein
 801 reviews 2,502 followers
 September 7, 2018
 A few months ago, I heard Steven Pinker give a talk about this book. I must say that his speaking skill did not impress me. However, his writing skill is brilliant. This is a very important book--epic in scope, comprehensive, well thought-out and structured, incredibly well researched, and full of some very important messages.

 The book begins with a student's question "Why should I live?" To which Pinker answers with a profound interpretation of the "meaning of life". I won't repeat his complete answer, but he writes,
 [You have] the ability to like, love, respect, help and show kindness--and you can enjoy the gift of mutual benevolence with friends, family, and colleagues ... You can foster the welfare of other sentient beings by enhancing life, health, knowledge, freedom, abundance, safety, beauty, and peace.
 Pinker writes that the Enlightenment helped us escape from superstition and ignorance. It increased our understanding of ourselves through science. Also, Humanism is a secular foundation for morality. And, it is individuals who are sentient, not the tribe. The Enlightenment helped to abolish cruel punishments and slavery. Also, Humanism helped bring about an increase in peace.

 The Enlightenment has helped to eradicate some terrible diseases. Science is the most unambiguous achievement by mankind. Science helped to eradicate smallpox, a painful and disfiguring disease that killed 300 million people in the 20th century. And, we have forgotten that on April 12, 1955, "people observed moments of silence, rang bells, honked horns, ... took the day off, closed schools, ... and forgave enemies." That was the day that Jonas Salk's polio vaccine was declared to be safe.

 Pinker extols the virtues of genetic engineering, that can accomplish in days what farmers accomplished over millennia, and what Norman Borlaug took years of "mind-warping tedium" to accomplish. Hundreds of studies, every major health and science organization, and over a hundred Nobel laureates have testified to the safety of transgenic crops. Nevertheless, some traditional environment groups persist in denying them to the world.

 I just loved this quote from the book:
 In 1976, Mao single-handedly and dramatically changed the direction of global poverty with one simple act: he died.


 Pinker devotes chapters to improvements in the environment, and the problem of climate change. He shows that there is virtually no dissension among scientists that climate change, and specifically global warming, is a significant problem. However, he is optimistic that these issues can, in principle be solved by courageous governmental action.

 The book describes the growth of democracy around the world--not steadily, but in waves. Democratic countries have higher rates of economic growth, fewer wars and genocides, better-educated citizens, and almost no famines. The best reason for democracy, stated by Karl Popper, is that it is a solution to the problem of how to dismiss bad leadership without bloodshed. And, it gives people the freedom to complain.

 Pinker shows how disbelief in human-caused climate change is not correlated with scientific illiteracy, but is due to allegiance to values held by one's social circle. Political tribalism is decried as the most insidious form of irrationality today. And this tribalism exists on the left and the right sides of the political spectrum. Pinker writes,
 American conservative politics has become steadily more know-nothing, from Ronald Reagan to Dan Quayle to George W. Bush to Sarah Palin to Donald Trump.
 Pinker lists all of the ways in which President Trump has resisted progress, and backtracks to a less advanced way of life: Reversal of health care, reversal of globalism, reversal in the growth of wealth, reversal of the environment, safety, law and order, international trade, equal rights, tolerance, and the judicial system. The president has all the hallmarks of a dictator; he is impulsive and vindictive.

 The last chapter of the book is about humanism; the chapter starts out well, but then briefly becomes too philosophical and abstract for my taste. Then the chapter returns to a more accessible, concrete structure. It becomes obvious that Pinker is an atheist. He writes that the "existence of the God of scripture is a perfectly testable scientific hypothesis." And, he list some experiments that could be performed to test the hypothesis. He also shows how the religiosity of nations, and even from region-to-region within the United States, is inversely related to happiness and well being. The United States, being more religious on the whole than West European countries, has higher homicide rates, abortion, STD's, child mortality, obesity, educational mediocrity, and premature deaths. And, Pinker points out that non-religious people in the U.S. tend not to vote--that helps explain why we have Trump in office today.

 This is such a fascinating book; it takes up arguments where his earlier book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined leaves off. This is the seventh book that I have read by Steven Pinker--and this one is just as wonderful as his previous books.
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 Rhys
 685 reviews 91 followers
 November 15, 2018
 A paean to the status quo that can be summarized in four words: ‘don’t worry, be happy’. (Actually five words, as one is contracted). This book will no doubt earn the author a lanyard to every corporate boardroom and conservative think tank in the country.

 His thesis is that Enlightenment principles must be defended – but not against mindless consumerism, not against the growing disparities of wealth, not against the disruption of earth systems. No, the Enlightenment must be defended against The Strawman.

 The author lets the cat out early in the book: “Intellectuals hate progress” [p.39]. Later, Pinker says: “An axiom of progressive opinion, especially in universities, is that we continue to live in a deeply racist, sexist, and homophobic society – which would imply that progressivism is a waste of time, having accomplished nothing at decades of struggle” (p.215). Did your jaw just drop, too? This is a recurring theme in the book – binary positions. If you feel that we have a ways to go regarding bigotry, then you are just not appreciative enough of the gains: intellectuals and progressives are anti-Enlightenment. Just five pages later, he says that “heightened concern … is not futile moralizing but has brought measurable progress – which means that continuing this concern can lead to greater progress still” (p.220). Yes, the idea of progressive thinking is that maintaining a heightened level of concern can motivate greater gains towards Enlightenment ideals – unless, that is, you are an 'intellectual' who, when maintaining a heightened level of concern, is just being unappreciative of the meaty bone the status quo has already thrown you.

 Pinker says “police shoot too many people, but it’s not primarily a racial issue”. I wonder if the number of people who are shot with their empty hands in the air is a racial issue - maybe a nice chart on that one would be interesting. Maybe he should interview groups of people who live in fear of the police – of being carded while walking, of being stopped on the road because of their appearance.

 In his effort to make all of his graphs show diminishing bads over time, he has to fudge GHG emissions to show GHG emissions / GDP. This is a favourite trick of those who wish to delay any meaningful efforts to face climate change – the atmosphere doesn't care how many goods and services an economy creates. Emissions are continuing to increase as our economy expands. Diluting this value with a GDP measure of ‘dematerialized’ services is more of an indicator of what public and personal work has been devoured by The Market than anything to do with emissions. In plain words, it is disingenuous.

 Probably the most distressing aspect of this book is Pinker’s unwillingness to engage in a meaningful critique of left intellectuals who he seems to despise. His references to them involve either gross, dog-whistle caricatures, the butt of a Russian peasant joke, or a cheap pot shot – Osama Bin Laden owned a copy of a book by Noam Chomsky … really?! Who cares?

 And then he misrepresents Deconstruction and post-modernism as the heartbeat of anti-Enlightenment thought, heirs of the anti-rational Romantic thinkers of the past. Any ‘intellectual’ who explores truth-making (like the Continental philosophers) or challenges the big, empty narratives around freedom, truth, right, etc. becomes anti-rational. Then Pinker unloads the big cliché that you can’t make a rational statement about ‘truth’ being socially constructed, which to Pinker means that what is meant is that there is no truth (binary thinking again), and therefore anti-rational – for a page or two he dances around the logical impossibility of making a rational statement about an anti-rationalist position … as if anyone really holds this position. But when it comes to his tribe, he says in italics: “no Enlightenment thinker ever claimed that humans were consistently rational”. It’s surprising that author could not see that this sentiment cuts both ways? Eg. ‘no postmodernist thinker ever claimed that humans were consistently irrational’ …

 “The left, too, has missed the boat in its contempt for the market and its romance with Marxism.” What does this even mean? What ‘Marxism’ – the critique of capital? I think this is most revealing, as Pinker dodges any reference to capitalism, or more accurately, a critique of capitalism. The ‘romance with Marxism’ is a sign of Enlightenment principles at work, as opposed to a dogmatic adherence to Capitalism as the best system in the past, and by extrapolation the best system forever. In addition to this bias, Pinker is quick to point out what he considers bad about ‘communist or leftist’ governments, without evaluating their successes and failures on the same principled measures as he applies throughout the book: for example, rather than a chauvinistic dismissal of Venezuela under Chavez, measure his gains or failures in child mortality, longevity, homicides, poverty, literacy and so on. He critiques the numbers of ‘left-intellectuals’ in the academy – a place where ambiguity, honest analysis, and critique is fostered – but doesn’t conduct a similar survey of the ratio of left-to-right thinkers in positions of power - in public office or corporate boardrooms, not to mention the academy.

 Later, during his analysis of Islam, he quotes ‘ex-Muslim activist Sarah Haider’ who says: “'Religions are just ideas and don’t have rights.' Criticizing the ideas of Islam is no more bigoted than criticizing the ideas of neoliberalism or the Republican Party Platform” (p.442). I wonder if he feels this way about other, non-Muslim, faith-based states in the region – replace ‘Islam’ with another faith and I wonder what sort of reception his book would have received.

 I could go on and on, as every page packs a groaner. Overall, Pinker loses the gist of his thesis in a stew of gross generalizations and what I would consider a contempt for the Enlightenment project as it relates to preserving open discussion of ideals and efforts against the reification of power-structures and narratives that hinder progress. Has humanity come a long way? Sure – who really doubts that? Do we have more work to do? Yes we do – but you wouldn’t feel any urgency to do so from this book.

 Pinker says: “Instead, their reputations hinge on their ability to entertain, titillate, or shock; on their ability to instill confidence or fear (in the hopes that a prophecy might be self-fulfilling or self-defeating); and on their skill in galvanizing a coalition and celebrating its virtue.” I would say this is a good description of the author of Enlightenment Now .

 Just to be clear: I didn't like this book.
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 Ross Blocher
 429 reviews 1,336 followers
 March 26, 2018
 Everyone should read Enlightenment Now . It seems odd to require a defense of reason, science, humanism and progress, but we suffer if we do not understand how far humanity has come by application of these principles. Steven Pinker has done us the favor of chronicling that progress, with data, in a compellingly written volume that challenges common assumptions. The news cycle and many prominent intellectuals would have us think that the world is becoming a darker, scarier place; yet the opposite is true. While pessimism makes for good news coverage and stokes political fires, denying progress causes us to mistrust the systems we've put in place. Combine that mistrust with a lack of understanding of WHY we put those systems in place, and you get setbacks like a Trump presidency, a burgeoning flat earther movement, and anti-vaccine advocacy. Acknowledging humanity's successes is not foolishly optimistic or defeatist; rather, it should inspire us to work toward an even better future, because we know our efforts will not be in vain. This is not a Panglossian "best of all possible worlds"; rather, it is ackowledgement that we live in the best world... SO FAR. A quote from Barack Obama summarizes this view: "If you had to choose a moment in history to be born, and you did not know ahead of time who you would be - you didn't know whether you were going to be born into a wealthy family or a poor family, what country you'd be born in, whether you were going to be a man or a woman - if you had to choose blindly what moment you'd want to be born, you'd choose now."

 This account of progress plays out on a variety of quantifiable measures, and it's not just good news for denizens of first world countries. Pinker is careful to tease apart the trends that typically begin in developed countries and then spread globally. Average life expectancy worldwide was stalled at 30 years until the late 1800s, but has now skyrocketed to 71. Child mortality has plummeted. "For an American woman, being pregnant a century ago was almost as dangerous as having breast cancer today." Infectious diseases are being driven to extinction (and many already have). Caloric intake has increased across the world, even as population continues to grow, to the point that in many countries the poorest people are over-fed rather than under-fed. Undernourishment is fast becoming a thing of the past, and famines are now incredibly rare and lack the destructive potential of their predecessors even a century ago. All people are becoming, on average, wealthier (wealth inequality is a separate topic that is also addressed, but the trend is still positive across the world), and have more disposable income and opportunities to learn and travel. Literacy has grown, and with it IQ. Work hours have decreased, and child labor is in steep decline. Violence and death are down across almost every single measure (as Pinker detailed in another book, The Better Angels of Our Nature , and expands on here). Representative government has spread to a majority of the world's countries and individuals. These improvements, surprisingly, also play out in sustainability (a chapter in particular that challenged many of my assumptions), energy use, pollution, and population growth. Pinker is no Pollyana: he does carefully address some of our most pressing problems, namely climate change and the threat of nuclear war. Even for these serious quandaries, he provides cause for optimism and some potential answers.

 All these charts and trends have ragged trajectories that dip and rise along their paths. None of these improvements come all-at-once or unceasingly. As Pinker says, that would be magic... and science isn't magic. There are reasons for these improvements - and those reasons can be applied to solving new problems. Pinker also unpacks the importance of appealing to reason, the power of scientific thinking, and a basis for secular morality that transcends religious identity. He identifies and argues against the worldviews that oppose the ideals of the Enlightenment. This is a long book, but it is important, timely, and a delight to read.
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 Alex MacMillan
 141 reviews 50 followers
 February 23, 2018
 In his newest book, (Neoliberalism) Now: The Case for (Positivism), Scien(tism), (Atheism), and (Globalization) , Steven Pinker seeks to cash in on the Trump election by rushing out what is mostly a rehash of material from his previous book, The Better Angels of Our Nature . His method of reasoning and tone of argument seeks to preach to the choir rather than persuade the unaffiliated. Unlike his classic works, The Blank Slate and The Sense of Style , this book will not be something we return to decades from now, except as a time capsule into the conventional wisdom of Economist -reading Davos attendees during the early 21st century.

 The book is divided into three parts:
 Part I : This would make a great TedTalk.

 Part II : Where it doesn't lift entire sections from Better Angels , this is Pinker's longwinded literature review of the work of economic historians. If you are interested in learning about humanity's recent exponential growth in material wellbeing, there are much better books on the subject that I highly recommend to you instead, such as Bourgeois Dignity , The Rational Optimist , The Ultimate Resource , or The Skeptical Environmentalist .

 Part III : Pinker uses pop psychology to pathologize anyone who disagrees with him politically. (He strangely criticizes social science departments for lacking ideological diversity only a few pages after having relied on the studies produced by these same departments to smugly dismiss opposing viewpoints.) Pinker's key syllogism appears to be that "If you're not a global citizen who completely prioritizes humanity's material wellbeing over the interests of your community or country, then you're a benighted bigot, as whatever maximizes global utility is progress."

 Pinker's strawman of what constitutes "progress" (who isn't in favor of progress?) allows him to avoid having to seriously contend with the core anxieties about the pace of globalization that underlie populist movements on the left and right. For example, his chapter about rising economic inequality has an elephant-shaped graph showing how globalization has occurred at the expense of people in developed nations who lack college degrees. This fact suggests a rational basis for Sanders and Trump supporters to intuit that the idea of "a common market, with open markets and open borders" may have reached the point of diminishing returns. Pinker does not have a rejoinder to the arguments of cultural pessimists like Charles Murray other than that governments should further expand the welfare state to compensate the losers from free trade. Pinker's hoped-for future where the majority of Americans are living on the dole, mollified by painkillers and online entertainment, is not "progress," no matter what Pinker and other technophiles may think.
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 Atila Iamarino
 411 reviews 4,359 followers
 March 13, 2018
 Tudo o que esperava e um pouco mais. O livro é uma continuação do Os Anjos Bons da Nossa Natureza: Por Que a Violência Diminuiu , onde o Pinker escreve porque a humanidade está progredindo em quase todos os sentidos, apesar de termos a impressão do contrário.

 Para alguém como eu, que não tem a menor bagagem filosófica, esta obra foi excelente. Pinker explica muito bem o que foi o Iluminismo (na interpretação dele) e porque o humanismo foi tão importante para mudarmos conceitos éticos, políticos e culturais. Na argumentação dele, ainda estamos surfando as mudanças trazidas pelo humanismo e os métodos nos quais ele passa a se basear (como a ciência). E o livro traz uma discussão sobre todo tipo de índice de desenvolvimento, econômico, de saúde, de violência, de educação, etc. para mostrar que esse é o caso.

 Grande parte do miolo do livro funciona como uma repetição do Os Anjos Bons da Nossa Natureza que, na minha opinião, dispensa a leitura do livro anterior. Traz também avanços em democracia, saúde, ambiente e desigualdade que não lembro muito de aparecerem no livro anterior. Se você não leu Anjos Bons, parta direto para este que traz uma lição mais abrangente e mais bem argumentada, ainda que menos detalhada, sobre como a humanidade está avançando a passos cada vez mais rápidos.

 O destaque para mim ficou com a parte 3 onde ele combina ciência, razão e conhecimento para argumentar por onde poderíamos caminhar para avançar ainda mais rápido. É a área que ele mais domina e traz contribuições que achei muito mais pertinentes do que autores mais ligados à humanidades que já li.

 É uma das obras que coloco como recomendadíssimas para qualquer um. Sapiens me explicou muito bem como chegamos aqui, Homo Deus para onde vamos. Este livro me explicou muito bem onde estamos.
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 Riku Sayuj
 653 reviews 6,927 followers
 January 22, 2021
 Single Quote Counter-Review:

 Science tells us how to heal and how to kill; it reduces the death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war; but only wisdom—desire coordinated in the light of all experience—can tell us when to heal and when to kill.

 ~ Will Durant
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 Charles Haywood
 488 reviews 677 followers
 February 16, 2018
 As with Steven Pinker’s earlier "The Better Angels of Our Nature," of which this is really an expansion and elucidation, I was frustrated by this book. On the one hand, Pinker is an able thinker and clear writer, free of much of the ideological cant and distortions of vision that today accompany most writing about society (for society is what this book is about), and he is mostly not afraid to follow his reasoning to its conclusions. His data on human progress is voluminous, persuasive, and extremely interesting. On the other hand, Pinker regularly makes gross errors about history, some of little import, but some that undermine the entire thesis of his book—which is that that the Enlightenment is the sole cause of the human progress he illustrates.

 I like Pinker for his clarity of mind. And since I have been reading a steady diet of books whose central claim is that the Enlightenment was a mistake, and moreover I am personally enamored of Reaction, the idea of creating a new thing by reference to the old, it is only fair that I consider the opposite ideas presented as well as possible. Moreover, this book claims to answer exactly a current question of mine—is the material marvel that is the modern world the child of the Enlightenment? I was not disappointed; this book is just what the doctor ordered, at least to clarify my own thoughts, though probably not with the result Pinker intended. He wants to prove the Enlightenment is responsible for everything that is good in the modern world, and every good thing that will be in the future, but he ends up, for the most part, refuting himself on all his key claims. Still, the ride is interesting enough and that alone makes his book worth reading.

 On the second page of his book, Pinker enunciates the core of his argument, by referring to “the Enlightenment principle that we can apply reason and sympathy to enhance human flourishing.” The next sentence, by implication, defines the Enlightenment further as “the ideals of reason, science, humanism, and progress.” The following paragraph says the Enlightenment is “also called humanism, the open society, and cosmopolitan or classical liberalism.” All this creates a somewhat confused definition, but once you read the whole book, it’s evident that to Pinker, the middle sentence is the key—the Enlightenment consists in the primacy to human societies of “reason, science, humanism, and progress.” His book revolves around these four concepts, and we will return to each of these concepts in turn.

 Pinker divides his book into three parts. The first, shortest, part expands on what Pinker means by “the Enlightenment.” Here, Pinker begins by turning to the driver of all the progress that he details at great length later in the book, namely, the Scientific Revolution. “The Enlightenment is conventionally placed in the last two-thirds of the 18th century, though it flowed out of the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Reason in the 17th century.” Given that the term “Age of Reason” is only used in one other place in this book, at the very end in a similar context, while the terms “Enlightenment” and “Scientific Revolution” are used continuously, it seems fair to conclude that Pinker believes that the Scientific Revolution (actually beginning in the 1500s, and possibly earlier, not “in the 17th century”) was the necessary first step that combined with the Enlightenment to produce the benefits of the modern world. Pinker reinforces this conclusion by summarizing the modern understanding of scientific progress to include entropy, evolution, and information. Grasping these three underlying drivers of scientific progress, Pinker tells us, allows a more complete approach to scientific understanding, and thus of the Enlightenment.

 All this is true. The problem with this definition of the Enlightenment, though, is that it is all about the Scientific Revolution, from its inception to today, and when you look closely at it, has nothing to do with the Enlightenment. The Scientific Revolution led to technology, which ultimately (with some other drivers that are endlessly debated) led to the Industrial Revolution, which created nearly all the progress Pinker spends the second part of his book documenting. But this eliding of the Enlightenment with the Scientific Revolution is the fatal error of Pinker’s entire book—every chapter, and practically every page, is shot through with it. Pinker claims for the Enlightenment, a system of political and philosophical principles with a nearly exclusive focus on increasing liberty, the advantages of created by the Scientific Revolution, a pre-Enlightenment happening whose success, and whose single-handed creation of the modern world, had essentially nothing to do with the Enlightenment. Pinker does this because he wishes to advocate for Enlightenment principles (in particular, emancipation and atheism), but justify those principles almost wholly by reference to the achievements of the Scientific Revolution. This is a neat parlor trick, but intellectually dishonest. I cannot tell whether Pinker realizes the dishonesty, or merely has wandered so far into the weeds he cannot think clearly. In either case, the effect is to make some parts of the book fascinating, and others risible.

 There are many, many claimed reasons for why the Industrial Revolution occurred, and why it only occurred in the West. But no serious historian claims that it was the Enlightenment that caused the Industrial Revolution, which is no doubt why Pinker glosses over the supposed linkage and offers no citations tying the Enlightenment to the Industrial Revolution (or, for that matter, to the Scientific Revolution). For a man dedicated to carefully parsing the evidence and linking causal chains through reasoning, this is a glaring omission. Fortunately for the reader, though, these first philosophical musings, or ramblings, only take up the first thirty-five pages of the book. The next 300 are an endless, and endlessly fascinating, series of statistical analyses about various forms of (mostly material) progress. In the final sixty pages, the last third of the book, Pinker returns to philosophy, attempting to synthesize the progress he has demonstrated with his other claimed keystones of the modern world, reason, science, and humanism.

 Pinker’s basic point about progress is a broadening of his claims about peace in "The Better Angels of Our Nature"—that those who think the world is getting worse are wrong, not (mostly) from malice, but from various forms of psychological bias, such as the “Optimism Gap” (people see their own lives as better than other people’s); “Availability Bias” (we make decisions based on data easily available to us, which is often weighted toward the negative); and “Negativity Bias” (it’s easier to imagine how things could be dramatically worse than how they could be dramatically better). To prove this, Pinker offers fourteen separate chapters, each covering a totally different area of progress, demonstrating that since the Scientific Revolution human conditions have gotten better.

 Pinker starts with Life—he shows how life expectancy, both at birth and at later periods of life, has dramatically increased over time—or, rather, since the Industrial Revolution in the West, and since the early twentieth century in much of the rest of the world. Next is Health, to much the same effect. In both chapters, Pinker relies heavily on Nobel Prize-winner Angus Deaton’s "The Great Escape," a fascinating book. But Pinker’s philosophical confusion shows up every time he makes other than statistical claims—for example, he tells us that “Deaton notes that even the idea that lies at the core of the Enlightenment—knowledge can make us better off—may come as a revelation” to some (i.e., the non-Western) parts of the world. There are two problems with this. First, that is not the “idea that lies at the core of the Enlightenment,” it is in an idea that, in the West, far pre-dated the Enlightenment, as I discuss further below. More to the immediate point, that’s not what Deaton says (since I have a copy of his book, I checked). What Deaton actually says is that people in poor countries are often satisfied with their health, not knowing it can be better. He saying nothing about the Enlightenment, or knowledge in general. Unfortunately, such appeals to authority are common in Pinker’s book (surprising, since appeal to authority has been identified as a basic logical fallacy for millennia), and when the authority is mis-cited, it makes matters worse. (The reader’s suspicion is further exacerbated by Pinker’s frequent habit of not offering page cites, just footnotes to books as a whole, though he does give a page cite to Deaton’s book.)

 Anyway, Pinker next turns to food (Sustenance), where he again talks about the Scientific Revolution (including its modern continuation in Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution) feeding the world, and then tries to claim that it was an accomplishment of the Enlightenment, and failure to feed people as shown by Stalin’s terror famines was because (supposed) Enlightenment values weren’t honored. That’s a stretch. Next is wealth, where Pinker focuses on GDP per capita, showing the takeoff since the Industrial Revolution in the West and more recently in some Asian countries, and the reductions in extreme poverty in other countries that have not experienced the same kind of takeoff.

 Following is Inequality, which Pinker acutely and subtly analyzes (channeling Thomas Sowell in some cases—you can tell that Pinker is, in many areas, broad-minded by the several times he cites Sowell for different propositions, since Sowell is anathema to doctrinaire leftists). Then Environment, noting that other than global warming, the environment is doing just fine and shows every sign of doing better in the future, on every metric. In particular, he notes how resource apocalypses, from Peak Oil to supposed shortages of rare earth elements, are invariably falsified, by technology in general and by hard work enabling us to produce better things with less material. He also covers Peace, updating his earlier book Better Angels, and Safety, noting the declines in homicides and accidents. He quickly dismisses Terrorism as a tempest in a teapot.

 It’s not just material progress that Pinker covers, although that’s the focus. It’s also moral progress—we are, among other things, nicer to people. Less torture, fewer executions, more value assigned to human life and happiness. True enough, but a necessary leg of Pinker’s entire argument is that there was no significant moral progress prior to the Enlightenment, since prior progress would disprove the causation he claims. But prior progress in the West was very great, as anyone with any grasp of history knows. Christianity immediately obviated many of the worst moral behaviors of the Ancient World (variants of which are still common in non-Christian cultures), from infanticide to the Roman practice of starving children to death in sight of a banquet, to distill their organs into love potions that would enhance desire. Christianity further led to the rule of law and was instrumental in the creation of the institutions that made possible the Scientific Revolution. All these moves forward, as Pinker documents while glossing over their cause, led to further moral gains. To hide his embarrassment at these pre-Enlightenment advances, Pinker chants, over and over again, the same trite phrases about “endless religious wars” and repeats boring anecdotes about witchcraft and bearbaiting.

 After these convincing chapters (convincing for their substance, at least), Pinker covers some softer topics, somewhat less successfully. Generally, the less harder-edged and susceptible to statistical analysis the topic, the worse Pinker does in showing that actual progress is being made. In fairness, though, it is true these softer topics, to the extent one agrees they constitute actual progress comparable to that covered in the earlier chapters, are more tied to actual Enlightenment ideas.

 First up is Democracy, which he claims is increasing, but Pinker helps himself over the finish line by defining democracy as basically any good government, one which “threads the needle, exerting just enough force to prevent people from preying on each other without preying on the people itself.” That, along with other definitional broadening from Karl Popper and John Mueller, means that democracy is redefined as any government with the rule of law and some responsiveness to public opinion. But in any case, there’s more democracy, however defined, and that’s Progress. Next is Equal Rights, where Pinker goes full Left, trumpeting all emancipation as good for what ails a society, and all failure to emancipate as evil incarnate (although he seems confused, since what is evil, anyway, to someone who denies the reality of moral abstractions other than utilitarian ones?) He does try to give a scientific gloss to his philosophical attachment to emancipation, ascribing it to more wealth means more people seek self-actualization, and want the same for others. This he then extrapolates to a claim that liberal values are spreading everywhere, with a lot of graphs (though we’re never told what “liberal values” are being measured, but by implication they overlap with “emancipative values”).

 Then Knowledge (we know more, and we’re getting smarter); Quality of Life (we work less and both the necessities and luxuries of life are cheaper); and Happiness (we are happier, largely because we’re richer, though Deaton covers this much better and more subtly). Along with Daniel T. Rodgers, Pinker huffily rejects Robert Putnam and others who point to the atomization of American lives as a problem, with the flip response that “Users of the Internet and social media have more contact with friends” and they “remain as satisfied with the number and quality of their friendships as in the decade of Gerald Ford and Happy Days.” But this is obtuse. Putnam’s claim wasn’t that people didn’t have friends anymore, it was that the intermediary institutions that were the entire basis of the success of any successful, and in particular, the successful American, society had been completely destroyed, resulting in the cascading baleful effects that Tocqueville and Robert Nisbet had earlier identified and feared. Pinker totally fails to make this connection, or more likely deliberately obfuscates it (which is probably why he refers to fears of social atomization as a “hysterical misconception”—that’s protesting too much). Not to mention that Putnam would have told him, too, that the problem was well under way by the time of Gerald Ford, so the 1970s are probably not the best comparison decade to today.

 Finally, Pinker points out that Existential Threats, from Y2K to bioterror, are grossly exaggerated. Sure, we can’t know the future, but on balance, we’re not all likely to wink out of existence next week, or next millennium. Of the supposed threat from artificial intelligence, he says “the scenario makes about as much sense as the worry that since jet planes have surpassed the flying ability of eagles, someday they will swoop out of the sky and seize our cattle.” Ha ha. He’s also heinously sexist. “There is no law of complex systems that says that intelligent agents must turn into ruthless conquistadors. Indeed, we know of one highly advanced form of intelligence that evolved without this defect. They’re called women.”

 I like all this, and agree with much of it (although I could do without the constant references to Mama Cass and the Beatles, reminding me Pinker is stuck, in many ways, in the 1960s). I am mostly a techno-optimist myself. However, Pinker’s greatest technical error, as opposed to failure of vision, is to believe (like Joseph Tainter) that if it can’t be quantified, it doesn’t exist. I’m a quantitative guy, personally—I have an MBA with finance and accounting concentrations from the Booth School of Business, and my wife correctly says I view the world as Neo does in the last scenes of "The Matrix"—as cascading columns of numbers underlying the perceived, but merely surface, reality of things. Certainly, non-quantifiable views of human flourishing are subject to errors of perception, which is probably why Pinker repeatedly excoriates the Romantics. But Pinker is too quick to reject that humans seek transcendence, and all the new flavors of Doritos and life extension in the world isn’t going to change that. “Man shall not live by bread alone.” Pinker is fond of quoting Jesus, always with a sneer, but he does not offer us that truth, because it scares him, since it cannot be quantified.

 But the unquantifiable aspects of progress are a topic too long to get into in this review. Pinker wraps up Progress by talking about its future. He does this by making totally unsupported claims about the origin of Progress. “Since the Enlightenment unfolded in the late 18th century, life expectancy across the world has risen from 30 to 71, and in the more fortunate countries to 81.” “The Enlightenment is working: for two and a half centuries, people have used knowledge to enhance human flourishing.” Therefore, it’s going to continue, don’t you know? No logic is offered, just repetition of the mantra of “knowledge” and trying to tie the Enlightenment to the Scientific Revolution by repeatedly mentioning them in the same breath. It’s not convincing; in fact, it comes across as desperate.

 Embedded within all this proof of progress (for proof is what it is—we can quibble, or call it incomplete, but only a fool would say that material progress since the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution has not been immense), is the truth, difficult for some to accept, that all this progress was caused purely by, and until recently only affected, the West. It is the Western world has gotten better—and finally, after 400 years, some of those benefits have been adopted by others. That’s it. This is not a global phenomenon in cause, and it may not be a global phenomenon in effect, if the inferior cultures of the world, for whatever reason, refuse to accept the gifts offered by the Western Scientific Revolution. Pinker doesn’t make this point, either, though I can see why—it’s inflammatory and distracts from his argument. (He does admit that his first love, the Enlightenment, was a wholly Western phenomenon, a topic he shuffles away from quickly, mumbling about how ideas have no home, which may be true, but they do have a birthplace.)

 [Review continues as first comment.]
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 Morgan Blackledge
 551 reviews 1,857 followers
 June 3, 2018
 If you had to chose a time to be alive, and (here’s the catch) you couldn’t pick what race, sex, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status or nationality you were. You’d be flat wrong if you chose any other time than right fuckin’ now!

 Skeptical?

 Steven Pinker would like to convince you otherwise.

 According to Pinker. Humans (on average) have never had it so good. And he’s got 500(+) pages and 75(+) graphs and charts that illustrate exactly that.

 And quite convincingly so.

 My favorite part is.

 He’s an equal opportunity hate hater.

 Pinker takes aim at both the far left and alt right in an all out data rich blitz attack on the histrionic, anti-intellectual fear-mongering both sides of the American political divide reliably trade in.

 Pinker argues that DJT’s populist uprising was a direct result of these exact misinformation wars.

 According Pinker’s diverse compilation of world health data, beginning in the mid nineties and continuing to the present and foreseeable future, global life spans, individual purchasing power, heath and wellbeing (by a multitude of measures) are all hella on the rise, while violent crime, poverty and disease are on the yard dart (see footnote at end of review) like trajectory nose dive decline.

 That being said, the average ideologue of either flavor very reliably believes that things are going to heck in a hatbox (to put it nicely).

 WTF?

 Pinker posits that precisely this ‘armageddon is upon us’ style sentiment enabled Donald Twitler’s P. T. Barnum style ascent, lending support to the O.G.’s (difficult at this particular historical juncture to deny) assertion that there’s ‘a sucker born ever minute’.

 Pinker invites us all to simply stop watching cable news (the overwhelmingly ‘uge’ beneficiaries of the Trumpster fire none of us can easily take our eyes off of) and have a look at some Good Organized Data (GOD).

 His point is not to inspire pollyannish optimism, but rather to stimulate (i) critical thinking and (ii) a commitment to solving the problems we face rather than trying to scare the undecideds into action, with the unintended, but predictable effect of scarring people into paralysis.

 People of the world: ideology is mental illness. Cable news is for retards. Our best (no only) hope is to figure out what kind of life we all want, and adopt a data driven, rational, naturalistic, pragmatic, realistic approach to getin’ er done.

 In a nutshell, Pinker urges us to recommit to enlightenment ideals e.g. science and humanism, and ditch the bleeding and leading hokum drizzled in snake-oil sauce pumped at us by the 24/7 alternative fact machines on both sides of the ideological sinkhole.

 I LOVE THIS BOOK!!!!!

 FOOT NOTE: for those of you too young to remember yard darts. It was this insanely dangerous lawn game that was comprised of two hula hoops laying on the grass at about 10 yards apart, and these approximately 5-7 pound mettle darts with a heavy sharp end, that you chucked underhanded up in the air and attempted to land in the other persons hoop. The SHUNK sound they made when they pierced the lawn was SO satisfying it defies words. And they were hugely popular in the 70’s. But they were eventually banned because of the (retrospectively obvious but at the time not so much) danger that you could hit your pal in the top of the dome with one of those bad boys and, well, if they didn’t die on impact, it’s all but certain they would be severely brain damaged. It is entirely plausible that the increase in lifespan indicated in Pinker’s research was significantly positively effected by the entirely rational ban of this ridiculously lethal toy.
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 Jillian Doherty
 340 reviews 58 followers
 August 11, 2017
 Ever since Bill Gates tweeted his endorsement for Pinker's Better Angels, fans have rushed to support his writing of big ideas by big thinkers!

 Enlightenment Now illustrates Pinker's practical yet tangible style, but is freshly positive as well. His explosive understanding toward social science and political empathy will appeal to all big thinkers and affirmative readers alike.
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 notgettingenough
 1,015 reviews 1,163 followers
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 January 12, 2019
 I sincerely regret ever thinking anything positive about this man. I already had that figured out when I read my second book by him long ago, but if you'd like a careful appraisal of this latest one try this:

 https://www.opendemocracy.net/transfo...
 haven-t-read-but
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 Maria Espadinha
 1,002 reviews 351 followers
 April 6, 2020
 Progress Where Are Thou?


 “Here's the shocking fact: The world has made fantastic progress on all indicators of human welfare. A second shocking fact: Virtually no one knows this.“

 Bad news are always extremely loud. Just by reading those huge headlines we’ll instantly know how sick is the world we live in!

 On the other hand, good news are usually silent. So silent that a good new is — most of the times — a no new.
 That’s why this book was born — to be the voice of those silent news!

 Surprise, Surprise, Guys:
 The world is turning into a better place and we didn’t even know about it! 😉 😂👍
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 Nika
 116 reviews 115 followers
 March 17, 2022
 3.5 stars

 " The appeal of regressive ideas is perennial, and the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress always has to be made ."

 Steven Pinker focuses on the welfare of humankind and progress that it has made in the last 250 years. The book covers many aspects of progress, such as life expectancy, provision of food, healthcare, access to education and world literacy rates, human rights, the long-term decline of violence against women, the victimization of children, hate crimes, and interstate wars.
 But even if they are not wiped off the face of the earth, they can be reduced further, including violence against women and children, hate crimes, civil war, and homicide.

 Not only has violence declined, but the attitude to it has changed. Today we are much less tolerable towards images containing violence, etc.
 After the end of WWII the world entered the period that has been called the Long Peace, something that most people in the 19th century would have thought improbable.
 After analyzing a large amount of statistical data, Pinker is convinced that the life of a typical modern human being is apriori better than that of a typical man or woman, say, 100 years ago.
 Figures show that life has gotten “longer, healthier, richer, safer, happier, freer, smarter, deeper, and more interesting.”

 Pinker admits that there are some parts of the world where the situation may become and sometimes does become worse, but that’s how global trends work.
 For example, as the data show, world literacy rates have been steadily increasing over the last 50 years. However, in some regions, the indicators have fallen during this period.
 But such contrasting with the overall picture facts do not countermand the positive trend according to which people across societies are becoming more literate and educated.
 Setbacks and periods of stagnation may happen and usually do not negate overall progress.

 Pinker disavows certain myths that are present in our collective consciousness.
 The number of people who consider themselves religious is declining in the modern world.
 Contrary to common belief, the rate of suicides across the world is also on the decline.

 I liked how Pinker commented on contemporary media and its current role in society. They often exploit one of the manifest features of the human brain.
 According to cognitive scientists, we tend to pay more attention to nasty things than to good and happy ones. As a result, hardly anyone speaks of the plunging number of people living in extreme poverty or of increasing literacy rates worldwide.
 Instead, content creators focus mainly on sad events, such as terrorist attacks and the victims of car crashes. We are flooded with catchy headlines promising to inform us of some violent event in one or another part of the world.

 Talking about the growing gap between the rich and the poor, the author does not regard income inequality as a factor that hinders progress. According to him, the fact that the rich are getting rich does not mean that the poor stay poor.

 Certain comparisons look dubious. For ex., his statement that conditions even in the poorest parts of the world are now somewhat similar to those in the rich developed countries 70 years ago.
 At times the author seems to simplify the complex processes that shaped our current world.

 Among the existential threats, Pinker names climate change, but even that could be dealt with given that the world work in concert (well, subjunctive here becomes an imperative).
 One may ask whether it is correct statistics-wise to approximate a large set of data, say from 1300 to our days, as the author does in his charts. One need not be a statistician to suggest that the data available for the year of 1350 must be much less complete than those available for 2015.

 A lot of problems exist today, and problems will always remain. But Enlightenment with its four ideals - reason, science, humanism, and progress - teaches us that most problems are solvable.
 As Pinker himself puts it, progress is demonstrable through figures, but, of course, it does not apply to all. If everyone in the world were touched by progress, it would be a miracle, but progress does not equal miracles. Progress does not mean that everything starts being better for everyone everywhere.
 The positive trends the world enjoys today may be reversed in the future. No one can guarantee constant progress.
 We must continue to apply knowledge to enhance human flourishing.

 Despite some qualifications, Pinker’s ideas sound too optimistic to me. Perhaps, one might say that Pinker is on the bright side of modern intellectual life.
 Not all agree with Pinker’s theories. Some argue that his graphs and statistics are not often reliable. For example, they believe that he gives an unduly optimistic picture concerning famine and other similar measurable indicators. Some think that he focuses too much on developed countries with rich populations.
 My knowledge does not permit me to decide which side is closer to the truth - Pinker or his opponents - but I find at least one of his ideas relevant and helpful.
 He insists on progress and its feasibility. The author proves his point with figures and graphs because he wants to show humanity that its problems could be solved by using knowledge and reason, or at least they could be significantly diminished.
 Pinker warns against the dangers of what he calls thoughtless or fact-free pessimism. If humanity is doomed, as some skeptics tend to believe, why should anyone bother to make an effort to improve the human condition?

 To sum up , almost all measurable elements that define the quality of life, such as sustenance, health, life expectancy, peaceful relations between countries, lowering of crime rates, gender equality, literacy, and the protection of childhood, have been improving over the last decades.
 According to Pinker, these measurements point to socio-economical, political, and moral progress.

 I would like to end this review with the following quote.
 “ Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these .”
 Steven Pinker? Bill Gates?.. Ovid.
 non-fiction
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 Bharath
 547 reviews 424 followers
 January 24, 2021
 The short summary of this book is that despite the considerable negative news we are subjected to every day, life is progressively getting better and for people at large. Though some of the inferences are simplistic and also unreliable, this is an intellectually stimulating book.

 The point Steven Pinker makes is that though some political leaders claim that the situation is deteriorating in terms of prosperity, safety and well-being, that is not really the case. He has a lot of data & references to make his case, including an analysis of news coverage over the years. The coverage we are exposed to is far more negative than in the past decades. He makes the point that capitalism and free markets have created wealth and in turn improved quality of life, health, safety, knowledge and made people happier. The Enlightenment ideals anchored by reason and science are the way forward, and people & nations who pursue that agenda are surging ahead.

 At a broad level, there is not too much to debate with the data or the reasoning which Pinker presents. Quite clearly, global poverty has dipped and living standards have improved. Pinker does concede that aggregates can hide pockets where things have not improved much. The book, however, steers clear of discussing these areas. At one point Pinker suggests a pandemic is very unlikely – after all there is the leap needed from animals to humans – a bet he has clearly lost in the circumstance. Pinker in his narrative also ignores the fact that there is a power structure in the world order which decides who will be heard and who will not. This allows a lot of rulers to stay secure that their military & economic power ensures that they will never be called out for serious censure. Also, though there is a lot of data, not all of it is reliable. Since years, I have read summaries of reports published on human rights, media freedom etc which either rely on poor media coverage or are influenced by powerful sponsors. In many cases, a local school going kid would have provided a more reliable perspective of the countries referenced. I also read the critical essays of Nassim Taleb on the data & analysis Pinker presents. That said, there is not too much which changes in the aggregate picture which Pinker paints though and I see little purpose in quibbling over individual data points. Some of the correlation Pinker suggests around wealth, happiness, religion, science is a stretch, but that scientific temper and reasoning should be held paramount is obviously something most of us would agree with. While the early sections with the data points are important, I actually found the latter sections which debate political alignment, science, etc to be more interesting.

 Things are better than they were say a century ago, yes – and yet that is not a reference point most of us hold day to day. If the world can get so much better with such inconsistent co-operation, groupism among nations and luck, what can it be if nations actually planned for the future to be better collectively?

 While there is quite a bit of the book which I obviously can debate about and some which I do not agree with, these are important matters which actually should find more coverage among the political leadership, academia and many of us. This is a book which substantially elevates the level of discourse, and for that I strongly recommend it for reading.

 My rating: 4.5 / 5.
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 Otis Chandler
 385 reviews 112k followers
 January 8, 2019
 An eye-opening book. I picked this up because I saw the authors TED talk , and then Bill Gates called it the best book he's read in a decade (his review is worth reading)

 The book starts with a premise that many people generally have an impression that the world is full of of serious crises.

 "Magazine covers warn us of coming anarchies, plagues, epidemics, collapses, and so many “crises” (farm, health, retirement, welfare, energy, deficit) that copywriters have had to escalate to the redundant “serious crisis.” Whether or not the world really is getting worse, the nature of news will interact with the nature of cognition to make us think that it is. News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen."

 Basically, we worry a lot. A LOT. We live in dark times (with a scary president), etc. Pinker points out why we worry so much: the news. The news cycle is designed to play on our fears, and thus it is largely negative, focusing on all the bad things that are happening in the world. And we are consuming more news than ever in human history! And if the news focused on all the good things, the ratings would plummet, after all. But one of my favorite lines in the book points out that we would be hard pressed to find negative news if we were covering the last 100 years, instead of the last day.

 "Bad things can happen quickly, but good things aren’t built in a day, and as they unfold, they will be out of sync with the news cycle. The peace researcher John Galtung pointed out that if a newspaper came out once every fifty years, it would not report half a century of celebrity gossip and political scandals. It would report momentous global changes such as the increase in life expectancy."

 And that was the eye opening thing about the book - if you take a long term view, every metric you can find has gotten better. Life expectancy, health, extreme poverty, prosperity, peace, freedom, safety, literacy, leisure, and even happiness - he has chapters and graphs for each of them, showing them vastly improving over the past centuries and usually with most gains in the past century. An interesting point is that most graphs show third world countries only being ~20-30 years behind first world countries, but the shape of the graphs looks the same in terms of the rate of progress. I won't recap all the graphs and numbers, but here is a small example of how life has gotten better.

 "In the mid-19th century it took twenty-five men a full day to harvest and thresh a ton of grain; today one person operating a combine harvester can do it in six minutes."

 This is not to say that there aren't still large problems in all of those areas left to solve. Nor that we haven't created other problems - the book has chapters on some of those, notably climate change and nuclear war - but again there we have actually made progress. For some reason I haven't quite fully fathomed, Pinker and this book have gotten a lot of criticism . I think some of this is from people who object to him saying "the world is great" because there is so much progress left to be made - yet Pinker often admits that in the book. Or from people who think he is measuring progress along the wrong metrics, and we are all headed for an apocalypse. Certainly, there are lots of books about apocalypse , but it's much more pleasant to be an optimist, and believe that as long as we keep applying reason and science and making progress, the world will keep getting better.
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 Amirography
 198 reviews 123 followers
 April 29, 2018
 This book is a sequel to Steven Pinker's other book "The Better Angels of our nature". The "The Better Angels of our nature" is a detailed comparison of violence in history. And how it reduced. The reasons for reduction and existence of these violences was covered.
 But "Enlightenment now" Covers other topics such as health, wealth, knowledge and many more.
 These two books have changed my mind about many of my core beliefs such as anarchism, nuclear energy, and endless other topics.

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 Fadi
 53 reviews 30 followers
 February 24, 2020
 OK, Boomer!
 -----------------------------------------------------
 “Evolutionary thinkers who insist on a moralizing orientation when considering a complex biocultural phenomenon such as religion are not meaningfully advancing their field. But Pinker makes matters worse by compounding ideological bias with historical ignorance.” ~Modernity & Cultural Decline.
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 Ayse_
 155 reviews 71 followers
 July 28, 2018
 Enlightening indeed! Very uplifting reading, especially for pessimists like me. He clearly points out the effect of distorted/exaggerated news, the negative bias of people, dirty politics and the lack of reason behind all the sky-is -falling attitude that seems to dominate communities.

 I have learned so many good facts from this book that helped me view things differently such as the global Cosmopolitanism, 8x increase in number of countries ruled by democracy within the last 50 years, the increased life quality and expectancy.

 He believes in our ability to create solutions and adapt. He pinpoints the evidence that we are evolving to a better vision of ourselves despite the fluctuations that may seem like a step-back at times. Lets hope the carbon emission will be under control soon..AND that the people will trust in science more than their own beliefs and superstitions. (and act accordingly)

 Great book, I am so glad I read it.
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 Ryan Boissonneault
 183 reviews 1,943 followers
 February 17, 2018
 Francis Bacon once said that “some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.” This is one of the few.

 The main thesis of the book is that the enlightenment values of reason, science, and humanism have led to scientific and moral progress and that the embrace of these values will continue the trend. This, as opposed to counter-enlightenment values (religious faith, nationalism, tribalism, relativism, declinism), is the recipe for the maximization of human flourishing and the minimization of human suffering.

 Pinker defends this thesis with massive amounts of data demonstrating that just about every meaningful dimension of human well-being has improved since the Age of Enlightenment. He also describes the drivers of progress and provides highly rational and sometimes unexpected conclusions about a variety of issues including climate change, artificial intelligence, and income inequality.

 The data, ideas, and philosophy in this book are extremely important, but unfortunately, people’s natural aversion to the concept of progress leads to some common objections that I’d like to address.

 Common Objections

 Objection #1: I already know all of this

 No, you don’t, and you almost certainly haven’t read the book if you say this. This massive undertaking examines the progress of human welfare in almost all aspects of life, and covers the most pressing questions about health, income, inequality, violence, safety, democracy, freedom, human rights, knowledge, happiness, climate change, artificial intelligence, and more.

 To claim that you know all of this is the epitome of hubris by suggesting that you already have figured out the best ways to think about and handle the world’s toughest challenges. IF you read the book, you will learn something. Not to mention Pinker is a skilled writer, the content is interesting, and the history of progress is history we should be proud of.

 Objection #2: Bad things still happen so isn’t progress an illusion?

 Pinker never makes the claim that violence, death, disease, suffering, or poverty has or ever will reach zero instances. This is not a book about achieving some kind of utopia. But pointing out specific examples of bad things that still happen does nothing to refute the overall thesis that astronomical progress has been made over the last few centuries since the Enlightenment.

 You can’t measure progress by citing specific examples or anecdotes. For example, the worldwide poverty rate has fallen from 43 percent just in 1990 to 21 percent in 2011. That’s a lot of people that have escaped poverty, and pointing out the people that are still poor says nothing about the trend.

 Pinker uses 70+ graphs and an overwhelming amount of statistics to make his case, so I’m sure if you wanted to you could find something to nitpick at. But you’ll also probably lose sight of the big picture and the more important numbers, trends, and points.

 Also keep in mind that the most troubled parts of the world prove Pinker’s point rather than refute it, as the most violent parts are also the least secular, democratic, literate, educated, and wealthy and embody counter-enlightenment ideals.

 Objection #3: Ok, so material well-being has increased, but the world is in no better shape spiritually. Pinker’s view of the world is materialist and reductionist.

 This objection usually comes from the religiously-inclined. It results from the false assumption that if you’re not religious you’re a reductionist or that you practice “scientism.”

 Science may not be able to determine our values, but philosophy, particularly Enlightenment philosophy, can. With its emphasis on human well-being and flourishing, Enlightenment philosophy sets the agenda to make us healthier, wealthier, wiser, freer, and happier.

 And once we all agree that life is better than death, wealth is better than poverty, and well-being is better than suffering, science can help us get there, which it already has and which is painstakingly documented in this book.

 The conditions for happiness are available to most of the world’s population. And as for higher purpose, plenty of people find great satisfaction in charity work, championing worthwhile social causes, pursuing meaningful work, spending time with friends and family, enjoying culture, traveling, and taking advantage of unprecedented amounts of leisure time. We’re responsible for creating our own meaning and we now have a plethora of choices in how to achieve this.

 Inexplicably, this still leaves some people cold. In the words of Pinker:

 “The idea that the ultimate good is to use knowledge to enhance human welfare leaves people cold. Deep explanations of the universe, the planet, life, the brain? Unless they use magic, we don’t want to believe them! Saving the lives of billions, eradicating disease, feeding the hungry? Bo-ring. People extending their compassion to all of humankind? Not good enough—we want the laws of physics to care about us! Longevity, health, understanding, beauty, freedom, love? There’s got to be more to life than that!”

 Objection #4: It’s naive to think progress will continue.

 Pinker distinguishes between two kinds of optimism. The first is complacency optimism , whereby you expect a positive outcome without extending any effort to influence the outcome. The second is conditional optimism , whereby you directly influence an outcome by identifying problems and proposing solutions.

 Pinker is of the second variety. He admits that progress is by no means guaranteed, but at the same time human history has been defined by its ability to identify and solve problems. This is productive optimism and makes you wonder what the benefit of pessimism is, exactly.
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 Maria Espadinha
 1,002 reviews 351 followers
 September 18, 2019
 Levanta-te e Anda...


 No Humanismo integram-se a solidariedade, a compaixão, a empatia,...
 É o respeito pelo indivíduo como indivíduo e não como membro dum grupo determinado por crenças religiosas, cor da pele, etc, etc,...
 Somos todos humanos e é quanto basta!...

 E sempre que o Humanismo se alia à Ciência, obtemos Progresso.

 Os media tendem a bombardear-nos com o Negativo em detrimento do Positivo, e este livro propõe-se actuar como contra-peso, reunindo factos e estatísticas que comprovam o Progresso como um aqui e agora presente, e não como fantasma dum devir à la longue ...

 “Eis o facto chocante: O mundo conseguiu um progresso fantástico em todos os indicadores do bem-estar humano. Um segundo facto chocante: Praticamente ninguém sabe isto.”

 Animem-se que o Mundo está a melhorar, é a mensagem positiva (e comprovada) que iremos encontrar neste livro!
 A continuar assim, daqui por mais um século ou dois (mais coisa, menos coisa), já a Mafalda poderá contar a toda a gente que o Mundo está curado, e finalmente, com o maior cuidado, chutá-lo para fora do leito!... 😜

 Força nisso, Mundo: Levanta-te e Anda!... 😜
 Cristo já não está cá para dizê-lo, mas legou-nos a sua milagrosa frase 😉
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 Jenna ❤ ❀ ❤
 743 reviews 1,108 followers
 November 1, 2018
 review to come
 cogito-ergo-sum non-fiction science-matters
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 Michael Sebastian
 10 reviews 4 followers
 January 5, 2019
 Steven Pinker's book, Enlightment Now, has a pretty basic premise. Things have gotten better as a whole for humanity in the past century, especially compared to the conditions in which most people lived not that long ago. For some reason though, Pinker not only needs to make the case that life has gotten better, but, because most things are better, everything must be great. A good chunk of this book is spent chastising people that are trying to make the world better for not being "grateful" enough, and downplaying things that are real problems. One of the examples that stood out to me the most was his defense of sweatshop labor, saying: "while working on the factory floor is often referred to as sweatshop labor, it is often better than the grandaddy of all sweatshops working in the field as an agricultural day worker."
 This seemed like an extreme claim to me, so I did a little digging and found this article in the New York Times that talks about this same subject. From the article:

 People who worked in agriculture or market selling earned about as much money as they could have at the factory, often with fewer hours and better conditions. We were amazed: By the end of a year only a third of the people who had landed an industrial job were still employed in the industrial sector at all. It would be easy to see this as the normal trial-and-error of young people starting out careers, but actually the factory jobs carried dangerous risks. Serious injuries and disabilities were nearly double among those who took the factory jobs, rising to 7 percent from about 4 percent. This risk rose with every month they stayed. The people we interviewed told us about exposure to chemical fumes and repetitive stress injuries.

 Quite a different picture than the one given by Pinker in his book. There are definitely positives to a country becoming more industrialized, and I think there is a valid argument to have on the sacrifices that need to be made to get to a point where the society can benefit from that industrialization. But Pinker completely glosses over the real suffering of people in these sweatshops so that he can pretend that the entire process is amazing. This is disingenuous and doesn't help anyone, but when it comes to other issues, like race, he misleads in even more blatant ways:

 "The data suggest that the number of police shootings has decreased, not increased in recent decades, and three independent analyses have found that a black suspect is no more likely than a white suspect to be killed by the police"

 On face value that claim seems absurd, but even the article he cites for this information confirms that what he's saying is wildly misleading: "According to the F.B.I.’s Supplementary Homicide Report, 31.8 percent of people shot by the police were African-American, a proportion more than two and a half times the 13.2 percent of African-Americans in the general population."

 The article goes on to say that this is the case because black people have more encounters with the police. Pinker never mentions that blacks are over represented in police homicide by two and a half times , he only cherry picks what he wants from the article, and discards the part that's inconvenient to the story that he's trying to tell. It's hard for me to imagine that he read that article, and what jumped out to him was "a black suspect is no more likely than a white suspect to be killed by the police" instead of "31.8 percent of people shot by the police were African-American, a proportion more than two and a half times the 13.2 percent of African-Americans in the general population." It's pretty blatant misrepresentation and really made me question all of the other "facts" he put into the book.

 Another argument made in this book is that economic inequality isn't really a problem: "The confusion of inequality with poverty comes straight out of the lump fallacy--the mindset in which wealth is a finite resource... As we just saw, wealth is not like that: since the Industrial Revolution, it has expanded exponentially. That means that when the rich get richer, the poor can get richer, too."

 But the United Nations report on Extreme Poverty in the United States seems to tell a different story. From the report:

 "But its immense wealth and expertise stand in shocking contrast with the conditions in which vast numbers of its citizens live. About 40 million live in poverty, 18.5 million in extreme poverty, and 5.3 million live in Third World conditions of absolute poverty. It has the highest youth poverty rate in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the highest infant mortality rates among comparable OECD States."

 It seems to directly contradict Pinker's assessment that the richest country in the world has the highest youth poverty rate in the OECD. If "when the rich get richer, the poor can get richer, too" then this wouldn't be the case. Aside from the dubiousness of the claim that a rising tide lifts all boats, Pinker doesn't seem to understand the full extent of how inequality damages a society. He thinks that people raising issues about economic inequality see wealth as a finite resource, but he doesn't take the next step and address the fact that power is a finite resource. From the UN report again:

 "What extreme inequality actually signifies is the transfer of economic and political power to a handful of elites who inevitably use it to further their own self-interest, as demonstrated by the situation in various countries around the world."

 There is never any serious conversation in this book about the power the ultra rich have gained over our society. Not only in the private sector, but their ability to influence the democratic sector as well. Pinker has a chapter about democracy as a liberating force in modern society, but ignores some of the fundamental ways it's undermined by the concentration of power in the hands of a few.

 I have more issues with this book, but it would require a lot more text than this to rebut every single claim. There's a pretty good response to his critique of environmentalists here . In terms of "facts", it's hard to trust a lot of the claims that this book makes, and I think someone would be better off doing the research on their own or just reading another book. Some of the stuff in here is blatant misinformation, but a lot of it is just manipulated to match the author's own personal biases. I don't even disagree that the world has gotten better for most people in the past century, but sugar coating it's current problems isn't helping anyone. Not only is it actively standing in the way of people making a better world, but it could push the world into even worse situations if some of these festering problems aren't addressed.
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 Richard
 1,131 reviews 1,006 followers
 October 2, 2018
 Pinker’s latest is getting a lot of press, of course.

 Here are a few links:

 His own synopsis at the Wall Street Journal: The Enlightenment Is Working (paywall; try Googling wsj The Enlightenment Is Working and clicking through from Google, maybe into “private browsing mode”. Works sometimes.)

 Ezra Klein of Vox is a pretty good interviewer, and he hooked up with Pinker at his podcast. I really liked that they both name-dropped Dan Kahan's work at his Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School. Even though Kahan's research has a slightly skewed focus on risk, that he points to "identity-protective cognition" is central how I perceive the tribal partisanship our country is in. The compound adjective is key; many folks now believe that motivated reasoning can create an intrinsic cogntive bias, but far fewer realize how it is typically used: subconsciously, in protection of part of a person's social identity .

 It's also kinda cool that this is now officially Bill Gate's " new favorite book of all time ". I'm ambivalent about Gates. On the negative side, I still despise how Microsoft, under his control, violated so many norms of fair play in pursuit of monopoly. And I know he's just doing that thing that plutocrats always do once making more money seems fruitless: build libraries . Oh, sorry that was the similarly amoral robber baron Andrew Carnegie. Same difference, right? But then I recall that Gates seems to be doing good things (as did Carnegie), while some others use their wealth in ways I mostly dislike. So: ambivalence.


 Will I read it? Dunno. I really liked his Better Angels , but my gut reaction is that his argument is facile: technically correct, but overlooks too much. For example, there's this , which is scary even before that whole identity-protective motivated reasoning thing is added in. Maybe Pinker addresses that, though.

 And frankly, there’s just so much more to read out there. I know I'll be reading How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future before Pinker.

 Update 19-Apr-2018—

 Pinker’s short interview with the Economist was well done, and made me think some about what I think his argument is, and why I think it’s flawed. The crux is this: Pinker is mostly dealing with materialist goals and the progress we are making in meeting them. To that extent, he’s undoubtedly correct. What we learned due to the Enlightenment has done marvels in gradually pulling us into a better future than Pangloss could have imagined (he refers Pangloss in his interview response).

 The problem is that he doesn’t perceive a deeper problem: that the Enlightenment did not provide us with a sense of meaning, purpose, or any hints about how to find them elsewhere (other than “hey, just make up your own!”). I ended my slam of Matt Ridley’s similar (but much more amateurish effort), The Rational Optimist . Here’s the text from that review — if you yank out Ridley and insert Pinker, I strongly suspect my critique of Enlightenment Now would be congruent:
 Materialism

 Ridley points out that humans have evolved into incredibly efficient organisms at solving the problems our paleolithic ancestors faced. Most humans alive today have access to food, health and a length of life that would astonish even our great-grandparents.

 And given how important those things are in our life, I’m also optimistic that we’re going to keep getting better at them. Given the staggering amount of research that’s going on, it would be very surprising if the coming decades don’t provide continuing delights at keeping people healthier and living longer.

 But here’s the problem: when I look around me, most of the people I see are already pretty satisfied on those counts. Sure, it’ll be really sweet when we finally cure cancer, and when we can reliably prevent Alzheimer’s, etc., etc. But the existential threats that drove paleolithic existence aren’t reflected on most folks’ day-to-day anxiety list, are they?

 The upshot of this is a little tricky: if the existential threats present during evolutionary time aren’t what drives us today… what does? Something I think is important to realize is that no matter what the answer is to that question, it isn’t embedded in our nature, at least certainly not in the same way as the old threats. Which means it is a very flexible thing, informed by culture, preference, and contingency. And that means individual and societal choices will vary widely, and might often contradict each other. I can easily imagine some of those drives being cause for pessimism — whether they be growth-for-growth’s sake of the capitalist, or the holy wars of various religious extremists. Those mimetic constructs could, in turn, put a damper on the pollyannaish future presented here.

 Since Ridley merely examines how good we are at meeting the materialistic goals of cavemen, he really never gets it. The pessimism of the post-modern isn’t about Malthusian crises, but about the lack of focused direction for our post-materialist civilization to take.

 Ridley doesn’t see that problem, and his book is fundamentally flawed.
 My complaint has broadened in the eight years since I reviewed that book, because it has been informed by the social crises we face today, especially regarding how social identity in the modern world has become a more salient dividing point between populations, despite the astonishing fact that it is often quite arbitrary. Modernity has a whole host of problems which are becoming ever more germane.

 So now I’m a bit more curious, and might have to read this to see if Pinker even notices that a whole host of new problems face humanity.
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 Ian
 693 reviews 65 followers
 March 3, 2020
 Prof. Pinker points out early in this book that people have a tendency to marshal evidence that confirms their convictions whilst dismissing evidence that contradicts them. I’m as guilty of that as most people, and on the evidence of this book, my own convictions are similar to the author’s. Prof. Pinker’s book largely provides me with reinforcement for my pre-existing opinions and on that basis it’s not surprising I rate it highly.

 A large part of the book is taken up with the author arguing that the ideals of the Enlightenment have led to levels of health, wealth, human rights, peace and security, and all-round happiness that were unimaginable to people in the pre-Enlightenment age. Also part of his argument is an attack on the surprisingly common belief that the world was a better place in the past than it is today. I’ve always felt that rose-tinted views of the past fly in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and overwhelming evidence is what Prof. Pinker provides, with a barrage of statistics and graphs about how the world has changed since the Enlightenment era. I had a few minor quibbles about some of his arguments, but nothing that affected the overall merits of his case.

 Of course, saying that things are far better than they were is not to say that we live in Utopia. Prof. Pinker would be the first to say that the world still faces many problems, and he addresses those that could reverse the gains of modernity. The hoary old chestnuts of resource depletion and “the Population Bomb” are despatched without much ado. He’s completely dismissive of the Elon Musk/Stephen Hawking arguments about the threat of AGI, (which made me feel rather foolish, since on this website I’ve previously written a favourable review of a book which articulates those fears). He does rate climate change and nuclear war as potentially serious threats (though again, if you had asked political commentators in the 1950s or 1960s about the chances of getting to 2018 without nuclear weapons ever being used, most would have rated the chances as close to zero).

 I’m a little less sanguine than Prof. Pinker when it comes to the threats to progress posed by nationalism, populism, political extremism (of the left and right) and religious fanaticism, all of which seem to be on a world-wide upswing at the moment. Prof. Pinker seems to be think that we’re just going through a bit of a bad patch and that it’ll all turn out right in the end. I hope he’s right.

 I had to take my time reading this book, as I had to consider the arguments carefully, and also because I kept stopping to read the references. They’ve given me a few ideas for future reading material. Overall for me this was a 4.5 star rating, but objectively it deserves 5 stars.
 5-star-non-fiction science society
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 Daniel Clausen
 Author 9 books 455 followers
 July 28, 2020
 In many ways, reading this book was similar to reading Pinker's book "Better Angels of our Nature." The theory of the book was straight-forward, the evidence was well-organized, and the insights from the data were presented clearly. The first drawback to reading this book is that it covers a lot of the same ground as "Better Angels of our Nature." The second drawback to this book is that...well, even if the conclusions of this book aren't common sense, to people who are roughly familiar with enlightenment ideals and are fairly well-read on current affairs, it sort of is common sense. That's a nice way of saying that there are few ideas in this book that will leave you awe-struck.

 That's not to see that Pinker isn't capable of writing such a book. I found "The Blank Slate" to be just such a book. That book remains one of my favorite books to this day. That is also the book I point to when I want to convince people what a great thinker Pinker is.

 Pinker's argument is straightforward and comes in the preface: "I will present a different understanding of the world, grounded in fact and inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment: reason, science, humanism, and progress. Enlightenment ideals, I hope to show, are timeless, but they have never been more relevant than they are right now." (page 12).

 If Enlightenment ideas are timeless, then why do they need a defense? Pinker's answer: "The ideals of the Enlightenment are products of human reason, but they always struggle with other strands of human nature: loyalty to tribe, deference to authority, magical thinking, the blaming of misfortune on evildoers" (page 18).

 In many ways, "Enlightenment Now" is similar to "Factfullness" in its use of quantitative data to make the case that life is indeed getting better. Pinker's earlier book "Better Angels of our Nature" was also a book that relied heavily on quantitative data. However, by my recollection, that book did a better job of reflecting on how the numbers were arrived at. I think numeracy is an important skill, and too often it is easy to be wowed by numbers without realizing how they are produced and the difficulty of getting reliable numbers in certain contexts -- for example, the distant past and developing countries. My recollection of "Better Angels" is a few years removed, but I seem to remember Pinker doing a better job with educating readers on how numbers were arrived at. Having said that, I do think the graphs are presented in a useful and simple way. Often, the data comes in the form of time series line charts. I think the repeated use of these kinds of statistics is great for more casual readers who need to be convinced.

 Another drawback to this book is that it tends to ignore and short-change the possibility of cataclysmic blowups. The discussion of the disruptive power of AI is discussed briefly, but pales in seriousness to Yuval Harari's analysis in "21 Lessons for the 21st Century." The benefits of enlightenment are discussed abundantly, but Frankenstein monsters like mortgage-backed securities are barely mentioned. In addition, one of the most important trends of the 21st century, the explosion of debt is barely discussed. The looming debt crisis (or, I should say crises since we are talking about various kinds of debts, government, municipal, shadow banking, and private) as well as other potential crises with systemic implications -- climate change, the growing use of social media, the introduction of disruptive technologies -- are under-discussed in this book. And because these systemic crises are under-discussed, Pinker fails to deal with the mother of all questions about modernity.

 Does modernity increase the risk of catastrophic blow-ups?

 Since nuclear war, climate change, and contagious financial panics are the product in one way or another of modernity, science, and globalization, is there a likelihood that more potentially catastrophic phenomena could be birthed from them? And, if so, what can we do to prevent potential catastrophic blow-ups from occurring?

 Another way to think about the question is this way: In what ways is modern progress like a financial bubble?

 For me, a high point of the book was its discussion of tribal epistemology. I have read short articles on tribal thinking, but the review of the literature here was excellent. And for those who are searching for literature that discusses this topic, the book can make for an effective gateway.

 This was written in the Guardian about this book: "More pertinently, the failed 2016 campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Remain demonstrated that, in the eyes of many people, “progress” simply meant more of the same. When people feel trapped and patronised by progress, then any alternative – even regress – will feel like freedom. Informing them that the policies of the past 40 years are still the best available starts to sound hopeless." (Full review here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/201... )

 Perhaps that's another way of saying that technocratic modernity (complete with its wonky charts) can feel emotionally ungratifying. Instead of gradual improvements and progress by a thousand nudges, there is a part of the soul that yearns for liberation, heroism, and love. People like stories with heroes and villains. Enlightenment often sees the world in terms of mechanical and quasi-mechanical cause and effect relationships. Heroism seems less like heroism when it requires design and system-thinking rather than great sacrifices.

 Nassim Taleb, another writer whose work I admire, steeps his writing in decidedly non-modern ideas and sentiments -- his thinking perhaps is best described as classical and romantic. I believe anyone who reads this book ought to put it in conversation with some of Taleb's writing (one or two books is enough).

 I'm sure each of the authors would hate to hear it, but I'll say it anyway -- they are better read together than separately. The unabashed modernist/enlightenment thinker is better with a classical/romantic counterpart and vice versa.

 I will repeat this: People who are only familiar with Pinker for "Better Angels" and "Enlightenment Now" ought to read his earlier work "Blank Slate." That book, more than his more recent works, demonstrates that he is a true thinker and not simply a chart-jockey or dataphile.

 Overall, even if you do not need to be convinced of the merit of enlightenment ideas and ideals, this is a wonderful book to read.


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Author  9 books505k followers     May 17, 2018   For years, I’ve been saying Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature was the best book I’d read in a decade. If I could recommend just one book for anyone to pick up, that was it. Pinker uses meticulous research to argue that we are living in the most peaceful time in human history. I’d never seen such a clear explanation of progress.I’m going to stop talking up Better Angels so much, because Pinker has managed to top himself. His new book, Enlightenment Now, is even better.  Enlightenment Now takes the approach he uses in Better Angels to track violence throughout history and applies it to 15 different measures of progress (like quality of life, knowledge, and safety). The result is a holistic picture of how and why the world is getting better. It’s like Better Angels on steroids. I read the book slowly since I loved it so much, but I think most people will find it a quick and accessible read. He manages to share a ton of information in a way that’s compelling, memorable, and easy to digest. It opens with an argument in favor of returning to the ideals of the Enlightenment—an era when reason, science, and humanism were touted as the highest virtues. I’m all for more reason, science, and humanism, but what I found most interesting were the 15 chapters exploring each measure of progress. Pinker is at his best when he analyzes historic trends and uses data to put the past into context. I was already familiar with a lot of the information he shares—especially about health and energy—but he understands each subject so deeply that he’s able to articulate his case in a way that feels fresh and new. I love how he’s willing to dive deep into primary data sources and pull out unexpected signs of progress. I tend to point to things like dramatic reductions in poverty and childhood deaths, because I think they’re such a good measure of how we’re doing as a society. Pinker covers those areas, but he also looks at more obscure topics. Here are five of my favorite facts from the book that show how the world is improving:  1. You’re 37 times less likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning than you were at the turn of the century—and that’s not because there are fewer thunderstorms today. It’s because we have better weather prediction capabilities, improved safety education, and more people living in cities.  2. Time spent doing laundry fell from 11.5 hours a week in 1920 to an hour and a half in 2014. This might sound trivial in the grand scheme of progress. But the rise of the washing machine has improved quality of life by freeing up time for people—mostly women—to enjoy other pursuits. That time represents nearly half a day every week that could be used for everything from binge-watching Ozark or reading a book to starting a new business.  3. You’re way less likely to die on the job. Every year, 5,000 people die from occupational accidents in the U.S. But in 1929—when our population was less than two-fifths the size it is today—20,000 people died on the job. People back then viewed deadly workplace accidents as part of the cost of doing business. Today, we know better, and we’ve engineered ways to build things without putting nearly as many lives at risk.  4. The global average IQ score is rising by about 3 IQ points every decade. Kids’ brains are developing more fully thanks to improved nutrition and a cleaner environment. Pinker also credits more analytical thinking in and out of the classroom. Think about how many symbols you interpret every time you check your phone’s home screen or look at a subway map. Our world today encourages abstract thought from a young age, and it’s making us smarter.  5. War is illegal. This idea seems obvious. But before the creation of the United Nations in 1945, no institution had the power to stop countries from going to war with each other. Although there have been some exceptions, the threat of international sanctions and intervention has proven to be an effective deterrent to wars between nations. Pinker also tackles the disconnect between actual progress and the perception of progress—something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. People all over the world are living longer, healthier, and happier lives, so why do so many think things are getting worse? Why do we gloss over positive news stories and fixate on the negative ones? He does a good job explaining why we’re drawn to pessimism and how that instinct influences our approach to the world, although I wish he went more in depth about the psychology (especially since he’s a psychologist by training). The late Hans Rosling explains this more fully in his excellent new book 
  Factfulness
. I agree with Pinker on most areas, but I think he’s a bit too optimistic about artificial intelligence. He’s quick to dismiss the idea of robots overthrowing their human creators. While I don’t think we’re in danger of a Terminator-style scenario, the question underlying that fear—who exactly controls the robots?—is a valid one. We’re not there yet, but at some point, who has AI and who controls it will be an important issue for global institutions to address. The big questions surrounding automation are proof that progress can be a messy, sticky thing—but that doesn’t mean we’re headed in the wrong direction. At the end of Enlightenment Now, Pinker argues that “we will never have a perfect world, and it would be dangerous to seek one. But there is no limit to the betterments we can attain if we continue to apply knowledge to enhance human flourishing." The world is getting better, even if it doesn’t always feel that way. I’m glad we have brilliant thinkers like Steven Pinker to help us see the big picture. Enlightenment Now is not only the best book Pinker’s ever written. It’s my new favorite book of all time.                   Author  2 books662 followers     February 17, 2018   You’ve never had it so good, and Steven Pinker has the stats and charts (over 70!) to prove it. Wars are fewer and less severe, homicides are down, racism is in decline, terrorism is a fading fad, democracy rules, communicable diseases and poverty are on their way out. Life expectancy is up, and police are killing fewer people, both black and white. Even the poor have refrigerators. Inequality is a requisite sign of success. So appreciate the wonderful state of affairs you find yourself in. This is the message of Enlightenment Now, with a title that sounds like a protest placard, but which is actually a survey of the world by the statistics that states collect.We’re so “progressive”, we’re beating back entropy itself. Steven Pinker takes 500 pages to create a world where everything is so fabulously much better than it ever has been, that anyone who says different is perpetuating an intellectual lie. This is why it is your enlightenment. The book is an endless, uplifting editorial. If you’re buying. He’s at his best criticizing politics and science. He shows precisely how our biases prejudice our most thoughtful conclusions, and bemoans the lack of respect for science and the humanities. He says science is presented in some schools as “just another narrative, or myth”. Humanities are in danger of extinction, and they are critical to progress. Pinker has a nice tendency to support his arguments with examples and charts. Unfortunately, he balances this with a tendency to ignore states or countries that don’t conform to his claims, and he swings numbers around to make them look better. He claims when he measures what people consume as opposed to what they earn, the poverty rate in the USA is 3%. So really, everyone is thriving. Even if they’re visibly not.  I fully realize Pinker is untouchable and slated for sainthood, but many things he says don’t add up, and a lot of it is just outrageous on its face. Let him speak for himself: -On war: “Virtually every acre of land that was conquered after 1928 has been returned to the state that lost it.” (Something must have happened in 1927 for him to pick 1928, but he doesn’t say). Where do you even begin to refute this? Kaliningrad? Mauritania? The South China Sea? Crimea? Donbass? Palestine? -He defends the demolition of the middle classes in the West. Yes, a hundred million Americans are worse off. But a billion Chinese are better off. “The tradeoff is worth it,” he says. That the extremely rich got fabulously more rich is fine with him, too.  -On terrorism’s “decline”, Pinker points to recently low numbers of victim deaths to show how safe we really are. He doesn’t mention all the freedom of movement, assembly and privacy we have lost to the terrorists. He’s satisfied they don’t kill that much, and that they will eventually fade away.  -On the mellowing of war: “Weapons don’t come into existence just because they are conceivable or physically possible.” Yes, they do. And worse, everything can be weaponized, from food to mouseclicks. Pinker goes even further, claiming “most historians” don’t think the atomic bombings caused Japan to surrender in three days, but rather it was the potential of Russia turning its attention from west to east. -There is a great deal of nonsense about how much cheaper life is today. The provision of a light indoors would have cost the equivalent of £40,000 in the middle ages (if anyone could read), while today, lights cost fractions of pennies. And 100 years ago it took 1800 hours’ work to afford a refrigerator (among too many more such examples). But Pinker never bothers with the other side of the coin. That today, everyone must spend $150 a month on cable, $125 on phone (after purchasing a phone every two years, with each costing more than the fridge), a $20,000 car, a mortgage, and $50,000 in school debt (none of which were factors in the cost of living in the middle ages ) or be unable to function in society. His endless comparisons are pointless. -He keeps repeating that because even the poor have flush toilets and refrigerators, they are much better off today than ever. He says even the fabulously wealthy Rothschilds didn’t have a washing machine like nearly everyone (80%) now supposedly has.  Pinker dismisses ecology as a pastime of the affluent. The more educated and wealthy we become, the more eco-conscious we become, so everything works out. He completely ignores the fact we have crossed the red line. That the oceans are toxic, that there is trash and plastic everywhere, that the carbon levels are at unseemly record levels. That the Paris Accord has not dented the damage one bit. But, he says, the air over London is no longer purple every day.  The book ends with an interminable bashing of religion, which Pinker considers “intellectually bankrupt”. He cites all the usual contradictions and hypocrisy, narrow-mindedness and longing for a cleaner era that never existed. Basically, religion and enlightenment are oil and water. So you can look at Enlightenment Now in two ways, according to your own various biases. Either the greater message of positivism is too important (and correct) to criticize Pinker’s maddening claims, or the maddening claims make the whole exercise suspect. David Wineberg                   935 reviews556 followers     February 14, 2018   When this book was not boring me it was irritating me. All of the author’s anecdotes I had read elsewhere. Science is good. I don’t need convincing. Vaccines work. Poverty is bad and is getting better throughout the world. Everyone who wants to know this stuff already knows it. Why equate Al Gore with Theodore Kaczynski (The Unabomber) as the author seems to do regarding the environment? Is Fox News really right when they said the poor can’t be poor because they have cell phones and air conditioning today? The author defended that absurdity though he doesn’t mention that Fox used to argue that when Obama was president.  And why did the author make a false equivalence between Bernie Sanders and Trump? Sanders didn’t believe ‘climate change is a Chinese Hoax’, or pick someone in his cabinet who thinks vaccines cause autism, or wanted to build a wall and claim Mexico will pay for it, or feed our hate against Muslims, Browns, Asians or anyone who strikes his fancy for the day even kneeling football players.  This author always seemed to have some pie in the sky anti-humanist post-modernist Strawman he was easily demolishing for some reason I couldn’t figure out. He mentioned the in-gratitude were in the 9th circle of hell and implied Dante had a point and people most of us have never heard of such as Heidegger, Adorno, and Neitzsche, and I think he also mentioned Marcuse belonged there for their in-gratitude. (I’m going to venture a guess, since I didn’t read all of the book: the author doesn’t like ‘identity politics’ and gets bothered by ‘political correctness’ and thinks ‘both sides’ are to blame. I don’t know if that’s where he was going, but I wasn’t going to find out by wading thru a familiar story I’ve read better told in other books). The author is completely out of his depth on economics and inequality. I suggest you read Piketty’s book instead of this author’s poorly constructed deconstruction of Piketty’s wonderful book, and then tell me again why inequality is not real or not a big deal! His Enlightenment and Romanticism knowledge seemed superficial. Of the 8 or so Voltaire quips he provided, I had heard them all elsewhere.  I stopped this book after 5 hours. I got my credit back from Audible. I seldom do that. This author was teaching me nothing I didn’t already know, and worse than that seemed to have a disregard for the truth by trying to defend his own thesis beyond what the facts would take a reasonable person.                   733 reviews3,397 followers     April 23, 2020   This concoction and Roslings´ similar „Go on, everything is super.“ Factfulness were the reasons for me to leave the soft space of some humanities that are nothing more than appeasement, belittlement, and deception. A mix of different quotes from the book and thoughts and impressions I had while consuming this fairytale. Some points might be redundant, sorry for that, but this is what happens when taking notes about a book that is nonsense:  1.	He´s attacking the ones who aren´t grateful, says everything is fine, takes the premise that because some things became better everything is great, based on unbearable pseudoscience. 2.	Hey, what about talking just about the positive things and avoiding anything negative or controversial?3.	Of course, there is only the great Western way of living, capitalism ineluctably always leads to the best society in the world.4.	If some things have become better thanks to technology in the last hundred years, there is of course everything great and no more problems with anything. 5.	Wait a moment, what exactly is Pinkers´ legitimation to talk about those topics, he must be an expert, maybe a unique ingenious polymath, in many different fields to make serious prognosis, not just assumptions, no even certainties about the whole society and the future? Oh yes, he is a linguist and cognitive psychologist that wrote some good works in his field and thought after that: „Hm, why not write some happy go lucky books based on nothing except what media, government, and the economy want me to highlight to boost my sales.“6.	One of the funniest things about such books is that they are close to impossible to suss if one has not read some progressive, alternative literature in contrast to what is permanently repeated in mainstream media and science.7.	Sweatshops aren´t that bad.8.	Capitalism already solved and will solve the few, little problems it created. Sure, a problem repairs the problems it creates instead of creating greater problems.9.	He finds the fact that people call humans under the current economic system a malady to the planet evil, discriminating, hateful, and wrong, although it´s the truth.10.	He is biased, does the ultimate replication crisis demonstration.11.	Philosophical, out of context, bla yada drivel that isn´t even close to the real philosophers, but fine tuned and modified to fit to the agenda and dogma of this book.12.	„Peak car“. Why, show me the extrapolations.13.	He ignores so much hard based science that doesn´t fit to the conclusions he wants that it´s hard to endure.14.	He states that richer states have less environmental pollutions and get cleaner. So let´s go jogging in an industrial center and go swimming in the local lake afterward. Who survives can pick some berries and vegetables grown outdoors and will be gone soon too. 15.	He compares the environmental protection movement with extremists, calling it „misanthropic environmentalism“. He does as if the wide consense about habitat destruction and the sixth extinction doesn´t exist and compares it to pessimistic people who spread viral fake news ideas.16.	He loves to use those techniques:17.	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaga... 18.	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychol... 19.	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_m... 20.	He praises science, knowledge, wisdom, creativity, intelligence as wordy as possible while being an ignorant apologist for the perfect, current system, ignoring and attacking any other opinion than his own.21.	His arrogance, joviality, condescension, and belittlement in his writing and in interviews are disgusting.22.	There is no problem with distributive justice, everything is fine because so many people aren´t extremely poor anymore, but now just poor or close to poverty.23.	He talks about ideas, concepts, humanities, avoiding anything substantial, profound, and hard science-based.24.	He and Rosling have the same concept: „Look, stupid people of the world, here is the manipulated data you are too dumb to understand in the way I want you to understand it, so let me explain it you while warmongering and hate trolling against anything that doesn´t confirm my opinion.“25.	He keeps repeating general knowledge about many things that have improved, stating that it will continue to get better. 26.	He picks any person, anecdote, or fact out of context to mostly demonstrate a pro capitalistic world-view. 27.	He knows everything about the climate, he is a weather God. Nobody else, thousands of scientists aren´t sure what will happen with climate change, global warming, how earths´ systems and the sun really function, and how bad it will become, but Pinker knows that everything will be fine now, in 100 years, always and forever. The sun always tells him how it will shine. 28.	„Combat poverty instead of reducing inequality.“ Of course, give a man a fish a day instead of showing him how to angle or allowing him at least to fish, but the lake and the sea are privatized, sorry. Give tiny parts of wealth to the poor instead of changing a dysfunctional system.29.	Overconsumption and consumerism are absolutely no problems, we should just reduce the environmental damage it does by…magic and positive thinking and not listening to the lies those pesky pessimists are telling.30.	In this so called age of new enlightenment anything progressive, alternative, or different of the dogmas is deemed a conspiracy theory. He got me, I also never quote or show the hard facts, links, I am inventing any review because the secret reptilian overlords are telling me to do it, I am completely bonkers because I am a dirty leftist inventing conspiracy theories about military industrial complexes and post democracy and you don´t want to know what else, it´s terrible for the kids.31.	The compulsion to have a positive mentality of being mindful, calm, meditating, and not negative and pessimistic. Forced happiness without reason and logic.32.	Much talk about the sock puppets of politics he doesn´t like, no meta analysis or mentioning of the puppetmasters or politicians he likes.33.	Extremism is caused by a power vacuum of disinterest in politics and the ideals that made democracy so great and it´s the peoples´ fault who are used to this and don´t appreciate it and has nothing to do with the system.34.	He calls marxism a pseudo fringe science. Oh wait, and of course, because of this socialism is pseudo too and capitalism is based on hard science or what? 35.	He doesn´t understand that faith and dictatorships that were criticized by the thinkers of the true enlightenment have been turned in our economic system that does exactly the same, but more perfidious and mendacious. And that he´s actively attacking and denying the thesis of the ones who work for a new enlightenment.36.	Truth can´t be constructed. Wait, why do you do it yourself Mr Pinker, if it´s impossible?37.	He uses data, sources, graphs, statistics out of context or out of unscientific sources, sometimes relating to just one article, book, study, that is highly controversial.38.	He bashes anything left or progressive in science, education, and universities, but doesn´t mention the overwhelming right-conservative majority in politics, governments, and economics with a single word.39.	Black people are not more likely to be shot by police than white people in the US.40.	He is great at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular....41.	The evil news media are always hyping about crises and problems that don´t really exist.42.	He says that there is far less violence (for privileged people in rich states and rich people in poor countries), but he should ask a prison inmate, the impoverished population of Western countries or the poor majority of the worlds´ population in Afrika, Asia, and Latin Amerika. I am sure that they are enthusiastic about the fact that there are fewer wars driven by political and economic interests of wealthy nations and they now just have to deal with crime, starvation, illness, extreme poverty and violence, and very low life expectancy. Oh, and of course with the regular financial crisis, land grabbing, and trade wars fought on and for their territory.43.	„The rate of extinctions has been reduced by 75 %.“ What, I thought the contrary was the case and that we don´t even know how many species we exterminate on a daily basis because we don´t know how many exist.44.	Osama bin Laden owned a copy of a Chomsky book. So left, socialist, ecosocial is the devil, don´t you understand?45.	Progressivism, activism, scientific results he doesn´t like, are described as useless. 46.	He is switching his opinions, saying that something is bad if it´s a point he doesn´t like, changing to great about the same thing, institution, philosophical concept, science, if it´s something he likes, mixing it with psychobabble and worst bad pseudo fringe science lying with statistics stuff. And he doesn´t even seem to recognize that he is contradicting himself because the book is a collection of such inconsistencies, it´s not even logical drivel.47.	He is not even mentioning that some of his crude theories could be wrong, as any good scientist I´ve read does in humility and self- criticism, instead, he deems himself all knowing and is vilifying any opposition, using subtle hate speech. It´s so bizarre because of the combination of points I´ve already mentioned: He is no specialist in any of the fields the talks about and it would need a few of them to draw a realistic and objective picture. Or at least an author who does his research and combines all points to an objective overview. Instead, he believes to reach god mode by combining cherrypicking, mentioned replication crisis, wrong attacks against anyone saying he is wrong, integrating anectotism instead of long-time data, and mixing it up to a numbing phantasmagoria of an idyllic world that is, in reality, breaking in pieces.  What shocks me the most and what is the worst thing a scientist can do, is that he integrates this hallucinations in the minds of intelligent, literate, educated people who infect others with this viral garbage, so that they stop activism and avoid progressive, alternative thinking and real, productive contentions about the topic, instead telling each other how great Pinker is and which of his amazing, brilliant ideas they find most astonishing. Possibly they should combine it with Roslings´ pseudo Factfulness for the full dosage of brainwashing and leave reality forever. It´s sad that Pinker started as a real scientist with his first books and switched to writing disinformation nonsense with „The better angels of our nature“, that seems so follow the same pattern of empty yada bla gossip. He quickly got richer, but lost his reputation forever. Alternative economists and political scientists with ideas that could really change the world aren´t read because of stuff like this.  Continued in the comments, because there is no space left here.     facepalm-trash-bin               1,921 reviews290k followers     July 3, 2018   Steven Pinker makes a strong argument for enlightenment principles and, essentially, not giving up on the world because Donald Trump is president. We are not, contrary to popular belief, going backwards, and have in fact made astounding progress in all measurable areas, such as wealth, health, safety, education and equality.Faced with the numbers, it's hard to disagree, though I went into this fairly convinced already. We do not, by any measure, live in a great world, but we do live in a better world than we did fifty, one hundred, one thousand years ago. Pinker presents this information, using charts and tables, in this extensively-researched book. However, some of his claims are not really backed up by the evidence, either because he uses limited sources or engages in some avoiding the issue fallacies. The lengthy breakdown of how much things cost compared to how much they cost in, say, the Middle Ages, is irrelevant to the discussion of wealth because Pinker doesn't consider new kinds of expenses - mortgages, insurance, electric, gas and phone bills (etc.).  I also looked up a couple of the references he uses and now I'm skeptical about the others.  One example I checked on was his source for the claim that black people are no more likely to be shot by police than white people in America. Obviously, this is a hot topic and a controversial claim to make. His single source for such a bold claim - here - actually found that black people were more likely to be shot by police than white people, but offered an opinion as to why this might be. Other pieces disagree. He arrives at a number of these grand conclusions based on a single article, which is often an opinion piece. He cherry-picks information to suit his argument and relies on the unlikelihood that anyone will go check his sources.  It's a shame, to be honest, because I think the central argument is a strong one: that we are indeed making progress. There's a whole lot to suggest that the world isn't going to hell in a handbasket. But Pinker actually risks fuelling a bleak opposite of societal pessimism. While I don't disagree that we are faced with a lot of doom-foreshadowing news stories, there is also an ever-growing misconception that inequality is over. That our society is colourblind and that women are now treated no different to men. Pinker's distortion of facts often supports this theory and it is incorrect. Things are, overall, getting better, but over-exaggerating the extent to which improvements have been made does not help anyone. Well, other than making rich white men feel better about the state of the world they rule over.  Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Youtube      2018 nonfiction               801 reviews2,502 followers     September 7, 2018   A few months ago, I heard Steven Pinker give a talk about this book. I must say that his speaking skill did not impress me. However, his writing skill is brilliant. This is a very important book--epic in scope, comprehensive, well thought-out and structured, incredibly well researched, and full of some very important messages.The book begins with a student's question "Why should I live?" To which Pinker answers with a profound interpretation of the "meaning of life". I won't repeat his complete answer, but he writes,   [You have] the ability to like, love, respect, help and show kindness--and you can enjoy the gift of mutual benevolence with friends, family, and colleagues ... You can foster the welfare of other sentient beings by enhancing life, health, knowledge, freedom, abundance, safety, beauty, and peace. Pinker writes that the Enlightenment helped us escape from superstition and ignorance. It increased our understanding of ourselves through science. Also, Humanism is a secular foundation for morality. And, it is individuals who are sentient, not the tribe. The Enlightenment helped to abolish cruel punishments and slavery. Also, Humanism helped bring about an increase in peace.The Enlightenment has helped to eradicate some terrible diseases. Science is the most unambiguous achievement by mankind. Science helped to eradicate smallpox, a painful and disfiguring disease that killed 300 million people in the 20th century. And, we have forgotten that on April 12, 1955, "people observed moments of silence, rang bells, honked horns, ... took the day off, closed schools, ... and forgave enemies." That was the day that Jonas Salk's polio vaccine was declared to be safe.  Pinker extols the virtues of genetic engineering, that can accomplish in days what farmers accomplished over millennia, and what Norman Borlaug took years of "mind-warping tedium" to accomplish. Hundreds of studies, every major health and science organization, and over a hundred Nobel laureates have testified to the safety of transgenic crops. Nevertheless, some traditional environment groups persist in denying them to the world. I just loved this quote from the book:  In 1976, Mao single-handedly and dramatically changed the direction of global poverty with one simple act: he died. Pinker devotes chapters to improvements in the environment, and the problem of climate change. He shows that there is virtually no dissension among scientists that climate change, and specifically global warming, is a significant problem. However, he is optimistic that these issues can, in principle be solved by courageous governmental action. The book describes the growth of democracy around the world--not steadily, but in waves. Democratic countries have higher rates of economic growth, fewer wars and genocides, better-educated citizens, and almost no famines. The best reason for democracy, stated by Karl Popper, is that it is a solution to the problem of how to dismiss bad leadership without bloodshed. And, it gives people the freedom to complain. Pinker shows how disbelief in human-caused climate change is not correlated with scientific illiteracy, but is due to allegiance to values held by one's social circle. Political tribalism is decried as the most insidious form of irrationality today. And this tribalism exists on the left and the right sides of the political spectrum. Pinker writes,  American conservative politics has become steadily more know-nothing, from Ronald Reagan to Dan Quayle to George W. Bush to Sarah Palin to Donald Trump. Pinker lists all of the ways in which President Trump has resisted progress, and backtracks to a less advanced way of life: Reversal of health care, reversal of globalism, reversal in the growth of wealth, reversal of the environment, safety, law and order, international trade, equal rights, tolerance, and the judicial system. The president has all the hallmarks of a dictator; he is impulsive and vindictive. The last chapter of the book is about humanism; the chapter starts out well, but then briefly becomes too philosophical and abstract for my taste. Then the chapter returns to a more accessible, concrete structure. It becomes obvious that Pinker is an atheist. He writes that the "existence of the God of scripture is a perfectly testable scientific hypothesis." And, he list some experiments that could be performed to test the hypothesis. He also shows how the religiosity of nations, and even from region-to-region within the United States, is inversely related to happiness and well being. The United States, being more religious on the whole than West European countries, has higher homicide rates, abortion, STD's, child mortality, obesity, educational mediocrity, and premature deaths. And, Pinker points out that non-religious people in the U.S. tend not to vote--that helps explain why we have Trump in office today. This is such a fascinating book; it takes up arguments where his earlier book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined leaves off. This is the seventh book that I have read by Steven Pinker--and this one is just as wonderful as his previous books.     ethics evolution history               685 reviews91 followers     November 15, 2018   A paean to the status quo that can be summarized in four words: ‘don’t worry, be happy’. (Actually five words, as one is contracted). This book will no doubt earn the author a lanyard to every corporate boardroom and conservative think tank in the country.His thesis is that Enlightenment principles must be defended – but not against mindless consumerism, not against the growing disparities of wealth, not against the disruption of earth systems. No, the Enlightenment must be defended against The Strawman.  The author lets the cat out early in the book: “Intellectuals hate progress” [p.39]. Later, Pinker says: “An axiom of progressive opinion, especially in universities, is that we continue to live in a deeply racist, sexist, and homophobic society – which would imply that progressivism is a waste of time, having accomplished nothing at decades of struggle” (p.215). Did your jaw just drop, too? This is a recurring theme in the book – binary positions. If you feel that we have a ways to go regarding bigotry, then you are just not appreciative enough of the gains: intellectuals and progressives are anti-Enlightenment. Just five pages later, he says that “heightened concern … is not futile moralizing but has brought measurable progress – which means that continuing this concern can lead to greater progress still” (p.220). Yes, the idea of progressive thinking is that maintaining a heightened level of concern can motivate greater gains towards Enlightenment ideals – unless, that is, you are an 'intellectual' who, when maintaining a heightened level of concern, is just being unappreciative of the meaty bone the status quo has already thrown you. Pinker says “police shoot too many people, but it’s not primarily a racial issue”. I wonder if the number of people who are shot with their empty hands in the air is a racial issue - maybe a nice chart on that one would be interesting. Maybe he should interview groups of people who live in fear of the police – of being carded while walking, of being stopped on the road because of their appearance. In his effort to make all of his graphs show diminishing bads over time, he has to fudge GHG emissions to show GHG emissions / GDP. This is a favourite trick of those who wish to delay any meaningful efforts to face climate change – the atmosphere doesn't care how many goods and services an economy creates. Emissions are continuing to increase as our economy expands. Diluting this value with a GDP measure of ‘dematerialized’ services is more of an indicator of what public and personal work has been devoured by The Market than anything to do with emissions. In plain words, it is disingenuous. Probably the most distressing aspect of this book is Pinker’s unwillingness to engage in a meaningful critique of left intellectuals who he seems to despise. His references to them involve either gross, dog-whistle caricatures, the butt of a Russian peasant joke, or a cheap pot shot – Osama Bin Laden owned a copy of a book by Noam Chomsky … really?! Who cares?  And then he misrepresents Deconstruction and post-modernism as the heartbeat of anti-Enlightenment thought, heirs of the anti-rational Romantic thinkers of the past. Any ‘intellectual’ who explores truth-making (like the Continental philosophers) or challenges the big, empty narratives around freedom, truth, right, etc. becomes anti-rational. Then Pinker unloads the big cliché that you can’t make a rational statement about ‘truth’ being socially constructed, which to Pinker means that what is meant is that there is no truth (binary thinking again), and therefore anti-rational – for a page or two he dances around the logical impossibility of making a rational statement about an anti-rationalist position … as if anyone really holds this position. But when it comes to his tribe, he says in italics: “no Enlightenment thinker ever claimed that humans were consistently rational”. It’s surprising that author could not see that this sentiment cuts both ways? Eg. ‘no postmodernist thinker ever claimed that humans were consistently irrational’ …  “The left, too, has missed the boat in its contempt for the market and its romance with Marxism.” What does this even mean? What ‘Marxism’ – the critique of capital? I think this is most revealing, as Pinker dodges any reference to capitalism, or more accurately, a critique of capitalism. The ‘romance with Marxism’ is a sign of Enlightenment principles at work, as opposed to a dogmatic adherence to Capitalism as the best system in the past, and by extrapolation the best system forever. In addition to this bias, Pinker is quick to point out what he considers bad about ‘communist or leftist’ governments, without evaluating their successes and failures on the same principled measures as he applies throughout the book: for example, rather than a chauvinistic dismissal of Venezuela under Chavez, measure his gains or failures in child mortality, longevity, homicides, poverty, literacy and so on. He critiques the numbers of ‘left-intellectuals’ in the academy – a place where ambiguity, honest analysis, and critique is fostered – but doesn’t conduct a similar survey of the ratio of left-to-right thinkers in positions of power - in public office or corporate boardrooms, not to mention the academy.  Later, during his analysis of Islam, he quotes ‘ex-Muslim activist Sarah Haider’ who says: “'Religions are just ideas and don’t have rights.' Criticizing the ideas of Islam is no more bigoted than criticizing the ideas of neoliberalism or the Republican Party Platform” (p.442). I wonder if he feels this way about other, non-Muslim, faith-based states in the region – replace ‘Islam’ with another faith and I wonder what sort of reception his book would have received. I could go on and on, as every page packs a groaner. Overall, Pinker loses the gist of his thesis in a stew of gross generalizations and what I would consider a contempt for the Enlightenment project as it relates to preserving open discussion of ideals and efforts against the reification of power-structures and narratives that hinder progress. Has humanity come a long way? Sure – who really doubts that? Do we have more work to do? Yes we do – but you wouldn’t feel any urgency to do so from this book. Pinker says: “Instead, their reputations hinge on their ability to entertain, titillate, or shock; on their ability to instill confidence or fear (in the hopes that a prophecy might be self-fulfilling or self-defeating); and on their skill in galvanizing a coalition and celebrating its virtue.” I would say this is a good description of the author of Enlightenment Now. Just to be clear: I didn't like this book.                   429 reviews1,336 followers     March 26, 2018   Everyone should read Enlightenment Now. It seems odd to require a defense of reason, science, humanism and progress, but we suffer if we do not understand how far humanity has come by application of these principles. Steven Pinker has done us the favor of chronicling that progress, with data, in a compellingly written volume that challenges common assumptions. The news cycle and many prominent intellectuals would have us think that the world is becoming a darker, scarier place; yet the opposite is true. While pessimism makes for good news coverage and stokes political fires, denying progress causes us to mistrust the systems we've put in place. Combine that mistrust with a lack of understanding of WHY we put those systems in place, and you get setbacks like a Trump presidency, a burgeoning flat earther movement, and anti-vaccine advocacy. Acknowledging humanity's successes is not foolishly optimistic or defeatist; rather, it should inspire us to work toward an even better future, because we know our efforts will not be in vain. This is not a Panglossian "best of all possible worlds"; rather, it is ackowledgement that we live in the best world... SO FAR. A quote from Barack Obama summarizes this view: "If you had to choose a moment in history to be born, and you did not know ahead of time who you would be - you didn't know whether you were going to be born into a wealthy family or a poor family, what country you'd be born in, whether you were going to be a man or a woman - if you had to choose blindly what moment you'd want to be born, you'd choose now."This account of progress plays out on a variety of quantifiable measures, and it's not just good news for denizens of first world countries. Pinker is careful to tease apart the trends that typically begin in developed countries and then spread globally. Average life expectancy worldwide was stalled at 30 years until the late 1800s, but has now skyrocketed to 71. Child mortality has plummeted. "For an American woman, being pregnant a century ago was almost as dangerous as having breast cancer today." Infectious diseases are being driven to extinction (and many already have). Caloric intake has increased across the world, even as population continues to grow, to the point that in many countries the poorest people are over-fed rather than under-fed. Undernourishment is fast becoming a thing of the past, and famines are now incredibly rare and lack the destructive potential of their predecessors even a century ago. All people are becoming, on average, wealthier (wealth inequality is a separate topic that is also addressed, but the trend is still positive across the world), and have more disposable income and opportunities to learn and travel. Literacy has grown, and with it IQ. Work hours have decreased, and child labor is in steep decline. Violence and death are down across almost every single measure (as Pinker detailed in another book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and expands on here). Representative government has spread to a majority of the world's countries and individuals. These improvements, surprisingly, also play out in sustainability (a chapter in particular that challenged many of my assumptions), energy use, pollution, and population growth. Pinker is no Pollyana: he does carefully address some of our most pressing problems, namely climate change and the threat of nuclear war. Even for these serious quandaries, he provides cause for optimism and some potential answers. All these charts and trends have ragged trajectories that dip and rise along their paths. None of these improvements come all-at-once or unceasingly. As Pinker says, that would be magic... and science isn't magic. There are reasons for these improvements - and those reasons can be applied to solving new problems. Pinker also unpacks the importance of appealing to reason, the power of scientific thinking, and a basis for secular morality that transcends religious identity. He identifies and argues against the worldviews that oppose the ideals of the Enlightenment. This is a long book, but it is important, timely, and a delight to read.                   141 reviews50 followers     February 23, 2018   In his newest book, (Neoliberalism) Now: The Case for (Positivism), Scien(tism), (Atheism), and (Globalization), Steven Pinker seeks to cash in on the Trump election by rushing out what is mostly a rehash of material from his previous book, The Better Angels of Our Nature. His method of reasoning and tone of argument seeks to preach to the choir rather than persuade the unaffiliated. Unlike his classic works, The Blank Slate and The Sense of Style, this book will not be something we return to decades from now, except as a time capsule into the conventional wisdom of Economist-reading Davos attendees during the early 21st century. The book is divided into three parts:  Part I: This would make a great TedTalk.   Part II: Where it doesn't lift entire sections from Better Angels, this is Pinker's longwinded literature review of the work of economic historians. If you are interested in learning about humanity's recent exponential growth in material wellbeing, there are much better books on the subject that I highly recommend to you instead, such as Bourgeois Dignity, The Rational Optimist, The Ultimate Resource, or The Skeptical Environmentalist.  Part III: Pinker uses pop psychology to pathologize anyone who disagrees with him politically. (He strangely criticizes social science departments for lacking ideological diversity only a few pages after having relied on the studies produced by these same departments to smugly dismiss opposing viewpoints.) Pinker's key syllogism appears to be that "If you're not a global citizen who completely prioritizes humanity's material wellbeing over the interests of your community or country, then you're a benighted bigot, as whatever maximizes global utility is progress." Pinker's strawman of what constitutes "progress" (who isn't in favor of progress?) allows him to avoid having to seriously contend with the core anxieties about the pace of globalization that underlie populist movements on the left and right. For example, his chapter about rising economic inequality has an elephant-shaped graph showing how globalization has occurred at the expense of people in developed nations who lack college degrees. This fact suggests a rational basis for Sanders and Trump supporters to intuit that the idea of "a common market, with open markets and open borders" may have reached the point of diminishing returns. Pinker does not have a rejoinder to the arguments of cultural pessimists like Charles Murray other than that governments should further expand the welfare state to compensate the losers from free trade. Pinker's hoped-for future where the majority of Americans are living on the dole, mollified by painkillers and online entertainment, is not "progress," no matter what Pinker and other technophiles may think.                   411 reviews4,359 followers     March 13, 2018   Tudo o que esperava e um pouco mais. O livro é uma continuação do Os Anjos Bons da Nossa Natureza: Por Que a Violência Diminuiu, onde o Pinker escreve porque a humanidade está progredindo em quase todos os sentidos, apesar de termos a impressão do contrário.Para alguém como eu, que não tem a menor bagagem filosófica, esta obra foi excelente. Pinker explica muito bem o que foi o Iluminismo (na interpretação dele) e porque o humanismo foi tão importante para mudarmos conceitos éticos, políticos e culturais. Na argumentação dele, ainda estamos surfando as mudanças trazidas pelo humanismo e os métodos nos quais ele passa a se basear (como a ciência). E o livro traz uma discussão sobre todo tipo de índice de desenvolvimento, econômico, de saúde, de violência, de educação, etc. para mostrar que esse é o caso. Grande parte do miolo do livro funciona como uma repetição do Os Anjos Bons da Nossa Natureza que, na minha opinião, dispensa a leitura do livro anterior. Traz também avanços em democracia, saúde, ambiente e desigualdade que não lembro muito de aparecerem no livro anterior. Se você não leu Anjos Bons, parta direto para este que traz uma lição mais abrangente e mais bem argumentada, ainda que menos detalhada, sobre como a humanidade está avançando a passos cada vez mais rápidos. O destaque para mim ficou com a parte 3 onde ele combina ciência, razão e conhecimento para argumentar por onde poderíamos caminhar para avançar ainda mais rápido. É a área que ele mais domina e traz contribuições que achei muito mais pertinentes do que autores mais ligados à humanidades que já li.  É uma das obras que coloco como recomendadíssimas para qualquer um. Sapiens me explicou muito bem como chegamos aqui, Homo Deus para onde vamos. Este livro me explicou muito bem onde estamos.                   653 reviews6,927 followers     January 22, 2021   Single Quote Counter-Review: Science tells us how to heal and how to kill; it reduces the death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war; but only wisdom—desire coordinated in the light of all experience—can tell us when to heal and when to kill.~ Will Durant   
     big-data conservative history               488 reviews677 followers     February 16, 2018   As with Steven Pinker’s earlier "The Better Angels of Our Nature," of which this is really an expansion and elucidation, I was frustrated by this book. On the one hand, Pinker is an able thinker and clear writer, free of much of the ideological cant and distortions of vision that today accompany most writing about society (for society is what this book is about), and he is mostly not afraid to follow his reasoning to its conclusions. His data on human progress is voluminous, persuasive, and extremely interesting. On the other hand, Pinker regularly makes gross errors about history, some of little import, but some that undermine the entire thesis of his book—which is that that the Enlightenment is the sole cause of the human progress he illustrates.I like Pinker for his clarity of mind. And since I have been reading a steady diet of books whose central claim is that the Enlightenment was a mistake, and moreover I am personally enamored of Reaction, the idea of creating a new thing by reference to the old, it is only fair that I consider the opposite ideas presented as well as possible. Moreover, this book claims to answer exactly a current question of mine—is the material marvel that is the modern world the child of the Enlightenment? I was not disappointed; this book is just what the doctor ordered, at least to clarify my own thoughts, though probably not with the result Pinker intended. He wants to prove the Enlightenment is responsible for everything that is good in the modern world, and every good thing that will be in the future, but he ends up, for the most part, refuting himself on all his key claims. Still, the ride is interesting enough and that alone makes his book worth reading. On the second page of his book, Pinker enunciates the core of his argument, by referring to “the Enlightenment principle that we can apply reason and sympathy to enhance human flourishing.” The next sentence, by implication, defines the Enlightenment further as “the ideals of reason, science, humanism, and progress.” The following paragraph says the Enlightenment is “also called humanism, the open society, and cosmopolitan or classical liberalism.” All this creates a somewhat confused definition, but once you read the whole book, it’s evident that to Pinker, the middle sentence is the key—the Enlightenment consists in the primacy to human societies of “reason, science, humanism, and progress.” His book revolves around these four concepts, and we will return to each of these concepts in turn. Pinker divides his book into three parts. The first, shortest, part expands on what Pinker means by “the Enlightenment.” Here, Pinker begins by turning to the driver of all the progress that he details at great length later in the book, namely, the Scientific Revolution. “The Enlightenment is conventionally placed in the last two-thirds of the 18th century, though it flowed out of the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Reason in the 17th century.” Given that the term “Age of Reason” is only used in one other place in this book, at the very end in a similar context, while the terms “Enlightenment” and “Scientific Revolution” are used continuously, it seems fair to conclude that Pinker believes that the Scientific Revolution (actually beginning in the 1500s, and possibly earlier, not “in the 17th century”) was the necessary first step that combined with the Enlightenment to produce the benefits of the modern world. Pinker reinforces this conclusion by summarizing the modern understanding of scientific progress to include entropy, evolution, and information. Grasping these three underlying drivers of scientific progress, Pinker tells us, allows a more complete approach to scientific understanding, and thus of the Enlightenment. All this is true. The problem with this definition of the Enlightenment, though, is that it is all about the Scientific Revolution, from its inception to today, and when you look closely at it, has nothing to do with the Enlightenment. The Scientific Revolution led to technology, which ultimately (with some other drivers that are endlessly debated) led to the Industrial Revolution, which created nearly all the progress Pinker spends the second part of his book documenting. But this eliding of the Enlightenment with the Scientific Revolution is the fatal error of Pinker’s entire book—every chapter, and practically every page, is shot through with it. Pinker claims for the Enlightenment, a system of political and philosophical principles with a nearly exclusive focus on increasing liberty, the advantages of created by the Scientific Revolution, a pre-Enlightenment happening whose success, and whose single-handed creation of the modern world, had essentially nothing to do with the Enlightenment. Pinker does this because he wishes to advocate for Enlightenment principles (in particular, emancipation and atheism), but justify those principles almost wholly by reference to the achievements of the Scientific Revolution. This is a neat parlor trick, but intellectually dishonest. I cannot tell whether Pinker realizes the dishonesty, or merely has wandered so far into the weeds he cannot think clearly. In either case, the effect is to make some parts of the book fascinating, and others risible. There are many, many claimed reasons for why the Industrial Revolution occurred, and why it only occurred in the West. But no serious historian claims that it was the Enlightenment that caused the Industrial Revolution, which is no doubt why Pinker glosses over the supposed linkage and offers no citations tying the Enlightenment to the Industrial Revolution (or, for that matter, to the Scientific Revolution). For a man dedicated to carefully parsing the evidence and linking causal chains through reasoning, this is a glaring omission. Fortunately for the reader, though, these first philosophical musings, or ramblings, only take up the first thirty-five pages of the book. The next 300 are an endless, and endlessly fascinating, series of statistical analyses about various forms of (mostly material) progress. In the final sixty pages, the last third of the book, Pinker returns to philosophy, attempting to synthesize the progress he has demonstrated with his other claimed keystones of the modern world, reason, science, and humanism. Pinker’s basic point about progress is a broadening of his claims about peace in "The Better Angels of Our Nature"—that those who think the world is getting worse are wrong, not (mostly) from malice, but from various forms of psychological bias, such as the “Optimism Gap” (people see their own lives as better than other people’s); “Availability Bias” (we make decisions based on data easily available to us, which is often weighted toward the negative); and “Negativity Bias” (it’s easier to imagine how things could be dramatically worse than how they could be dramatically better). To prove this, Pinker offers fourteen separate chapters, each covering a totally different area of progress, demonstrating that since the Scientific Revolution human conditions have gotten better. Pinker starts with Life—he shows how life expectancy, both at birth and at later periods of life, has dramatically increased over time—or, rather, since the Industrial Revolution in the West, and since the early twentieth century in much of the rest of the world. Next is Health, to much the same effect. In both chapters, Pinker relies heavily on Nobel Prize-winner Angus Deaton’s "The Great Escape," a fascinating book. But Pinker’s philosophical confusion shows up every time he makes other than statistical claims—for example, he tells us that “Deaton notes that even the idea that lies at the core of the Enlightenment—knowledge can make us better off—may come as a revelation” to some (i.e., the non-Western) parts of the world. There are two problems with this. First, that is not the “idea that lies at the core of the Enlightenment,” it is in an idea that, in the West, far pre-dated the Enlightenment, as I discuss further below. More to the immediate point, that’s not what Deaton says (since I have a copy of his book, I checked). What Deaton actually says is that people in poor countries are often satisfied with their health, not knowing it can be better. He saying nothing about the Enlightenment, or knowledge in general. Unfortunately, such appeals to authority are common in Pinker’s book (surprising, since appeal to authority has been identified as a basic logical fallacy for millennia), and when the authority is mis-cited, it makes matters worse. (The reader’s suspicion is further exacerbated by Pinker’s frequent habit of not offering page cites, just footnotes to books as a whole, though he does give a page cite to Deaton’s book.) Anyway, Pinker next turns to food (Sustenance), where he again talks about the Scientific Revolution (including its modern continuation in Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution) feeding the world, and then tries to claim that it was an accomplishment of the Enlightenment, and failure to feed people as shown by Stalin’s terror famines was because (supposed) Enlightenment values weren’t honored. That’s a stretch. Next is wealth, where Pinker focuses on GDP per capita, showing the takeoff since the Industrial Revolution in the West and more recently in some Asian countries, and the reductions in extreme poverty in other countries that have not experienced the same kind of takeoff. Following is Inequality, which Pinker acutely and subtly analyzes (channeling Thomas Sowell in some cases—you can tell that Pinker is, in many areas, broad-minded by the several times he cites Sowell for different propositions, since Sowell is anathema to doctrinaire leftists). Then Environment, noting that other than global warming, the environment is doing just fine and shows every sign of doing better in the future, on every metric. In particular, he notes how resource apocalypses, from Peak Oil to supposed shortages of rare earth elements, are invariably falsified, by technology in general and by hard work enabling us to produce better things with less material. He also covers Peace, updating his earlier book Better Angels, and Safety, noting the declines in homicides and accidents. He quickly dismisses Terrorism as a tempest in a teapot. It’s not just material progress that Pinker covers, although that’s the focus. It’s also moral progress—we are, among other things, nicer to people. Less torture, fewer executions, more value assigned to human life and happiness. True enough, but a necessary leg of Pinker’s entire argument is that there was no significant moral progress prior to the Enlightenment, since prior progress would disprove the causation he claims. But prior progress in the West was very great, as anyone with any grasp of history knows. Christianity immediately obviated many of the worst moral behaviors of the Ancient World (variants of which are still common in non-Christian cultures), from infanticide to the Roman practice of starving children to death in sight of a banquet, to distill their organs into love potions that would enhance desire. Christianity further led to the rule of law and was instrumental in the creation of the institutions that made possible the Scientific Revolution. All these moves forward, as Pinker documents while glossing over their cause, led to further moral gains. To hide his embarrassment at these pre-Enlightenment advances, Pinker chants, over and over again, the same trite phrases about “endless religious wars” and repeats boring anecdotes about witchcraft and bearbaiting. After these convincing chapters (convincing for their substance, at least), Pinker covers some softer topics, somewhat less successfully. Generally, the less harder-edged and susceptible to statistical analysis the topic, the worse Pinker does in showing that actual progress is being made. In fairness, though, it is true these softer topics, to the extent one agrees they constitute actual progress comparable to that covered in the earlier chapters, are more tied to actual Enlightenment ideas. First up is Democracy, which he claims is increasing, but Pinker helps himself over the finish line by defining democracy as basically any good government, one which “threads the needle, exerting just enough force to prevent people from preying on each other without preying on the people itself.” That, along with other definitional broadening from Karl Popper and John Mueller, means that democracy is redefined as any government with the rule of law and some responsiveness to public opinion. But in any case, there’s more democracy, however defined, and that’s Progress. Next is Equal Rights, where Pinker goes full Left, trumpeting all emancipation as good for what ails a society, and all failure to emancipate as evil incarnate (although he seems confused, since what is evil, anyway, to someone who denies the reality of moral abstractions other than utilitarian ones?) He does try to give a scientific gloss to his philosophical attachment to emancipation, ascribing it to more wealth means more people seek self-actualization, and want the same for others. This he then extrapolates to a claim that liberal values are spreading everywhere, with a lot of graphs (though we’re never told what “liberal values” are being measured, but by implication they overlap with “emancipative values”). Then Knowledge (we know more, and we’re getting smarter); Quality of Life (we work less and both the necessities and luxuries of life are cheaper); and Happiness (we are happier, largely because we’re richer, though Deaton covers this much better and more subtly). Along with Daniel T. Rodgers, Pinker huffily rejects Robert Putnam and others who point to the atomization of American lives as a problem, with the flip response that “Users of the Internet and social media have more contact with friends” and they “remain as satisfied with the number and quality of their friendships as in the decade of Gerald Ford and Happy Days.” But this is obtuse. Putnam’s claim wasn’t that people didn’t have friends anymore, it was that the intermediary institutions that were the entire basis of the success of any successful, and in particular, the successful American, society had been completely destroyed, resulting in the cascading baleful effects that Tocqueville and Robert Nisbet had earlier identified and feared. Pinker totally fails to make this connection, or more likely deliberately obfuscates it (which is probably why he refers to fears of social atomization as a “hysterical misconception”—that’s protesting too much). Not to mention that Putnam would have told him, too, that the problem was well under way by the time of Gerald Ford, so the 1970s are probably not the best comparison decade to today. Finally, Pinker points out that Existential Threats, from Y2K to bioterror, are grossly exaggerated. Sure, we can’t know the future, but on balance, we’re not all likely to wink out of existence next week, or next millennium. Of the supposed threat from artificial intelligence, he says “the scenario makes about as much sense as the worry that since jet planes have surpassed the flying ability of eagles, someday they will swoop out of the sky and seize our cattle.” Ha ha. He’s also heinously sexist. “There is no law of complex systems that says that intelligent agents must turn into ruthless conquistadors. Indeed, we know of one highly advanced form of intelligence that evolved without this defect. They’re called women.” I like all this, and agree with much of it (although I could do without the constant references to Mama Cass and the Beatles, reminding me Pinker is stuck, in many ways, in the 1960s). I am mostly a techno-optimist myself. However, Pinker’s greatest technical error, as opposed to failure of vision, is to believe (like Joseph Tainter) that if it can’t be quantified, it doesn’t exist. I’m a quantitative guy, personally—I have an MBA with finance and accounting concentrations from the Booth School of Business, and my wife correctly says I view the world as Neo does in the last scenes of "The Matrix"—as cascading columns of numbers underlying the perceived, but merely surface, reality of things. Certainly, non-quantifiable views of human flourishing are subject to errors of perception, which is probably why Pinker repeatedly excoriates the Romantics. But Pinker is too quick to reject that humans seek transcendence, and all the new flavors of Doritos and life extension in the world isn’t going to change that. “Man shall not live by bread alone.” Pinker is fond of quoting Jesus, always with a sneer, but he does not offer us that truth, because it scares him, since it cannot be quantified. But the unquantifiable aspects of progress are a topic too long to get into in this review. Pinker wraps up Progress by talking about its future. He does this by making totally unsupported claims about the origin of Progress. “Since the Enlightenment unfolded in the late 18th century, life expectancy across the world has risen from 30 to 71, and in the more fortunate countries to 81.” “The Enlightenment is working: for two and a half centuries, people have used knowledge to enhance human flourishing.” Therefore, it’s going to continue, don’t you know? No logic is offered, just repetition of the mantra of “knowledge” and trying to tie the Enlightenment to the Scientific Revolution by repeatedly mentioning them in the same breath. It’s not convincing; in fact, it comes across as desperate. Embedded within all this proof of progress (for proof is what it is—we can quibble, or call it incomplete, but only a fool would say that material progress since the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution has not been immense), is the truth, difficult for some to accept, that all this progress was caused purely by, and until recently only affected, the West. It is the Western world has gotten better—and finally, after 400 years, some of those benefits have been adopted by others. That’s it. This is not a global phenomenon in cause, and it may not be a global phenomenon in effect, if the inferior cultures of the world, for whatever reason, refuse to accept the gifts offered by the Western Scientific Revolution. Pinker doesn’t make this point, either, though I can see why—it’s inflammatory and distracts from his argument. (He does admit that his first love, the Enlightenment, was a wholly Western phenomenon, a topic he shuffles away from quickly, mumbling about how ideas have no home, which may be true, but they do have a birthplace.) [Review continues as first comment.]                   551 reviews1,857 followers     June 3, 2018   If you had to chose a time to be alive, and (here’s the catch) you couldn’t pick what race, sex, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status or nationality you were. You’d be flat wrong if you chose any other time than right fuckin’ now! Skeptical?  Steven Pinker would like to convince you otherwise.  According to Pinker. Humans (on average) have never had it so good. And he’s got 500(+) pages and 75(+) graphs and charts that illustrate exactly that.  And quite convincingly so.  My favorite part is.  He’s an equal opportunity hate hater.  Pinker takes aim at both the far left and alt right in an all out data rich blitz attack on the histrionic, anti-intellectual fear-mongering both sides of the American political divide reliably trade in.  Pinker argues that DJT’s populist uprising was a direct result of these exact misinformation wars.  According Pinker’s diverse compilation of world health data, beginning in the mid nineties and continuing to the present and foreseeable future, global life spans, individual purchasing power, heath and wellbeing (by a multitude of measures) are all hella on the rise, while violent crime, poverty and disease are on the yard dart (see footnote at end of review) like trajectory nose dive decline.  That being said, the average ideologue of either flavor very reliably believes that things are going to heck in a hatbox (to put it nicely). WTF? Pinker posits that precisely this ‘armageddon is upon us’ style sentiment enabled Donald Twitler’s P. T. Barnum style ascent, lending support to the O.G.’s (difficult at this particular historical juncture to deny) assertion that there’s ‘a sucker born ever minute’. Pinker invites us all to simply stop watching cable news (the overwhelmingly ‘uge’ beneficiaries of the Trumpster fire none of us can easily take our eyes off of) and have a look at some Good Organized Data (GOD).  His point is not to inspire pollyannish optimism, but rather to stimulate (i) critical thinking and (ii) a commitment to solving the problems we face rather than trying to scare the undecideds into action, with the unintended, but predictable effect of scarring people into paralysis.  People of the world: ideology is mental illness. Cable news is for retards. Our best (no only) hope is to figure out what kind of life we all want, and adopt a data driven, rational, naturalistic, pragmatic, realistic approach to getin’ er done.  In a nutshell, Pinker urges us to recommit to enlightenment ideals e.g. science and humanism, and ditch the bleeding and leading hokum drizzled in snake-oil sauce pumped at us by the 24/7 alternative fact machines on both sides of the ideological sinkhole.  I LOVE THIS BOOK!!!!! FOOT NOTE: for those of you too young to remember yard darts. It was this insanely dangerous lawn game that was comprised of two hula hoops laying on the grass at about 10 yards apart, and these approximately 5-7 pound mettle darts with a heavy sharp end, that you chucked underhanded up in the air and attempted to land in the other persons hoop. The SHUNK sound they made when they pierced the lawn was SO satisfying it defies words. And they were hugely popular in the 70’s. But they were eventually banned because of the (retrospectively obvious but at the time not so much) danger that you could hit your pal in the top of the dome with one of those bad boys and, well, if they didn’t die on impact, it’s all but certain they would be severely brain damaged. It is entirely plausible that the increase in lifespan indicated in Pinker’s research was significantly positively effected by the entirely rational ban of this ridiculously lethal toy.                   340 reviews58 followers     August 11, 2017   Ever since Bill Gates tweeted his endorsement for Pinker's Better Angels, fans have rushed to support his writing of big ideas by big thinkers!Enlightenment Now illustrates Pinker's practical yet tangible style, but is freshly positive as well. His explosive understanding toward social science and political empathy will appeal to all big thinkers and affirmative readers alike.                   1,002 reviews351 followers     April 6, 2020   Progress Where Are Thou?“Here's the shocking fact: The world has made fantastic progress on all indicators of human welfare. A second shocking fact: Virtually no one knows this.“ Bad news are always extremely loud. Just by reading those huge headlines we’ll instantly know how sick is the world we live in! On the other hand, good news are usually silent. So silent that a good new is — most of the times — a no new. That’s why this book was born — to be the voice of those silent news! Surprise, Surprise, Guys:The world is turning into a better place and we didn’t even know about it! 😉 😂👍                   116 reviews115 followers     March 17, 2022   3.5 stars"
 The appeal of regressive ideas is perennial, and the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress always has to be made
." Steven Pinker focuses on the welfare of humankind and progress that it has made in the last 250 years. The book covers many aspects of progress, such as life expectancy, provision of food, healthcare, access to education and world literacy rates, human rights, the long-term decline of violence against women, the victimization of children, hate crimes, and interstate wars. But even if they are not wiped off the face of the earth, they can be reduced further, including violence against women and children, hate crimes, civil war, and homicide. Not only has violence declined, but the attitude to it has changed. Today we are much less tolerable towards images containing violence, etc.After the end of WWII the world entered the period that has been called the Long Peace, something that most people in the 19th century would have thought improbable.After analyzing a large amount of statistical data, Pinker is convinced that the life of a typical modern human being is apriori better than that of a typical man or woman, say, 100 years ago.Figures show that life has gotten “longer, healthier, richer, safer, happier, freer, smarter, deeper, and more interesting.” Pinker admits that there are some parts of the world where the situation may become and sometimes does become worse, but that’s how global trends work. For example, as the data show, world literacy rates have been steadily increasing over the last 50 years. However, in some regions, the indicators have fallen during this period.But such contrasting with the overall picture facts do not countermand the positive trend according to which people across societies are becoming more literate and educated. Setbacks and periods of stagnation may happen and usually do not negate overall progress.  Pinker disavows certain myths that are present in our collective consciousness. The number of people who consider themselves religious is declining in the modern world.Contrary to common belief, the rate of suicides across the world is also on the decline. I liked how Pinker commented on contemporary media and its current role in society. They often exploit one of the manifest features of the human brain. According to cognitive scientists, we tend to pay more attention to nasty things than to good and happy ones. As a result, hardly anyone speaks of the plunging number of people living in extreme poverty or of increasing literacy rates worldwide.Instead, content creators focus mainly on sad events, such as terrorist attacks and the victims of car crashes. We are flooded with catchy headlines promising to inform us of some violent event in one or another part of the world. Talking about the growing gap between the rich and the poor, the author does not regard income inequality as a factor that hinders progress. According to him, the fact that the rich are getting rich does not mean that the poor stay poor.  Certain comparisons look dubious. For ex., his statement that conditions even in the poorest parts of the world are now somewhat similar to those in the rich developed countries 70 years ago. At times the author seems to simplify the complex processes that shaped our current world. Among the existential threats, Pinker names climate change, but even that could be dealt with given that the world work in concert (well, subjunctive here becomes an imperative). One may ask whether it is correct statistics-wise to approximate a large set of data, say from 1300 to our days, as the author does in his charts. One need not be a statistician to suggest that the data available for the year of 1350 must be much less complete than those available for 2015.  A lot of problems exist today, and problems will always remain. But Enlightenment with its four ideals - reason, science, humanism, and progress - teaches us that most problems are solvable. As Pinker himself puts it, progress is demonstrable through figures, but, of course, it does not apply to all. If everyone in the world were touched by progress, it would be a miracle, but progress does not equal miracles. Progress does not mean that everything starts being better for everyone everywhere. The positive trends the world enjoys today may be reversed in the future. No one can guarantee constant progress.We must continue to apply knowledge to enhance human flourishing. Despite some qualifications, Pinker’s ideas sound too optimistic to me. Perhaps, one might say that Pinker is on the bright side of modern intellectual life. Not all agree with Pinker’s theories. Some argue that his graphs and statistics are not often reliable. For example, they believe that he gives an unduly optimistic picture concerning famine and other similar measurable indicators. Some think that he focuses too much on developed countries with rich populations. My knowledge does not permit me to decide which side is closer to the truth - Pinker or his opponents - but I find at least one of his ideas relevant and helpful.He insists on progress and its feasibility. The author proves his point with figures and graphs because he wants to show humanity that its problems could be solved by using knowledge and reason, or at least they could be significantly diminished.Pinker warns against the dangers of what he calls thoughtless or fact-free pessimism. If humanity is doomed, as some skeptics tend to believe, why should anyone bother to make an effort to improve the human condition?  To sum up, almost all measurable elements that define the quality of life, such as sustenance, health, life expectancy, peaceful relations between countries, lowering of crime rates, gender equality, literacy, and the protection of childhood, have been improving over the last decades.According to Pinker, these measurements point to socio-economical, political, and moral progress. I would like to end this review with the following quote.“
 Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these
.”Steven Pinker? Bill Gates?.. Ovid.     non-fiction               547 reviews424 followers     January 24, 2021   The short summary of this book is that despite the considerable negative news we are subjected to every day, life is progressively getting better and for people at large. Though some of the inferences are simplistic and also unreliable, this is an intellectually stimulating book. The point Steven Pinker makes is that though some political leaders claim that the situation is deteriorating in terms of prosperity, safety and well-being, that is not really the case. He has a lot of data &amp; references to make his case, including an analysis of news coverage over the years. The coverage we are exposed to is far more negative than in the past decades. He makes the point that capitalism and free markets have created wealth and in turn improved quality of life, health, safety, knowledge and made people happier. The Enlightenment ideals anchored by reason and science are the way forward, and people &amp; nations who pursue that agenda are surging ahead.  At a broad level, there is not too much to debate with the data or the reasoning which Pinker presents. Quite clearly, global poverty has dipped and living standards have improved. Pinker does concede that aggregates can hide pockets where things have not improved much. The book, however, steers clear of discussing these areas. At one point Pinker suggests a pandemic is very unlikely – after all there is the leap needed from animals to humans – a bet he has clearly lost in the circumstance. Pinker in his narrative also ignores the fact that there is a power structure in the world order which decides who will be heard and who will not. This allows a lot of rulers to stay secure that their military &amp; economic power ensures that they will never be called out for serious censure. Also, though there is a lot of data, not all of it is reliable. Since years, I have read summaries of reports published on human rights, media freedom etc which either rely on poor media coverage or are influenced by powerful sponsors. In many cases, a local school going kid would have provided a more reliable perspective of the countries referenced. I also read the critical essays of Nassim Taleb on the data &amp; analysis Pinker presents. That said, there is not too much which changes in the aggregate picture which Pinker paints though and I see little purpose in quibbling over individual data points. Some of the correlation Pinker suggests around wealth, happiness, religion, science is a stretch, but that scientific temper and reasoning should be held paramount is obviously something most of us would agree with. While the early sections with the data points are important, I actually found the latter sections which debate political alignment, science, etc to be more interesting. Things are better than they were say a century ago, yes – and yet that is not a reference point most of us hold day to day. If the world can get so much better with such inconsistent co-operation, groupism among nations and luck, what can it be if nations actually planned for the future to be better collectively? While there is quite a bit of the book which I obviously can debate about and some which I do not agree with, these are important matters which actually should find more coverage among the political leadership, academia and many of us. This is a book which substantially elevates the level of discourse, and for that I strongly recommend it for reading.  My rating: 4.5 / 5.                   385 reviews112k followers     January 8, 2019   An eye-opening book. I picked this up because I saw the authors TED talk, and then Bill Gates called it the best book he's read in a decade (his review is worth reading) The book starts with a premise that many people generally have an impression that the world is full of of serious crises.   "Magazine covers warn us of coming anarchies, plagues, epidemics, collapses, and so many “crises” (farm, health, retirement, welfare, energy, deficit) that copywriters have had to escalate to the redundant “serious crisis.” Whether or not the world really is getting worse, the nature of news will interact with the nature of cognition to make us think that it is. News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen."  Basically, we worry a lot. A LOT. We live in dark times (with a scary president), etc. Pinker points out why we worry so much: the news. The news cycle is designed to play on our fears, and thus it is largely negative, focusing on all the bad things that are happening in the world. And we are consuming more news than ever in human history! And if the news focused on all the good things, the ratings would plummet, after all. But one of my favorite lines in the book points out that we would be hard pressed to find negative news if we were covering the last 100 years, instead of the last day.  "Bad things can happen quickly, but good things aren’t built in a day, and as they unfold, they will be out of sync with the news cycle. The peace researcher John Galtung pointed out that if a newspaper came out once every fifty years, it would not report half a century of celebrity gossip and political scandals. It would report momentous global changes such as the increase in life expectancy."  And that was the eye opening thing about the book - if you take a long term view, every metric you can find has gotten better. Life expectancy, health, extreme poverty, prosperity, peace, freedom, safety, literacy, leisure, and even happiness - he has chapters and graphs for each of them, showing them vastly improving over the past centuries and usually with most gains in the past century. An interesting point is that most graphs show third world countries only being ~20-30 years behind first world countries, but the shape of the graphs looks the same in terms of the rate of progress. I won't recap all the graphs and numbers, but here is a small example of how life has gotten better.  "In the mid-19th century it took twenty-five men a full day to harvest and thresh a ton of grain; today one person operating a combine harvester can do it in six minutes."  This is not to say that there aren't still large problems in all of those areas left to solve. Nor that we haven't created other problems - the book has chapters on some of those, notably climate change and nuclear war - but again there we have actually made progress. For some reason I haven't quite fully fathomed, Pinker and this book have gotten a lot of criticism. I think some of this is from people who object to him saying "the world is great" because there is so much progress left to be made - yet Pinker often admits that in the book. Or from people who think he is measuring progress along the wrong metrics, and we are all headed for an apocalypse. Certainly, there are lots of books about apocalypse, but it's much more pleasant to be an optimist, and believe that as long as we keep applying reason and science and making progress, the world will keep getting better.     economics history philosophy               198 reviews123 followers     April 29, 2018   This book is a sequel to Steven Pinker's other book "The Better Angels of our nature". The "The Better Angels of our nature" is a detailed comparison of violence in history. And how it reduced. The reasons for reduction and existence of these violences was covered. But "Enlightenment now" Covers other topics such as health, wealth, knowledge and many more. These two books have changed my mind about many of my core beliefs such as anarchism, nuclear energy, and endless other topics.     2018-priorities favorites philosophy               53 reviews30 followers     February 24, 2020   OK, Boomer!-----------------------------------------------------“Evolutionary thinkers who insist on a moralizing orientation when considering a complex biocultural phenomenon such as religion are not meaningfully advancing their field. But Pinker makes matters worse by compounding ideological bias with historical ignorance.” ~Modernity &amp; Cultural Decline.                  155 reviews71 followers     July 28, 2018   Enlightening indeed! Very uplifting reading, especially for pessimists like me. He clearly points out the effect of distorted/exaggerated news, the negative bias of people, dirty politics and the lack of reason behind all the sky-is -falling attitude that seems to dominate communities.I have learned so many good facts from this book that helped me view things differently such as the global Cosmopolitanism, 8x increase in number of countries ruled by democracy within the last 50 years, the increased life quality and expectancy. He believes in our ability to create solutions and adapt. He pinpoints the evidence that we are evolving to a better vision of ourselves despite the fluctuations that may seem like a step-back at times. Lets hope the carbon emission will be under control soon..AND that the people will trust in science more than their own beliefs and superstitions. (and act accordingly) Great book, I am so glad I read it.     favorites mind-expansion reviews               183 reviews1,943 followers     February 17, 2018   Francis Bacon once said that “some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.” This is one of the few.The main thesis of the book is that the enlightenment values of reason, science, and humanism have led to scientific and moral progress and that the embrace of these values will continue the trend. This, as opposed to counter-enlightenment values (religious faith, nationalism, tribalism, relativism, declinism), is the recipe for the maximization of human flourishing and the minimization of human suffering.  Pinker defends this thesis with massive amounts of data demonstrating that just about every meaningful dimension of human well-being has improved since the Age of Enlightenment. He also describes the drivers of progress and provides highly rational and sometimes unexpected conclusions about a variety of issues including climate change, artificial intelligence, and income inequality.  The data, ideas, and philosophy in this book are extremely important, but unfortunately, people’s natural aversion to the concept of progress leads to some common objections that I’d like to address.   Common Objections   Objection #1: I already know all of this  No, you don’t, and you almost certainly haven’t read the book if you say this. This massive undertaking examines the progress of human welfare in almost all aspects of life, and covers the most pressing questions about health, income, inequality, violence, safety, democracy, freedom, human rights, knowledge, happiness, climate change, artificial intelligence, and more.  To claim that you know all of this is the epitome of hubris by suggesting that you already have figured out the best ways to think about and handle the world’s toughest challenges. IF you read the book, you will learn something. Not to mention Pinker is a skilled writer, the content is interesting, and the history of progress is history we should be proud of.   Objection #2: Bad things still happen so isn’t progress an illusion?  Pinker never makes the claim that violence, death, disease, suffering, or poverty has or ever will reach zero instances. This is not a book about achieving some kind of utopia. But pointing out specific examples of bad things that still happen does nothing to refute the overall thesis that astronomical progress has been made over the last few centuries since the Enlightenment. You can’t measure progress by citing specific examples or anecdotes. For example, the worldwide poverty rate has fallen from 43 percent just in 1990 to 21 percent in 2011. That’s a lot of people that have escaped poverty, and pointing out the people that are still poor says nothing about the trend.  Pinker uses 70+ graphs and an overwhelming amount of statistics to make his case, so I’m sure if you wanted to you could find something to nitpick at. But you’ll also probably lose sight of the big picture and the more important numbers, trends, and points.  Also keep in mind that the most troubled parts of the world prove Pinker’s point rather than refute it, as the most violent parts are also the least secular, democratic, literate, educated, and wealthy and embody counter-enlightenment ideals.  Objection #3: Ok, so material well-being has increased, but the world is in no better shape spiritually. Pinker’s view of the world is materialist and reductionist.  This objection usually comes from the religiously-inclined. It results from the false assumption that if you’re not religious you’re a reductionist or that you practice “scientism.” Science may not be able to determine our values, but philosophy, particularly Enlightenment philosophy, can. With its emphasis on human well-being and flourishing, Enlightenment philosophy sets the agenda to make us healthier, wealthier, wiser, freer, and happier. And once we all agree that life is better than death, wealth is better than poverty, and well-being is better than suffering, science can help us get there, which it already has and which is painstakingly documented in this book. The conditions for happiness are available to most of the world’s population. And as for higher purpose, plenty of people find great satisfaction in charity work, championing worthwhile social causes, pursuing meaningful work, spending time with friends and family, enjoying culture, traveling, and taking advantage of unprecedented amounts of leisure time. We’re responsible for creating our own meaning and we now have a plethora of choices in how to achieve this. Inexplicably, this still leaves some people cold. In the words of Pinker: “The idea that the ultimate good is to use knowledge to enhance human welfare leaves people cold. Deep explanations of the universe, the planet, life, the brain? Unless they use magic, we don’t want to believe them! Saving the lives of billions, eradicating disease, feeding the hungry? Bo-ring. People extending their compassion to all of humankind? Not good enough—we want the laws of physics to care about us! Longevity, health, understanding, beauty, freedom, love? There’s got to be more to life than that!”  Objection #4: It’s naive to think progress will continue.  Pinker distinguishes between two kinds of optimism. The first is complacency optimism, whereby you expect a positive outcome without extending any effort to influence the outcome. The second is conditional optimism, whereby you directly influence an outcome by identifying problems and proposing solutions.  Pinker is of the second variety. He admits that progress is by no means guaranteed, but at the same time human history has been defined by its ability to identify and solve problems. This is productive optimism and makes you wonder what the benefit of pessimism is, exactly.     favorites               1,002 reviews351 followers     September 18, 2019   Levanta-te e Anda...No Humanismo integram-se a solidariedade, a compaixão, a empatia,...É o respeito pelo indivíduo como indivíduo e não como membro dum grupo determinado por crenças religiosas, cor da pele, etc, etc,...Somos todos humanos e é quanto basta!... E sempre que o Humanismo se alia à Ciência, obtemos Progresso. Os media tendem a bombardear-nos com o Negativo em detrimento do Positivo, e este livro propõe-se actuar como contra-peso, reunindo factos e estatísticas que comprovam o Progresso como um aqui e agora presente, e não como fantasma dum devir à la longue ... “Eis o facto chocante: O mundo conseguiu um progresso fantástico em todos os indicadores do bem-estar humano. Um segundo facto chocante: Praticamente ninguém sabe isto.” Animem-se que o Mundo está a melhorar, é a mensagem positiva (e comprovada) que iremos encontrar neste livro!A continuar assim, daqui por mais um século ou dois (mais coisa, menos coisa), já a Mafalda poderá contar a toda a gente que o Mundo está curado, e finalmente, com o maior cuidado, chutá-lo para fora do leito!... 😜 Força nisso, Mundo: Levanta-te e Anda!... 😜Cristo já não está cá para dizê-lo, mas legou-nos a sua milagrosa frase 😉                   10 reviews4 followers     January 5, 2019   Steven Pinker's book, Enlightment Now, has a pretty basic premise. Things have gotten better as a whole for humanity in the past century, especially compared to the conditions in which most people lived not that long ago. For some reason though, Pinker not only needs to make the case that life has gotten better, but, because most things are better, everything must be great. A good chunk of this book is spent chastising people that are trying to make the world better for not being "grateful" enough, and downplaying things that are real problems. One of the examples that stood out to me the most was his defense of sweatshop labor, saying: "while working on the factory floor is often referred to as sweatshop labor, it is often better than the grandaddy of all sweatshops working in the field as an agricultural day worker."This seemed like an extreme claim to me, so I did a little digging and found this article in the New York Times that talks about this same subject. From the article:  People who worked in agriculture or market selling earned about as much money as they could have at the factory, often with fewer hours and better conditions. We were amazed: By the end of a year only a third of the people who had landed an industrial job were still employed in the industrial sector at all. It would be easy to see this as the normal trial-and-error of young people starting out careers, but actually the factory jobs carried dangerous risks. Serious injuries and disabilities were nearly double among those who took the factory jobs, rising to 7 percent from about 4 percent. This risk rose with every month they stayed. The people we interviewed told us about exposure to chemical fumes and repetitive stress injuries.  Quite a different picture than the one given by Pinker in his book. There are definitely positives to a country becoming more industrialized, and I think there is a valid argument to have on the sacrifices that need to be made to get to a point where the society can benefit from that industrialization. But Pinker completely glosses over the real suffering of people in these sweatshops so that he can pretend that the entire process is amazing. This is disingenuous and doesn't help anyone, but when it comes to other issues, like race, he misleads in even more blatant ways:"The data suggest that the number of police shootings has decreased, not increased in recent decades, and three independent analyses have found that a black suspect is no more likely than a white suspect to be killed by the police" On face value that claim seems absurd, but even the article he cites for this information confirms that what he's saying is wildly misleading: "According to the F.B.I.’s Supplementary Homicide Report, 31.8 percent of people shot by the police were African-American, a proportion more than two and a half times the 13.2 percent of African-Americans in the general population." The article goes on to say that this is the case because black people have more encounters with the police. Pinker never mentions that blacks are over represented in police homicide by two and a half times, he only cherry picks what he wants from the article, and discards the part that's inconvenient to the story that he's trying to tell. It's hard for me to imagine that he read that article, and what jumped out to him was "a black suspect is no more likely than a white suspect to be killed by the police" instead of "31.8 percent of people shot by the police were African-American, a proportion more than two and a half times the 13.2 percent of African-Americans in the general population." It's pretty blatant misrepresentation and really made me question all of the other "facts" he put into the book.  Another argument made in this book is that economic inequality isn't really a problem: "The confusion of inequality with poverty comes straight out of the lump fallacy--the mindset in which wealth is a finite resource... As we just saw, wealth is not like that: since the Industrial Revolution, it has expanded exponentially. That means that when the rich get richer, the poor can get richer, too." But the United Nations report on Extreme Poverty in the United States seems to tell a different story. From the report:  "But its immense wealth and expertise stand in shocking contrast with the conditions in which vast numbers of its citizens live. About 40 million live in poverty, 18.5 million in extreme poverty, and 5.3 million live in Third World conditions of absolute poverty. It has the highest youth poverty rate in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the highest infant mortality rates among comparable OECD States." It seems to directly contradict Pinker's assessment that the richest country in the world has the highest youth poverty rate in the OECD. If "when the rich get richer, the poor can get richer, too" then this wouldn't be the case. Aside from the dubiousness of the claim that a rising tide lifts all boats, Pinker doesn't seem to understand the full extent of how inequality damages a society. He thinks that people raising issues about economic inequality see wealth as a finite resource, but he doesn't take the next step and address the fact that power is a finite resource. From the UN report again:  "What extreme inequality actually signifies is the transfer of economic and political power to a handful of elites who inevitably use it to further their own self-interest, as demonstrated by the situation in various countries around the world."  There is never any serious conversation in this book about the power the ultra rich have gained over our society. Not only in the private sector, but their ability to influence the democratic sector as well. Pinker has a chapter about democracy as a liberating force in modern society, but ignores some of the fundamental ways it's undermined by the concentration of power in the hands of a few. I have more issues with this book, but it would require a lot more text than this to rebut every single claim. There's a pretty good response to his critique of environmentalists here. In terms of "facts", it's hard to trust a lot of the claims that this book makes, and I think someone would be better off doing the research on their own or just reading another book. Some of the stuff in here is blatant misinformation, but a lot of it is just manipulated to match the author's own personal biases. I don't even disagree that the world has gotten better for most people in the past century, but sugar coating it's current problems isn't helping anyone. Not only is it actively standing in the way of people making a better world, but it could push the world into even worse situations if some of these festering problems aren't addressed.                   1,131 reviews1,006 followers     October 2, 2018   Pinker’s latest is getting a lot of press, of course.Here are a few links: His own synopsis at the Wall Street Journal: 
 The Enlightenment Is Working
 (paywall; try Googling wsj The Enlightenment Is Working and clicking through from Google, maybe into “private browsing mode”. Works sometimes.) Ezra Klein of Vox is a pretty good interviewer, and he hooked up with Pinker at his podcast. I 
 really
 liked that they both name-dropped Dan Kahan's work at his Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School. Even though Kahan's research has a slightly skewed focus on risk, that he points to "identity-protective cognition" is central how I perceive the tribal partisanship our country is in. The compound adjective is key; many folks now believe that motivated reasoning can create an intrinsic cogntive bias, but far fewer realize how it is typically used: subconsciously, in protection of part of a person's social identity. It's also kinda cool that this is now officially Bill Gate's "new favorite book of all time". I'm ambivalent about Gates. On the negative side, I still despise how Microsoft, under his control, violated so many norms of fair play in pursuit of monopoly. And I know he's just doing that thing that plutocrats always do once making more money seems fruitless: build libraries. Oh, sorry that was the similarly amoral robber baron Andrew Carnegie. Same difference, right? But then I recall that Gates seems to be doing good things (as did Carnegie), while some others use their wealth in ways I mostly dislike. So: ambivalence. Will I read it? Dunno. I really liked his Better Angels, but my gut reaction is that his argument is facile: technically correct, but overlooks too much. For example, there's this, which is scary even before that whole identity-protective motivated reasoning thing is added in. Maybe Pinker addresses that, though. And frankly, there’s just so much more to read out there. I know I'll be reading How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future before Pinker. Update 19-Apr-2018—  Pinker’s short interview with the Economist was well done, and made me think some about what I think his argument is, and why I think it’s flawed. The crux is this: Pinker is mostly dealing with materialist goals and the progress we are making in meeting them. To that extent, he’s undoubtedly correct. What we learned due to the Enlightenment has done marvels in gradually pulling us into a better future than Pangloss could have imagined (he refers Pangloss in his interview response). The problem is that he doesn’t perceive a deeper problem: that the Enlightenment did not provide us with a sense of meaning, purpose, or any hints about how to find them elsewhere (other than “hey, just make up your own!”). I ended my slam of Matt Ridley’s similar (but much more amateurish effort), The Rational Optimist. Here’s the text from that review — if you yank out Ridley and insert Pinker, I strongly suspect my critique of Enlightenment Now would be congruent:  Materialism Ridley points out that humans have evolved into incredibly efficient organisms at solving the problems our paleolithic ancestors faced. Most humans alive today have access to food, health and a length of life that would astonish even our great-grandparents. And given how important those things are in our life, I’m also optimistic that we’re going to keep getting better at them. Given the staggering amount of research that’s going on, it would be very surprising if the coming decades don’t provide continuing delights at keeping people healthier and living longer. But here’s the problem: when I look around me, most of the people I see are already pretty satisfied on those counts. Sure, it’ll be really sweet when we finally cure cancer, and when we can reliably prevent Alzheimer’s, etc., etc. But the existential threats that drove paleolithic existence aren’t reflected on most folks’ day-to-day anxiety list, are they? The upshot of this is a little tricky: if the existential threats present during evolutionary time aren’t what drives us today… what does? Something I think is important to realize is that no matter what the answer is to that question, it isn’t embedded in our nature, at least certainly not in the same way as the old threats. Which means it is a very flexible thing, informed by culture, preference, and contingency. And that means individual and societal choices will vary widely, and might often contradict each other. I can easily imagine some of those drives being cause for pessimism — whether they be growth-for-growth’s sake of the capitalist, or the holy wars of various religious extremists. Those mimetic constructs could, in turn, put a damper on the pollyannaish future presented here. Since Ridley merely examines how good we are at meeting the materialistic goals of cavemen, he really never gets it. The pessimism of the post-modern isn’t about Malthusian crises, but about the lack of focused direction for our post-materialist civilization to take. Ridley doesn’t see that problem, and his book is fundamentally flawed. My complaint has broadened in the eight years since I reviewed that book, because it has been informed by the social crises we face today, especially regarding how social identity in the modern world has become a more salient dividing point between populations, despite the astonishing fact that it is often quite arbitrary. Modernity has a whole host of problems which are becoming ever more germane.So now I’m a bit more curious, and might have to read this to see if Pinker even notices that a whole host of new problems face humanity.                   693 reviews65 followers     March 3, 2020   Prof. Pinker points out early in this book that people have a tendency to marshal evidence that confirms their convictions whilst dismissing evidence that contradicts them. I’m as guilty of that as most people, and on the evidence of this book, my own convictions are similar to the author’s. Prof. Pinker’s book largely provides me with reinforcement for my pre-existing opinions and on that basis it’s not surprising I rate it highly. A large part of the book is taken up with the author arguing that the ideals of the Enlightenment have led to levels of health, wealth, human rights, peace and security, and all-round happiness that were unimaginable to people in the pre-Enlightenment age. Also part of his argument is an attack on the surprisingly common belief that the world was a better place in the past than it is today. I’ve always felt that rose-tinted views of the past fly in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and overwhelming evidence is what Prof. Pinker provides, with a barrage of statistics and graphs about how the world has changed since the Enlightenment era. I had a few minor quibbles about some of his arguments, but nothing that affected the overall merits of his case. Of course, saying that things are far better than they were is not to say that we live in Utopia. Prof. Pinker would be the first to say that the world still faces many problems, and he addresses those that could reverse the gains of modernity. The hoary old chestnuts of resource depletion and “the Population Bomb” are despatched without much ado. He’s completely dismissive of the Elon Musk/Stephen Hawking arguments about the threat of AGI, (which made me feel rather foolish, since on this website I’ve previously written a favourable review of a book which articulates those fears). He does rate climate change and nuclear war as potentially serious threats (though again, if you had asked political commentators in the 1950s or 1960s about the chances of getting to 2018 without nuclear weapons ever being used, most would have rated the chances as close to zero). I’m a little less sanguine than Prof. Pinker when it comes to the threats to progress posed by nationalism, populism, political extremism (of the left and right) and religious fanaticism, all of which seem to be on a world-wide upswing at the moment. Prof. Pinker seems to be think that we’re just going through a bit of a bad patch and that it’ll all turn out right in the end. I hope he’s right.  I had to take my time reading this book, as I had to consider the arguments carefully, and also because I kept stopping to read the references. They’ve given me a few ideas for future reading material. Overall for me this was a 4.5 star rating, but objectively it deserves 5 stars.     5-star-non-fiction science society               Author  9 books455 followers     July 28, 2020   In many ways, reading this book was similar to reading Pinker's book "Better Angels of our Nature." The theory of the book was straight-forward, the evidence was well-organized, and the insights from the data were presented clearly. The first drawback to reading this book is that it covers a lot of the same ground as "Better Angels of our Nature." The second drawback to this book is that...well, even if the conclusions of this book aren't common sense, to people who are roughly familiar with enlightenment ideals and are fairly well-read on current affairs, it sort of is common sense. That's a nice way of saying that there are few ideas in this book that will leave you awe-struck. That's not to see that Pinker isn't capable of writing such a book. I found "The Blank Slate" to be just such a book. That book remains one of my favorite books to this day. That is also the book I point to when I want to convince people what a great thinker Pinker is.  Pinker's argument is straightforward and comes in the preface: "I will present a different understanding of the world, grounded in fact and inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment: reason, science, humanism, and progress. Enlightenment ideals, I hope to show, are timeless, but they have never been more relevant than they are right now." (page 12).  If Enlightenment ideas are timeless, then why do they need a defense? Pinker's answer: "The ideals of the Enlightenment are products of human reason, but they always struggle with other strands of human nature: loyalty to tribe, deference to authority, magical thinking, the blaming of misfortune on evildoers" (page 18).  In many ways, "Enlightenment Now" is similar to "Factfullness" in its use of quantitative data to make the case that life is indeed getting better. Pinker's earlier book "Better Angels of our Nature" was also a book that relied heavily on quantitative data. However, by my recollection, that book did a better job of reflecting on how the numbers were arrived at. I think numeracy is an important skill, and too often it is easy to be wowed by numbers without realizing how they are produced and the difficulty of getting reliable numbers in certain contexts -- for example, the distant past and developing countries. My recollection of "Better Angels" is a few years removed, but I seem to remember Pinker doing a better job with educating readers on how numbers were arrived at. Having said that, I do think the graphs are presented in a useful and simple way. Often, the data comes in the form of time series line charts. I think the repeated use of these kinds of statistics is great for more casual readers who need to be convinced.  Another drawback to this book is that it tends to ignore and short-change the possibility of cataclysmic blowups. The discussion of the disruptive power of AI is discussed briefly, but pales in seriousness to Yuval Harari's analysis in "21 Lessons for the 21st Century." The benefits of enlightenment are discussed abundantly, but Frankenstein monsters like mortgage-backed securities are barely mentioned. In addition, one of the most important trends of the 21st century, the explosion of debt is barely discussed. The looming debt crisis (or, I should say crises since we are talking about various kinds of debts, government, municipal, shadow banking, and private) as well as other potential crises with systemic implications -- climate change, the growing use of social media, the introduction of disruptive technologies -- are under-discussed in this book. And because these systemic crises are under-discussed, Pinker fails to deal with the mother of all questions about modernity.  Does modernity increase the risk of catastrophic blow-ups?  Since nuclear war, climate change, and contagious financial panics are the product in one way or another of modernity, science, and globalization, is there a likelihood that more potentially catastrophic phenomena could be birthed from them? And, if so, what can we do to prevent potential catastrophic blow-ups from occurring?  Another way to think about the question is this way: In what ways is modern progress like a financial bubble?  For me, a high point of the book was its discussion of tribal epistemology. I have read short articles on tribal thinking, but the review of the literature here was excellent. And for those who are searching for literature that discusses this topic, the book can make for an effective gateway.  This was written in the Guardian about this book: "More pertinently, the failed 2016 campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Remain demonstrated that, in the eyes of many people, “progress” simply meant more of the same. When people feel trapped and patronised by progress, then any alternative – even regress – will feel like freedom. Informing them that the policies of the past 40 years are still the best available starts to sound hopeless." (Full review here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...) Perhaps that's another way of saying that technocratic modernity (complete with its wonky charts) can feel emotionally ungratifying. Instead of gradual improvements and progress by a thousand nudges, there is a part of the soul that yearns for liberation, heroism, and love. People like stories with heroes and villains. Enlightenment often sees the world in terms of mechanical and quasi-mechanical cause and effect relationships. Heroism seems less like heroism when it requires design and system-thinking rather than great sacrifices.  Nassim Taleb, another writer whose work I admire, steeps his writing in decidedly non-modern ideas and sentiments -- his thinking perhaps is best described as classical and romantic. I believe anyone who reads this book ought to put it in conversation with some of Taleb's writing (one or two books is enough).  I'm sure each of the authors would hate to hear it, but I'll say it anyway -- they are better read together than separately. The unabashed modernist/enlightenment thinker is better with a classical/romantic counterpart and vice versa.  I will repeat this: People who are only familiar with Pinker for "Better Angels" and "Enlightenment Now" ought to read his earlier work "Blank Slate." That book, more than his more recent works, demonstrates that he is a true thinker and not simply a chart-jockey or dataphile.  Overall, even if you do not need to be convinced of the merit of enlightenment ideas and ideals, this is a wonderful book to read.      books-of-2020 top-books
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<div><div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/155663-david-rubenstein"></a></section><section><p>801 reviews2,502 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1094520699">November 1, 2014</a></section><div><p>I have enjoyed every one of Steven Pinker's books, and this one is no exception. Pinker writes engagingly, with humor, with intelligence, and with authority. He is the chair of the Usage Panel of the <i>American Heritage Dictionary</i>, so he has useful insights into how the English language is being used in print. As a linguist, he not only knows all the "rules" of writing, he understands the logic (or illogic) behind them. Moreover, he understands which "rules" are real, and which ones were just dreamed up for the heck of it. <p>Pinker shows how many writers fall into a wide range of traps. The chief trap is <i>the curse of knowledge</i>. This occurs when a writer assumes that his reader knows as much as himself. Some people believe that opaque writing is a deliberate choice. Pseudo-intellectuals often dress up their writings with "highfalutin gobbledygook, as shown in this cartoon: But even sincere, intelligent writers can overestimate their readers' knowledge, and this leads to lots of wasted effort.</p><p>Pinker discusses the old-fashioned technique of diagramming a sentence. This technique used to be taught in schools, but he shows that the technique is not the best. He introduces a tree technique that focuses not on the parts of speech, but on the internal structure of a sentence and the relationships between its components. The focus is more on clarity, rather than on grammar.</p><p>Pinker also puts great stock on the quality of coherence. Do sentences fit together, with one leading logically to the next? Are relationships between ideas written clearly, or are they muddled with sloppy organization? Pinker shows how a writer can organize his ideas and make the reader's job easier.</p><p>I learned some fascinating stuff. People confuse the "past tense" with "past time." For example, I learned that the past tense of the words can, will, may, and shall, are could, would, might, and should. Pinker makes it clear when to use one of these words rather than the other. Some rules, like forbidding the use of a preposition at the end of a sentence, or splitting infinitives with an adverb, are simply superstitions. The choice of where to place a preposition, or when to split an infinitive, should depend on clarity and not on someone's say-so.</p><p>Throughout the book, there are side-by-side comparisons between sentences showing two options. The version on the left is usually ungrammatical or unclear, while the corrected version on the right is generally a better example. Pinker discusses the reasons <i>why</i> one alternative is better than the other, and the reasons have nothing to do with blindly following rules; the reasons always explain why one version is clearer or more easily understood.</p><p>If you are a writer, then you will want to read this book. If you are not a writer, but simply curious about language--as I am--then this book can also feed your curiosity. Highly recommended!</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/155663?shelf=linguistics">linguistics</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/155663?shelf=nonfiction">nonfiction</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/4213258-bradley"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>5 books3,845 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2327436848">April 4, 2018</a></section><div><p>I was thoroughly charmed by this well-written guide on how to write better. :) <p>Maybe it's because real language changes. Maybe it's because true clarity comes from the spaces between the words and not absolutely from the rules about the words.</p><p>But that's not to say that this cogent discussion on grammar isn't rife with practical examples and great reflection, because it does. It just happens to bring up the fact that one generation's Haberdash is another's charming fireside chat. Moreover, it uses humor, skepticism, and common sense to throw out the grammar nazism and return us back to the firm hand of insight and delight.</p><p>For writing should not be a chore. </p><p>It should edify, clarify, and wrap us up in a warm comforter and hand us a favorite beverage and ramble on about what it really loved about its day. Am I clear? </p><p>Rules are for chumps, yo. But learn them first before you break them. :)</p><p>(Advice I think I will always have to take to heart.)</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/4213258?shelf=2018-shelf">2018-shelf</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/4213258?shelf=non-fiction">non-fiction</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/4213258?shelf=writing">writing</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/8525332-andrew"></a></section><section><p>527 reviews159 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1042318084">January 23, 2015</a></section><div><p>It started well. Your brain will finish the rest of that sentence.<p>Or so Steven Pinker explains. The best way to describe this book is as a style guide that relies on neuroscience. Instead of admonishments based on grammar, old rules, and urban myths, Pinker explains the best way to write based on how our brain understand words on a page. Which makes this one of the more readable style guides out there in that it has a purpose instead of just being a list of literary taboos.</p><p>But the list of taboos makes an appearance in the last third. And then it becomes just another style guide that's better for reference than for reading. Pinker doesn't provide bad advice here - he comes down in favour of the Oxford comma so I'm already a fan - but the scientific explanations make fewer appearances and the whole thing just becomes a little less interesting. He retains a sense of style throughout, which will carry you, just, to the end.</p><p>Also on <a href="https://twitter.com/Dr_A_Taubman">Twitter</a></p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/8525332?shelf=studies-and-ologies">studies-and-ologies</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/3357765-jimmy"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>5 books199 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2359408768">April 21, 2018</a></section><div><p>Chapter 1 summary: <p>1. Insist on fresh wording and concrete imagery over familiar verbiage and abstract summary. <br />2. Pay attention to the readers' vantage point and the target of their gaze. <br />3. Use the judicious placement of an uncommon word or idiom against a backdrop of simple nouns and verbs. <br />4. Use parallel syntax. <br />5. Have an occasional planned surprise. <br />6. Present a telling detail that obviates an explicit pronouncement. <br />7. Use meter and sound that resonates with the meaning and mood. </p><p>Chapter 2 summary: </p><p>1. The author calls attention to habits that "result in soggy prose": metadiscourse, signposting, hedging, apologizing, professional narcissism, cliches, mixed metaphors, metaconcepts, zombie nouns, and unnecessary passives. <br />2. "The writer, in conversation with a reader, directs the reader's gaze to something in the world." Each of don'ts in #1 make a writer stray. </p><p>Chapter 3 summary: </p><p>1. Be careful of sharing knowledge that your reader does not understand. </p><p>Chapter 4 summary: </p><p>1. Learn grammar and syntax. <br />2. Avoid unnecessary words and phrases. <br />3. Avoid sentences beginning with "there is" or "it is." <br />4. That does not mean cutting out every single word that is redundant in context. <br />5. Make use of structural parallelism and understand its rules. <br />6. Pull unrelated (but mutually attracted) phrases apart to avoid confusion. <br />7. Save the heaviest for last in a sentence. <br />8. "Topic, then comment" or "Given, then new." </p><p>Chapter 5 summary: </p><p>1. Monologophobia is the fear of using the same word more than once. On the other hand, "elegant variation" is using different words to identify the same thing. Both can be a problem. <br />2. Coherence is important. A lengthy discussion about this one. For example, it is important NOT to begin with what something is NOT. So after you read this, do NOT think about a white bear. <br />3. "A coherent text is a designed object." </p><p>Chapter 6 summary: </p><p>1. An alphabetical list of common problems in grammar. Be sure to read this carefully and follow all suggestions otherwise the planets in our solar system will implode on each other and we will all die. And you do not want to be responsible for that one, do you? </p><p>For a book about writing, this was a real slog to plod through. </p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/3357765?shelf=writing">writing</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/29002534-valeriu-gherghel"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>6 books1,149 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3629721714">June 20, 2021</a></section><div><p>Ante Scriptum. După nota de mai jos am pus o mică bibliografie comentată despre arta scrisului.<p>Lucrarea lui Pinker nu e neapărat pentru viitorii poeți și prozatori (deși n-ar fi rău să răsfoiască volumul lui Pinker), ci, mai degrabă, pentru jurnaliști și, de ce nu?, pentru bieți eseiști ca subsemnatul. </p><p>Subscriu întru totul la una dintre observațiile autorului (poate e cea mai importantă). Un filosof (un „înțelept”, un om de știință etc.) nu e tenebros fiindcă gîndește mai profund decît vulgul profan (noooooo), e tenebros fiindcă și-a propus deliberat asta. Ce-i drept, articolele academice (legendare pentru opacitatea lor) se adresează, de obicei, unui grup microscopic de aleși (filosofii vorbesc filosofilor, lingviștii lingviștilor, hermeneuții hermeneuților ș.a.m.d.). Doar grupul e chemat să intre în întuneric și să-i măsoare adîncimea.</p><p>Prost e cînd filosofii se adresează umanității (trecute, prezente și viitoare) în întregul ei. Steven Pinkler încearcă să-i scuze. Savanții ar fi atît de orbiți de ceea ce știu / cunosc / gîndesc, încît nu-și dau seama că știința lor îi depășește pe muritorii de rînd și că discursul lor e o complicație „păsărească”. Ei își ignoră complet publicul. Magistrul abscons nu se uită la studenți. Din păcate, mulți scriu în chipul cel mai încîlcit, fiindcă așa și-au propus din capul locului. Pur și simplu! Scopul lor nu este „trezirea” celorlalți, luminarea. Scopul lor e să-i lase cu gura căscată pe cititori. Să-i stupefieze. În treacăt fie spus, asta se numește impostură.</p><p>Reacția cititorului e una singură: „Ai citit, frate? Aici pare a fi ceva foarte adînc. N-am priceput nimic, de aia e așa de adînc”.</p><p>Steven Pinkler are dreptate. Un scriitor (scriptor) cinstit e limpede și coerent. Vrea să-i convingă pe cititori și nu să-i umilească. Stilul lui adaugă frumusețe lumii: „Style adds beauty to the world”...</p><p>Bibliografie</p><p>1. Umberto Eco, <i>Cum se face o teză de licenţă: disciplinele umaniste</i>, traducere de George Popescu, Iaşi: Polirom, 2006, 2020, 264p.<br /><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3074067504?book_show_action=false&amp;from_review_page=1">https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...</a><br />2. Stephen King, <i>Misterul Regelui. Despre scris</i>, traducere de Mircea Pricăjan, București: Editura Nemira, 2016, 280p.<br /><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2759197091?book_show_action=false&amp;from_review_page=1">https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...</a><br />3. Howard Mittelmark &amp; Sandra Newman, <i>Cum să NU scrii un roman: Arta greșelilor</i>, traducere de Bogdan-Alexandru Stănescu, București: Baroque Books &amp; Arts, 2014, 310p.<br /><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26058116-cum-s-nu-scrii-un-roman?ac=1&amp;from_search=true&amp;qid=BvQMiVN8Xo&amp;rank=1">https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...</a><br />4. Anne Lamott, <i>Cum înveți să scrii ficțiune pas cu pas. Sugestii despre scris si viață</i>, traducere de Ileana Ioniţă-Iancu, Pitești: Paralela 45, 2013.<br />5. Mario Vargas Llosa, <i>Scrisori către un tînăr romancier</i>, traducere de Mihai Cantuniari, București: Humanitas, 2010, 144p.<br /><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3355906866?book_show_action=false&amp;from_review_page=1">https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...</a><br />6. William Zinsser, <i>Cum să scriem bine: Ghidul clasic pentru scriitorii de nonficţiune</i>, traducere de Amalia Mărăşescu, Piteşti: Paralela 45, 2013, 224p.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/136159162-xeon"></a></section><section><p>34 reviews258 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5206136617">January 2, 2023</a></section><div><p>As part of my studies, this past semester I had to take an English writing class. Pinker's book <i>The Sense of Style</i> was part of the assigned readings. Throughout the semester we would do feedback loops of the writing process for increasingly demanding essays. And in the middle of the semester, I wrote my worst essay. Initially, I thought it was pretty clever. I had compressed a swath of ideas into the minimum word count while meeting the requirements. The professor, in their wisdom, did not think so. They explained why, and offered the opportunity to rewrite it. This is what led me to actually read this whole book rather than skimming the few selections we were assigned. <p>When I had started the course, and the book, what I had noticed immediately was that English writing fit squarely in much of what I believed: this is just applied epistemology, philosophy of language, and logic. Easy peasy I thought. It is the creation, transmission, or expenditure of truth. Language is just the channel through which this was done. And the goal is to most efficiently communicate things, but also balance this with making sure the things that are communicated are worthwhile or effective. However, this is easier said than done.</p><p>In this review, I shall share that original essay, use the lessons of Pinker to point out areas of improvement, and explain some of what I learned. And please, feel free to critique this essay as well (because while I am fairly certain Steven Pinker lives within a mile from me, I do not wish to share this with him for fear he would be left aghast)</p><p>Prompt: essentially, to write anything related to individuality versus society, reference the essay <i>Disciplining the Individual</i> by Patrick Miller and three other sources, and be at least 1000 words. </p><p><i>The Perfect Citizen, But The Nonexistent Individual</i> by Xeon</p><blockquote><p>Let us consider a thought experiment. Imagine, a person who forgets their desires and needs to live only in accordance with the laws of their region. Specifically, they use rules and laws as a paradigm of what actions to do, and thus use them to test the limits of such constraints. This would be their sole purpose, the activity to which they spend all their time upon. Then, doing the same thing for, say, different ethical paradigms. As shall be seen, such a thought experiment would yield paradoxes or inefficiencies, but also permits the extraction of the societal properties which individuals suffer from, benefit from, or can leverage.</p><p>There are similar real world instances of this. For example, it could be argued labs and scientists live in accordance with but at the limits of reality. By virtue of this, they discover new truths of reality. Furthermore, living under an authoritarian government may be analogously similar. On the same line of reasoning, such a thought experiment would yield new truths for the functioning of society itself. For example, to do so in regards to laws might demonstrate existing contradictions within domains of law or interesting permutations of constraints that make up singular circumstances (such as ill-fortuned individuals), and thus that these laws and rules may be in need of reformation. In the context of ethics, it would be difficult since these are subjective and up to the individual. Nonetheless, one way such could be performed is that the constant interpretation of whatever chosen ethical systems to every single action may yield ambiguities within the theories. Alternatively, since many ethical theories are seemingly compatible or overlap with each other, interpreting and applying the ethical systems to every single action may yield ambiguities amongst theories. Lastly, what could be demonstrated is how the degree to which the deontological ideals of a given means of living can not be consistently fulfilled in the backdrop of balancing other practical duties. Such were the findings of a stunt journalist when trying to live as literally to the Bible and as the most healthy person possible (Jacobs 2007; Jacobs 2012).</p> <p>More specifically, to analyze the ramifications and nuances of such a thought experiment, an attribute presents itself. This is that there are multiple layers and spheres in which rules are circumscribed, dynamically constraining the individual. For example, from the international level, national level, state level, and local level of laws. Then there are also different rules or policies at specific institutions, such as school as a student, at the company one is an employee at, or the business one is a customer at. Strongly tied, though not necessarily always the same, is that of geographical locations. For example, take the case of embassies or consulates, specially sanctioned buildings within countries. By simply stepping into the premises of such, one can garner various international protections (United Nations 1963). Here the point that may be observed is that whether by socially construed institutions or physically existent locations, these combine to create specific contexts as preconditions which if fulfilled, then certain things should or should not be conducted. Here, the most intriguing distinction is that either laws or ethics can be written in the manner of negative or positive instantiations such as “If X, do not Y” or “If X, do Y.” Thus, to assimilate the aforementioned, an individual is simply the remainder of thousands of dynamically activating conditional statements; an individual is the remainder after social rules.</p><p>However, social rules can also be the very thing which best permits the potential flourishing of individuals. From others’ specialization, comparative advantages, and economies of scale, the pie grows larger for everyone (Mankiw 2021). Or as it is said, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” Furthermore, the purpose of formal or informal rules may be said to be because of a prisoner’s dilemma (Poundstone 1993). However in this case it would not be a two player game, but an eight billion player game (United Nations 2022). Whereby for the long term equilibrium of society, it is best for everyone to abide by the same rules, which also happens to be the most mutually beneficial. This can be seen whereby preexisting social institutions, incrementally improved over time, perpetuate into the future via socialization by cycling through their constituent members: society is but one large Ship of Theseus, and individuals reap the benefits from the labor of those who came before them.</p><p>The issue is, the very benefit of social institutions can be their flaw. The manifest functions of robustness via cultural reproduction has the latent dysfunction of resilience to change (Merton 1957; Taleb 2012). So, “Every time you see an injustice or an inefficiency or an abnormality” you can in fact only “wish that there were someone or something” (Miller 2019). For it becomes evident it is difficult to correct issues of the system without copious amounts of resources and time. The most one can often do is either attempt to influence those in key positions of power, or conduct their influence by virtue of second order effects via other endeavors.</p><p>How then can individuals most flourish? The solution for both a life of excess stringency to rules as well as objective systemic change is that of balance (and action, of course). Whether as best originally posited as the golden mean in Western philosophy or tao in Eastern philosophy, a more specific, but modern and technical, instantiation of this would be that of optimizations from math. For even in the jungle of the constraints and confines of society, there is hope. One simply need be creative. This is balance at its truest; when one can effortlessly glide through, find gaps within, or take advantage of the existing structures of society. If society truly can be symbolically represented as but sets of conditional statements, what is physically possible yet socially unaddressed? Such as how there are hidden gem locations in cities around the world, how the guise of setting up an entity can provide individuals additional rights and protections, how a corporation can have its own county and surrogate city where it even provides the infrastructure, or how certain individuals can travel anywhere in the world anytime without the need of visas. Regardless of whatever predicament, the other more underlying solution is, as always, to work on oneself to the degree that is possible. For as famed Russian writer Leo Tolstoy once put it, “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”</p><br />Works Cited<br />Jacobs, A. J. Drop Dead Healthy: One Man's Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection. Simon &amp; <br />	Schuster, 2012. <br />Jacobs, A. J. The Year of Living Biblically. Simon &amp; Schuster, 2007. <br />Mankiw, Nicholas Gregory. Principles of Economics. Cengage Learning, 2021. <br />Miller, Patrick Lee. Disciplining the Individual. Medium, Arc Digital, 29 March 2019, <br />	<a href="https://medium.com/arc-digital/disciplining-the-individual-1238ac3e558c">https://medium.com/arc-digital/discip...</a>. <br />Merton, Robert King. Social Theory and Social Structure. Free Press, 1957. <br />Poundstone, William. Prisoner's Dilemma. Anchor Books, 1993. <br />Taleb, Nassim. Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder. Random House, 2012. <br />United Nations. Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. 1963. <br />	<a href="https://legal.un.org/ilc/texts/instruments/english/conventions/9_2_1963.pdf">https://legal.un.org/ilc/texts/instru...</a>.<br />United Nations. World Population Prospects. 2022.<br /><a href="https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.development.desa.pd/files/wpp2022_summary_of_results.pdf">https://www.un.org/development/desa/p...</a></blockquote><br />Now, you must understand: Coming in, the developmental capacities of young Xeon were stagnant. He had trouble referring to himself in his own writing. He keenly tried to speak only of facts. He avoided using his beliefs and deferred to the words of authority figures. He utilized theory much. He did not care about pandering to readers. He placed the burden of connections and background information on the reader. <p>But, Pinker swiftly corrected all this. </p><p>My favorite quotes include the following (but trust me, there are a <i>lot</i> of other tips in the book):</p><blockquote><p>"As Thomas and Turner note, “When we open a cookbook, we completely put aside—and expect the author to put aside—the kind of question that leads to the heart of certain philosophic and religious traditions. Is it possible to talk about cooking? Do eggs really exist? Is food something about which knowledge is possible? Can anyone else ever tell us anything true about cooking? … Classic style similarly puts aside as inappropriate philosophical questions about its enterprise. If it took those questions up, it could never get around to treating its subject, and its purpose is exclusively to treat its subject.”"</p><p>"Classic style is not the same as the common but unhelpful advice to “avoid abstraction.” Sometimes we do have to write about abstract ideas. What classic style does is explain them as if they were objects and forces that would be recognizable to anyone standing in a position to see them."</p><p>"Classic writing, with its assumption of equality between writer and reader, makes the reader feel like a genius. Bad writing makes the reader feel like a dunce."</p><p>"Could you recognize a “level” or a “perspective” if you met one on the street? Could you point it out to someone else? What about an approach, an assumption, a concept, a condition, a context, a framework, an issue, a model, a process, a range, a role, a strategy, a tendency, or a variable?"</p><br />"Often the pronouns I, me, and you are not just harmless but downright helpful. They simulate a conversation, as classic style recommends, and they are gifts to the memory-challenged reader."<p>“"Please, sir; I didn’t do it! It was done! Try to conquer your cowardice, and start your concluding chapter with the creative assertion: Lo! I found …"”</p></blockquote><br />Pinker advocates for something called the Classical style. Being a researcher, he would use evidence from cognitive psychology to support claims as well as experiences and examples of bad academic or technical writing to contrast with. Both aspects uniquely resonated with me. <p>Even for technical writing, my essay is not written well. And it really need not be that way. Here's why:</p><blockquote>1. I could have written a clearer and better thesis statement.<br />2. For the thought experiment I posit, I should at least have applied it or made it relevant for the normal person. The point is to ask: who cares? And I do not think I really addressed this. <br />3. For the amount of sociology and economics I mentioned, I should have at least provided examples of each. Besides this, I could have also defined the advanced vocabulary I used along the way. I did neither of these things, thus making it too abstract.<br />4. Rereading, I do not think I make a reader feel enlightened. I believe it is because I was just throwing up information, rather than walking through it.<br />5. The quote on identifying something on the street was the most impactful: the questions. I feel like a kid, with an older sibling giving me a tirade. As it relates to this essay, little can be pointed to or has real world referents, or at least I did not even attempt to do so. Once more, I could have used more examples.<br />6. On the use of pronouns to refer to myself, Pinker explained that it is okay, and in fact helpful in a variety of ways, to refer to oneself and to siphon from one's own experiences. As my professor explained, this is what gives writing our voice, a means of speaking our personal truths. </blockquote><br />I wish I could share my other essays, because I really did improve and had an excellent comeback. But this review is becoming too long as it is.<p>The book, overall, was very useful. I wonder if I am one of the few readers who got the most out of it, because the advice and instruction were peculiarly useful for me. Admittedly, I think I was in dire need of repair: reading textbooks and old texts has tainted me, and I had forgotten the very language of our times. I ascended from the abyss I was in, to a new light that I knew not of. And for that, I am grateful.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/136159162?shelf=handbooks">handbooks</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/14046996-roy-lotz"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>1 book8,092 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1099942158">June 7, 2016</a></section><div><p>I’ve long admired Pinker’s poise with the pen. Both <i>The Blank Slate</i> and <i>The Language Instinct</i> (the two books of his I’d before read) are, in my opinion at least, conspicuously well-written. Popular science is, contrary to what one might expect, a difficult genre; the writer must take complex ideas from esoteric subjects—ideas usually mired in technical terminology—and release them from their provincial prisons. Added to this complicated task of exegesis, the writer of popular science must also work hard to entertain; for popular science, like popular music, isn’t a success unless it sells. So when I heard that Pinker had just come out with a style guide, I quite naturally noticed; as I am in perfect agreement with Pinker when he says:<br /><blockquote>I love style manuals. Ever since I was assigned Strunk and White’s <i>The Elements of Style</i> in an introductory psychology course, the writing guide has been among my favorite literary genres. It’s not just that I welcome advice on the lifelong challenge of perfecting the craft of writing. It’s also that credible guidance on writing must itself be well written, and the best of the manuals are paragons of their own advice.</blockquote><br />So, with my usual overblown expectations, I cracked open the pages of this book, hoping to hear secrets from a professional. I will spoil the surprise and say that I was a bit disappointed; the book was quite good, but could have been much better. So allow me, if you will, to go through it chapter by chapter, noting the good, the bad, and the boring.<p>	This book starts out strong. Pinker acknowledges what I wish more style guides would: that the foundation of good writing is not abiding by “proper” grammar, nor mastering some rhetorical tricks, but is simply being a sensitive reader. In this vein, Pinker chooses four examples of good writing, and pulls them apart, providing us with a quick glimpse inside Pinker’s readerly mind. (Speaking for myself, I think I’ve learned more about the art of writing from acquiring the habit of writing down attractive quotations than from all of the style guides put together.) Pinker also acknowledges something that many guides do not address: that most guides are not properly guides to writing, but to revising. Perhaps there are some who naturally speak in balanced phrases and arresting metaphors; but for most of us, elegance is a product of careful reworking, of obsessive rewriting, of assiduous editing.</p><p>	Pinker’s next two chapters are also strong. First, he discusses a certain philosophy of style: Classic Style. This view is guided by two metaphors: conversation and vision. The writer of classic prose treats the reader as a conversation partner—that is, as an equal. Thus, new information is not presented as oracular pronouncements, but as a guiding of the reader’s eye to previously unexamined bits of terrain—just like one might tell an interesting factoid to a friend. The implication is that the knowledge was there all along, and that the reader only needed the kindly writer to direct his gaze. It is unsurprising that Pinker chooses this view to endorse; this style is well-suited for popular nonfiction (and book reviews), what with its emphasis on concreteness, simplicity, and directness. Of course, no philosophy of style could embrace all genres (imagine how boring the world would be if everyone wrote like Pinker?). With that caveat on mind, I thought this view, and Pinker’s presentation of it, very attractive.</p><p>	Next, Pinker discusses what he calls the Curse of Knowledge. This is simply the difficulty that we all have in imagining what it's like not to know something we do know. This has been proven in experiment, but daily life is full of copious examples: how many times have instructions from a teacher or a boss struck you as ambiguous, vague, confusing? People aren't good at giving instructions because they aren't good at imagining what it's like to <i>need</i> instructions for something they know how to do. And even when people are made aware of this tendency—namely, the tendency to assume that other people are aware of the same knowledge as are you—they aren’t very good at making the leap to clarity. The only remedy, Pinker suggests, is an outside editor: “Social psychologists have found that we are overconfident, sometimes to the point of delusion, about our ability to infer what other people think, even the people who are closest to us. Only when we ask those people do we discover that what’s obvious to us isn’t obvious to them. That’s why professional writers have editors.” (Speaking for myself again, it’s an alarming experience to have somebody single out a sentence as being obscure, which you found, after copious editing, to be clear as day.)</p><p>	The next chapter is where the book petered out. Pinker, perhaps himself suffering from the curse of knowledge, launches into an explanation of the tree-like nature of grammatical relationships. For readers of <i>The Language Instinct</i>, this will be partially old ground. His presentation here, however, is somehow less compelling. The tree diagrams struck me as unnecessary; I don’t need a picture to understand why “The impact, which theories of economics predict </p><u>are</u> bound to be felt sooner or later, could be enormous” is wrong. Further, I don’t need tree diagrams to understand the utility of passive voice, or why sentences like this one, penned by Bob Dole, should be avoided: “The view that beating a third-rate Serbian military that for the third time in a decade is brutally targeting civilians is hardly worth the effort is not based on a lack of understanding of what is occurring on the ground.” In short, in Pinker's attempt to make the subject of grammar more clear using linguistics, his explanations became tiresome and superfluous.<p>	With chapter 5, the book begins to be interesting once more. Here, Pinker discusses the art of composition on a larger scale—how to put ideas into an orderly succession, how to signal transitions of topic, etc. He has some sensible things to say, but nothing very new, I’m afraid. It is, however, inevitable that there be a large degree of overlap between style guides. Good writing is, of course, various in style and form; but certain lessons are basic, such as how to arrange points coherently.</p><p>	Then we get to the final chapter, which occupies almost half the book. I predict that this chapter will be either the most useful or the most tedious for readers: if you write often, this will seem like the real meat; but if you don’t, it will seem pointless and pedantic. What Pinker does here is disassemble, point by point, many of the bugbears and hobgoblins of purists, such as the proverbial split infinitive. These rules, as Pinker points out, are usually based on linguistic and historical ignorance, adopted only because their proponents have been vituperative and vocal, not because the rules were reflective of good writing. I personally feel a kind of Schadenfreude seeing Pinker make know-it-alls sound like fools, but perhaps I am just particularly sadistic. Pinker is, however, careful to make a subtle point: just because there are some bad rules, doesn’t mean that all rules should be flouted:</p><blockquote>Phony rules, which proliferate like urban legends and are just as hard to eradicate, are responsible for vast amounts of ham-fisted copyediting and smarty-pants one-upmanship. Yet when language scholars try to debunk the spurious rules, the dichotomizing mindset imagines that they are trying to abolish all standards of good writing. It is as if anyone who proposed repealing a stupid law, like the one forbidding interracial marriage, must be a black-cloaked, bomb-clutching anarchist.</blockquote><br />So Pinker is not saying there are no rules to language, and no common characteristics to good writing; all he is saying is that these rules and advice should be based on evidence, not ignorance. Clearly, if Pinker didn’t think there were any common characteristics of good writing, he wouldn’t write a style guide. (And, while I’m at it, if he didn’t think that cultural and environmental influences were important—as some people who accuse him of being a genetic deterministic claim—then he wouldn’t write a style guide, either.)<p>	Style guides are stuck in a bit of a paradox. This book is aimed at somebody who reads and writes habitually; it is full of technical advice for the frequent practitioner. Thus, Pinker isn't working as hard to be as entertaining as in his other books, so the tone is somewhat more dry than in, say, <i>The Blank Slate</i>; this quite naturally restricts his readership to a subset of those who often write. On the other hand, if you read and write much, Pinker won’t say much that is surprising; frequent practice gives one a feel for the correct and the spurious rule, the elegant and the jumbled grammatical form. Thus, Pinker is in the odd position of delivering a sermon to a congregation of priests: the nonwriter will be bored because the advice is irrelevant, and the writer will be bored because the advice is old news.</p><p>	But I'll admit that Pinker did clear up some things I was a bit shaky on. For example, the rules governing singular and plural can get a little hairy. We say “The mac and cheese </p><u>is</u>,” but “Fred and Joe <u>are</u>”—because mac and cheese is treated as one thing, whereas Fred and Joe are two separate things. But what about phrases less common than mac and cheese, such as “flora and fauna”? I recently encountered this very problem when writing a review of Darwin’s <i>Voyage of the Beagle</i>: I was unsure whether to say “the flora and fauna <u>is</u>,” or “the flora and fauna <u>are</u>.” Are they two separate things, or one inclusive thing like mac and cheese? Or consider other ambiguous cases, like with the word “or.” What’s better: “<u>Was</u> the bicycle or the scooters damaged?” or “<u>Were</u> the bicycle or the scooters damaged?” Both sound a bit odd to me.<p>	Perhaps the biggest drawback of this book, aside from the tree diagrams, was simply the formatting. It’s laid out like a work of popular science, not a work of reference; thus, it would be fairly tedious to look up any specific questions one had. For that reason, I can’t see it becoming terribly influential; writers can’t point to a specific bullet-point or principle in order to debate punctilious copy-editors. That’s a shame, because Pinker has some really useful things to say on the subject. Writing is hard enough without dogmatic pedants screaming in your ear. But while I don't think this book is destined for classic status, it is still certainly worth reading. Pinker manages to present a nuanced, evidence-based view of grammar, while upholding the values that all careful readers and writers hold dear: consistency, clarity, and grace.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/14046996?shelf=help-me-help-myself">help-me-help-myself</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/14046996?shelf=prose-style">prose-style</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/21413858-k-j-charles"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>57 books7,650 followers</p></section></div><section><section><p><b>Read</b></p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4866640268">July 23, 2022</a></section><div><p>Pretty good style guide, especially re sentence/structure organisation. The focus is very much on clarity and bringing across what you want to achieve, which means he doesn't indulge in sweeping prescriptivist instructions like "cut unnecessary words"--the point is to consider what words in what order best do the job. A useful corrective to the shibboleth-ridden world of style advice.</p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/21413858?shelf=writing">writing</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/5160409-jenny"></a></section><section><p>563 reviews772 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3803895343">February 17, 2021</a></section><div><p><i>The Sense of Style</i> was mandatory reading for me and the rest of my tenth-grade English class. We were so <i>dismayed</i> when this was assigned; I remember thinking, “Great! On top of learning grammar in class, now we have to read about it at home too.” I skimmed <i>The Sense of Style</i> and called it a day. (Which is probably why I never realized this book <i>isn’t</i> about grammar. At least, not entirely.)<p>Years later, I’ve picked this up of my own volition. And I have found Steven Pinker’s style manual to be immensely helpful in articulating and elucidating not only the thornier parts of my own writing—the sentences that sound a smidge off but I can’t pinpoint why—but also the esoteric academic prose I now have to read every day for my master’s degree. </p><p>In fact, I’m thinking of sending a copy to each of my professors. Too unsubtle, you think?</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/5160409?shelf=audiobook">audiobook</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/5160409?shelf=beautiful-writing">beautiful-writing</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/5160409?shelf=canadian-author">canadian-author</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/279256-diane"></a></section><section><p>1,079 reviews2,609 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2331871738">March 25, 2018</a></section><div><p>Steven Pinker has created a writer's guide that is interesting, useful, amusing, and also frustrating.<p>I enjoyed the first part of this book, but the middle section got bogged down in parsing sentences and grammar exercises. I put the book down and took a week-long break from it, and debated whether to pick it up again. I finally did finish, but it was a slog. </p><p>My big takeaways from this book were 1) language is constantly changing, and the English language is so inventive that when the grammar police come hollerin' at you that you've written something wrong, chances are there is a dispute over what is correct. 2) Few things in language are correct, and even then, if enough people adopt that word or style, it may eventually be considered correct. 3) This knowledge won't stop the grammar fussbudgets from complaining that "people used to write better," which is also nonsense. Language and writing are created by mankind, and creative writers love to break the rules, so 4) the fussbudgets need to knock it off, already.</p><p>I listened to this book on audio, and I think the boggy sections might have been less frustrating (and easier to skim) if I had read that section in print. </p><p>Recommended, with reservations, for those who like writers writing about writing.</p><p><b>Opening Passage</b><br />"I love style manuals. Ever since I was assigned Strunk and White's <i>The Elements of Style</i> in an introductory psychology course, the writing guide has been among my favorite literary genres. It's not just that I welcome advice on the lifelong challenge of perfecting the craft of writing. It's also that credible guidance on writing must itself be well written, and the best of the manuals are paragons of their own advice. William Strunk's course notes on writing, which his student E. B. White turned into their famous little book, was studded with gems of self-exemplifcation such as "Write with nouns and verbs," "Put the emphatic words of a sentence at the end," and best of all, his prime directive, "Omit needless words."</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/279256?shelf=audiobooks">audiobooks</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/279256?shelf=nonfiction">nonfiction</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/279256?shelf=writers-on-writing">writers-on-writing</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/45199512-rafal"></a></section><section><p>304 reviews18 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2746954545">October 19, 2019</a></section><div><p>Świetna książka. Obowiązkowa pozycja w każdej redakcji. Zamierzam zadbać, żeby w mojej redakcji znalazł się egzemplarz, by wszyscy dziennikarze mogli w wolnych chwilach poczytać. Bo w tej książce każdy rozdział, podrozdział czy akapit wnosi coś wartościowego dla kogoś, kto zajmuje się pisaniem (nawet krótkich dziennikarskich form). <p>Lubię tę książkę między innymi za to, że wyjaśnia w prostych słowach to, co często czuje się intuicyjnie, czytając słabo napisane teksty. Czyta się, widzi się, że coś jest nie halo, nawet wie się co... ale nie bardzo wiadomo, jak to nazwać i wyjaśnić przyczyny. Dzięki tej książce takie intuicje zyskują definicję. A do tego jest oczywiście świetnie napisana a chwilami bardzo dowcipna. </p><p>P.S. Nie przeczytałem na razie angielskiego aneksu. We wstępie przeczytałem, że jest specyficznie skierowany do osób piszących po angielsku. Więc ponieważ po angielsku pisuję głównie maile lub SMS-y, więc uznałem, że na razie nie jestem odbiorcą takiego tekstu. Ale może kiedyś do tego wrócę... bo część polskojęzyczną zamierzam podczytywać bardzo często. </p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/45199512?shelf=steven-pinker">steven-pinker</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/22679327-david-huff"></a></section><section><p>153 reviews46 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2021826833">July 16, 2017</a></section><div><p>Having just embarked on a fairly intensive writing course, I asked my mentor for some recommendations of books on the craft of writing. This book, "The Sense of Style" was at the top of his list, and I can see why.<p>The author, Steven Pinker, is a Psychology professor at Harvard, and has also done much research on language and cognition (he's described as a Cognitive Scientist). Further, he is chair of the Usage Panel of The American Heritage Dictionary. And it shows. All of it. He has written a very readable, engaging, and entertaining manual on writing, providing a wealth of information which will help anyone write better prose. He also goes into considerable detail on the mechanics of good writing, including syntax, noun piles, quantifiers, remote conditionals .... you get the idea. </p><p>Even though he goes quite deep on the technical side, he is very generous with clear, helpful examples of everything, a good many of which are laugh out loud funny. I found the book to be a solid 4 or 4.5, but the final chapter, "Telling Right From Wrong", was a lengthy and very practical compendium of many additional illustrations and applications that took it to a 5. If you are interested in becoming a better writer, you will benefit from this book!</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/113387426-craig"></a></section><section><p>59 reviews18 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4730238958">June 20, 2022</a></section><div><p>One thing starts to seem pretty clear early on here: Steven Pinker rarely teaches undergraduates, or at least rarely has to slog through a pile of their written work himself. <p>No surprises there: professors who are much less famous and fancy than Pinker often teach just a handful of grad students a year and that’s it. Under those conditions you might tend to see most writers as smart, keen, already pretty skilful good-faith actors whose writing is just sadly held back now and then by the foibles of the human mind. As he declares in the handy one-line summary at the beginning of Chapter 3, “The Curse of Knowledge,” Pinker thinks “the main cause of incomprehensible prose is the difficulty of imagining what it’s like for someone else not to know something that you know.” That’s certainly got a role to play much of the time. But speaking as someone who spends an enormous number of his professional hours sifting through and assessing unintelligible prose written by rookie writers, I’m not so sure it’s “the main cause” of incomprehensibility. At least as often, it’s having intentionally troweled on a thick layer of vagueness and bafflegab designed to conceal ignorance, avoid the hard work of thought, and big up the author’s knowledge rather than a struggle with an imprisoning selfhood that blinds us to the sensibilities of others. </p><p>Likewise later, in Chapter 5, “Arcs of Knowledge,” where psycholinguist Pinker has all sorts of complicated theories involving trees of linked phrases and elaborate syntactic systems to account for failures to “ensure that readers will grasp the topic, get the point, keep track of the players, and see how one idea follows from another”—when the problem seems <i>at least</i> as likely to be that the confusing writer is simply lazily typing away on autopilot, only half-grasps the topic, doesn’t have good working methods for “keeping track of the players” themselves, and hasn’t yet fully worked out “how one idea follows from another.” </p><p>Pinker is proposing interesting alternative accounts of the origins of incomprehensible prose, but these seem like the main writing problems of just a few. They’re interesting, then, but really only of value if Pinker is contentedly preaching to the composition choir rather than trying to teach people how to write. Maybe it’s the fate of style guides like this to preach to that choir in the end, especially books like Pinker’s that aren’t even organized like a coil-bound composition textbook that would allow for looking up specific topics easily, but are instead meant for you to just curl up in your easy chair and read like any other book. One other thing seems pretty clear here, then: while I liked this book and found much of it interesting—especially the earlier, more manageable and much shorter chapters—I wouldn’t dream of giving it to one of my struggling students.</p><p>In the long closing chapter, “Telling Right from Wrong” (187-304), there’s something of an abiding claim or point having to do with the need to jettison many sticklers’ rules about usage, but it’s a kind of disorganized mini handbook rather than a chapter, a curio cabinet of entries under category headings. And in this regard it highlights that same fundamental problem with many usage guides, the question of who and what they’re ultimately for. You can’t really look things up here for ad-hoc advice because you must already be in the know to use the chapter that way. Want to sort out whether it’s okay to split an infinitive? There you’re fine, because that’s filed under “split infinitives” (228-30). But if you’re wondering whether it should be <i>She approved of Sheila taking the job</i> or <i>She approved of Sheila’s taking the job</i>, are you master enough of the argot of the grammarian to know that this is found under “fused participles” (212-3)? You’ll need to be—which is to say, you’ll need to know as much as those who don’t <i>need</i> Pinker’s advice to know where to <i>find</i> Pinker’s advice.</p><p>	And some of the time, you’re probably better off ignoring that advice anyway. I, for one, part company with him almost as often as I’m with him. Take, for example, the section in which he devotes three pages to a weak defense of <i>very unique</i> on the grounds that things are only ever truly unique in certain of their respects, never in all of them. The argument is casuistic, unconvincing, hair-splitting and ultimately beside the point. I know it’s the done thing in style guides now to distance yourself from the fussy prescriptivist Strunks and Whites, loosen your tie, turn your chair around backwards, and have a cool descriptivist real-talk session where you try to be seen tossing out as many of the rules as possible, but defending <i>very unique</i> is just a little too “hey guys it’s Steve your cool grammar uncle” for me. (And I’m not much of a stickler, even when I’m grading essays on the clock.)</p><p>All that said, Pinker is at least somewhat serious about protecting the finely tuned technical instrument of language from the destructive power of reckless use. This always seems to me the best kind of argument for prescriptions in the end rather than the silly arbitrariness of etymology, false analogies with Latin, the question of whether Shakespeare or Austen ever did it, to say nothing of the more sinister kinds of usage policing that originate in racism, classism, etc. The English language is robust and various, but we need it for tons of high-precision work, so sometimes we need to sharpen its blades and oil its moving parts. Yes, it’s true: more and more people use <i>literally</i> as an intensifier, for example. But intensifiers are generally empty and weak, and I think we can see that the language is already really rather extremely very absolutely highly totally utterly full of them. But there’s no synonym for <i>literally</i> that precisely captures the “not figuratively but strictly speaking” sense that sticklers advocate reserving the word for. So there are good reasons to protect <i>literally</i> that don’t make a monster, a fool or a fanatic nitpicker of the protector. In the end, Pinker seems to agree, I think, and he does eventually acknowledge the point about bafflegabbers and thoughtless show-offs, too: “When a not-so-careful writer tries to gussy up his prose with an upmarket word that he mistakenly thinks is a synonym of a common one, like <i>simplistic</i> for <i>simple</i> or <i>fulsome</i> for <i>full</i>, his readers are likely to conclude the worst: that he has paid little attention to what he has read, is affecting an air of sophistication on the cheap, and is polluting a common resource” (198). </p><p>Amen—all that sentence needs is the singular “they” (255-62).</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/10407443-ross-blocher"></a></section><section><p>429 reviews1,336 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4187151669">August 20, 2021</a></section><div><p>What up, word nerds! If you find yourself contemplating the finer points of sentence structure, word usage, and punctuation (and especially if you spend time correcting the speech and writing of others), this is the book for you. Steven Pinker is a polymath who writes on language, cognitive psychology and a host of scientific topics: here he applies his erudition and good humor, as well as his experience as Chair of the Usage Panel of <i>The American Heritage Dictionary</i>, to the topic of clear communication in <i>The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century</i>. As ever, Pinker offers brilliant explanations that reveal the structure of seemingly arbitrary conventions of thought and speech. Rather than writing a sop to pedants, he challenges us to think in terms of the reader and how she parses words on the page (for example, you just formed thoughts about my choice to use the pronoun "she": the gender-neutral singular is covered extensively here). This book is bound to change the way you think about language and will joyously confirm some of your personal preferences while mercilessly smashing others. Everyone who cares deeply about the English language should read it.<p>It's a lot of fun (there are comic strips aplenty and laugh-out-loud usage examples), but it’s not easy reading. You'll have to put your thinking cap on for this one. I don't mean to say that it's all subjunctive and pluperfect and modal auxiliary, but those highfalutin terms are invoked where necessary and may come flying at your head. Pinker dutifully unpacks these concepts, but there are times in which I had to stop and re-read or simply resign myself to duck and not get hit. I employed one of my new favorite ways of reading: listening to the audio book <i>while</i> reading the text. This is a delightful way to get into the zone. Arthur Morey does a yeoman's job of dictating charts and punctuation and describing illustrations, but I'd have been lost without the sentence tree diagrams and the 3-column grids to look at. If you have to choose one, go with the text copy.</p><p>Any thorough accounting of the topics addressed would be a massive undertaking, but I'll share a few highlights. Pinker lampoons our tendency to decry the death of English with new each generation, providing dire predictions of its imminent decline from the 1970s, 1960s, 1910s, 1800s, 1700s and... well, you get the idea. The CU L8TRs and IMHOs of texting are no more indicative of forgotten formal language than the elided and truncated staccato of telegrams in their heyday. A key to being a good writer is to be a good reader, and most of what we learn comes from observing masters at work: Pinker provides examples and breaks down what makes them so satisfying. It's important to use words to form images in the reader's head: "A writer, like a cinematographer, manipulates the viewer's perspective on an ongoing story, with the verbal equivalent of camera angles and quick cuts." We see how a carefully chosen word can break up cliché, invoke a shared cultural reference, or yield clues that save a paragraph of description. "The key to good style, far more than obeying any list of commandments, is to have a clear conception of the make-believe world in which you're pretending to communicate." We are urged to be mindful of our assumed relationship to the reader. "Classic writing, with its assumption of equality between writer and reader, makes the reader feel like a genius. Bad writing makes the reader feel like a dunce." A self-heeding nugget of wisdom: “Omit needless words.” The fault of academese, legalese and jargon is less attributable to intentional obfuscation, and more a problem of "The Curse of Knowledge": our tendency to assume that others already know what we know. One cure can be to have others read your work, or to wait and then re-read your own, addressing instances in which you've assumed everyone shares your familiarity with a topic, or simply catching constructions that are hard to read aloud. "The advice in this and other stylebooks is not so much on how to write as on how to revise."</p><p>Here I shall break these notes up with a new paragraph; which, Pinker reminds us, does not consistently correspond to any unit of discourse (and can even be, contra an army of grade school teachers, a single sentence). Much of the book consists of taking the received "rules" of grammar - don't end a sentence with a preposition, don't split the infinitive, or don't use "like" as "as" - and turning them on their heads. He provides counterexamples from English's most respected writers, popular songs, and common idioms, and dashes their false-analogies-to-Latin, spurious logic, and appeals-to-authority upon the rocks. I stuck with the Oxford comma (aka the serial comma, I’ve now learned) in the previous sentence, inspired by the argument in this book that it is typically the clearer construction. Pinker does not bemoan the loss of sentence diagrams, but employs cascading trees to visualize how our brains uptake sentences as we form meaning from component words. The order matters. A given sentence might need reorganization if it forces the reader to hold a thought for too long or to suspend multiple clauses in her head before the crucial information finally arrives. So much confusion with case- and tense- and subject/verb-agreement arises from those gaps in the tree that are placed too far from their logical partners. Pinker is sensitive to how language is used in the real world, and willing to let conventions slide when language evolves. He provides numerous examples of similar concessions: vestiges of previous generations in which usage battles were fought and lost. And yet, he argues convincingly against select malapropisms and miscarriages of language that he insists will cause trouble for the careful reader. His attack upon the figurative use of "literally" gave me a good laugh: "Like other intensifiers it is usually superfluous, whereas the 'actual fact' sense is indispensable and has no equivalent. And since the figurative use can evoke ludicrous imagery (e.g. <i>The press has literally emasculated the president</i>), it screams, 'I don't think about what my words mean.'"</p><p>There are many additional insights and explanations, new terminology (coordinator, subordinator and determiner will be particularly helpful), things I had never thought of before, and concepts I had previously misunderstood… but hopefully you get an idea of the observations herein. If you need more convincing, a delightful way to hear Pinker present the salient points is in this 54-minute lecture titled <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV5J6BfToSw">Linguistics, Style and Writing in the 21st Century</a>. Happy reading, and happy writing!</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/5177572-genevieve"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>7 books123 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1048388747">June 28, 2015</a></section><div><p>* Originally reviewed on the Night Owls Press blog <a href="http://www.nightowlspress.com/what-were-reading-the-sense-of-style/">here</a>. *<p>Heads-up, editors. In <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/20821371.The_Sense_of_Style_The_Thinking_Person_s_Guide_to_Writing_in_the_21st_Century">The Sense of Style</a>, author <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/3915.Steven_Pinker">Steven Pinker</a> challenges every authoritarian grammarian and language purist who has held sway over the rules of the English language with their dogmatic style books. </p><p>A psycholinguist by profession, Pinker is a scholar of the science of language. So it's no surprise that <i>The Sense of Style</i> feels like a modern alternative to the classic but tired guides of Strunk and White and others. In my days as an English undergrad, Strunk and White's <i>The Elements of Style</i> was the biblical tome of writing. But Pinker arrives with this iconoclastic book to show us that sometimes rules can be tone-deaf to what really makes for transparent and compelling prose. </p><p>Purists often forget that the English language is rife with idiosyncrasies that can't be fit so neatly into rule boxes. You'll see the best kind of rule-breaking among poets and novelists, who often have the better "ear" and feel for language than your clumsy grammarian. Language is chiefly a medium for expression, not just an embodiment of rules. Literature's most gifted writers have often 'broken' the rules using constructions that might have been edited into sterility by heavy-handed editors. The expressive possibilities of language often rely on the rules being bent. </p><p>As you can see, this book isn't your typical manual on grammar and usage. You won't find a list of dos and don'ts in an effort to indoctrinate. Pinker shows us instead that unthinking adherence to manuals actually makes for bad, clunky writing. For example, one of the signature rules in writing is to avoid using the passive voice at all costs. But Pinker argues that if you change every passive sentence into an active one, you're not necessarily improving the prose. The main problem is that the passive construction exists for a purpose—but most people don't know when to use it effectively. Sure, both active and passive constructions convey the same information but they have cognitive differences because of the order of information given. Pinker's rule of thumb: Passive is the preferred construction when the affected entity (the item that receives the action) is the topic of the preceding discussion or when the agent of action is irrelevant to the discussion. In other words, good writing is about having a "sense," about letting your communication goals dictate the writing.</p><p>This book isn't for beginners. Pinker is clear in the Introduction about this and writes that this book is for experienced writers. You will benefit the most from this book if you are a relatively experienced writer and reader, and are familiar with the basic rules of language and grammar. You have to know the rules in order to bend them with style and with compelling reason, to know when to take advantage of loopholes and irregularities.</p><p>The "sense" in <i>The Sense of Style</i> is knowing how a masterful writer moves fluidly between logical rules and combinations, and knows those idiomatic usages and irregularities. The book is packed with examples and is wonderfully readable, which surprised me. Pinker is great at reverse engineering passages and illuminating what writers have done well (or not done well) to convey their ideas. Take lots of notes!</p><p>For those who still crave the utility of a reference manual, the later chapters in the book include lists of words and rules that can be bent and those that can't (in Pinker's opinion). Or, for a bite-size taste of the grammar rules Pinker explores in this book, check out <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/15/steven-pinker-10-grammar-rules-break">this article</a> by Pinker in <i>The Guardian</i>.</p><p>Overall, a great, informative read. I'll be keeping this on my reference shelf.</p><p>[Disclaimer: I received an ARC copy of this book from the publisher through the Goodreads First Reads Program in exchange for an honest review.]</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/5177572?shelf=first-reads-arc">first-reads-arc</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/5177572?shelf=how-to">how-to</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/5177572?shelf=nonfiction">nonfiction</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/13162061-amirography"></a></section><section><p>198 reviews123 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1451486045">November 15, 2017</a></section><div><p>A great book on the considerations for writing non-fiction.<br />This book was written with the amazing style of Pinker's usual writings and it was about that style and practical advice to improve one's writings. I am implementing the lessons I've learned from pinker in my writing process for my blog. And it improved my effectiveness to a great degree. <br />It is worth knowing that most advice on the book contains pretty solid arguments for them. So you can use the arguments to find ways to improve writing, regardless of what language you are writing with. </p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/13162061?shelf=favorites">favorites</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/13162061?shelf=linguistics">linguistics</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/23066833-bloodorange"></a></section><section><p>655 reviews179 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1519261755">February 7, 2017</a></section><div><p>What I expect from a writing guide is either a comprehensive reference book where I can easily find answers to my questions, or - much more valued - explanations so memorable that my writing - or my students' writing - is changed forever. (<a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/909831.Sin_Boldly__Dr__Dave_s_Guide_To_Writing_The_College_Paper">Sin Boldly!: Dr. Dave's Guide To Writing The College Paper</a> worked quite well this year; in one case, the shock of reading the Torah was so strong that a student of mine started to write clearly, because he understood that <b>communicating</b> ideas is the key to good writing. True story.) <p>With this book, we get neither. The explanations are long-winded, frequently involving tree diagrams (meaning they can cause brain damage in grammar-illiterate 16-year-olds), and ultimately unmemorable. I have enjoyed reading it - mostly - but this book is no miracle cure and not a go-to resource. Still, Pinker provides some excellent study material, such as incorrect and doctored sentences, or analysed samples of good writing, which I found very effective for teaching kids close reading.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/23066833?shelf=us">us</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/23066833?shelf=writing-guides">writing-guides</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/11033209-steve"></a></section><section><p>116 reviews4 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1032570807">September 6, 2014</a></section><div><p>Thanks to a Goodreads Firstreads giveaway, I had a chance to read an advanced copy of Pinker's Sense of Style. My thoughts on the book are a bit mixed. Here goes:<p>The Good:<br />--Well, let's be honest--I just read a stylebook cover to cover; it must have SOMETHING going for it!<br />--I found Pinker's wit to be on full display here, and that was a welcome addition to what can sometimes become dry material (i.e., talk of grammar). Pinker's wit is at its best when he slyly breaks all the grammar rules he's discussing in the midst of discussing them only to reveal the trick a paragraph later. An instance of the old aphorism "form follows function" at its best.<br />--In a piece of writing I completed this week, I found myself utilizing advice I'd read in this book and/or considering the constructions of my sentences based on the logic Pinker provides in the book. If a stylebook--a utilitarian genre if there ever was one--turns out to be useful, that certainly bodes well for it.</p><p>The Not-so-good:<br />--I found the structure/form of the book to be a bit two-headed. It was as though the book couldn't decide whether it wanted to be a scholarly monograph about style (to be read cover-to-cover) or a textbook/reference book (to be consulted piecemeal). I chose to approach the book as a monograph; however, I found that there were chapters that read like a monograph and chapters that read like a reference book. Needless to say, the "referencey" chapters were not quite as read-able.<br />--In addition, several of the chapters were far too long to be useful in a textbook setting. Truth be told, perhaps Pinker wasn't shooting for textbook use for his book, but the incongruity here is that the chapters that were most like textbook chapters in their content were the longest (and therefore the least like textbook chapters in their functionality). </p><p>In sum, this was a readable stylebook (a feat in and of itself) that has a lot of 21st-century insights that it would do a lot of us a lot of good to internalize. However, it was also a book that just couldn't make up its mind about its identity. </p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/18517002-sherri"></a></section><section><p>81 reviews</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1000097601">September 7, 2014</a></section><div><p>I started out reading this book as I thought it was intended: a style manual for the modern day writer. I ended up equating it more to a textbook and reference guide for the modern day writer. I can easily see this book being required for college level courses. It is deep into sentence structure,and the entire last chapter is fantastic for reference. <br />I liked his approach of writing so that one's brain has the most effective cognitive response to what it's reading. There were moments when I admit I had to go back and re-read some parts, as it was a bit too dry to keep me engaged but, overall, I found this book to be one of the most original I've read on structure. <br />I will keep this book on my reference shelf; as I've highlighted parts throughout for quick reference. I have not read any of his other books, although I have to say he is a very good writer, and an author I will look for should I want to purchase other books on writing.</p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/2976142-thomas-edmund"></a></section><section><p>881 reviews50 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1272660083">March 6, 2016</a></section><div><p>I love Pinker, and I love writing, so this really was the book for me. It was denser than I expected, and I thus I wouldn't recommend it for any looking for a light read in writing.<p>The focus is more on academic non-fiction than other forms of non-fiction or fiction, but offers generally timeless advice about style and clarity. Pinker strikes a good balance between useful rules and avoiding pedantry. He occasionally breaks his own advice by overusing his large and eccentric vocabulary, but its all in good fun.</p><p>Will require a bit of time to get through but well recommended.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/104936019-tymciolina"></a></section><section><p>211 reviews50 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3201999375">February 29, 2020</a></section><div><p>Pisać każdy może,<br />Trochę lepiej, lub trochę gorzej.<p>Steven Pinker w "Pięknym stylu" odpowiada na pytanie jak pisać lepiej. Odpowiedź brzmi - prosto i czytelnie. Niektóre jego zalecenia są oczywiste - "unikaj słów które ledwo rozumiesz". Inne mogą być zaskakujące - "broń Cię Panie Boże, nie przekształcaj czasownika w rzeczownik". Ja, jako użytkownik potępianego przez niego prawniczego żargonu, dowiedziałam się jak dużo wykroczeń przeciwko stylowi, nieświadomie popełniałam. Setnie się przy tym ubawiłam, bo Steven Pinker swoje uwagi przedstawił w zabawny sposób. </p><p>Wyjątkowo przypadła mi do gustu forma książki - zestawienie zdań źle napisanych ze zdaniami poprawnie sformułowanymi. Wizualizacja (rzeczownik zombie) pozwoliła lepiej zrozumieć jakich lapsusów językowych nie należy popełniać (konstrukcja bezprzedmiotowa), ponieważ przez to wzrasta wrażenie nieczytelności tekstu (podwójna negacja), co wpływa na ograniczenie komunikatywności i klarowności tegoż (trudne słowa i synonimomania). A mogłam napisać inaczej - łatwiej zrozumiałam, dlaczego błędy stylistyczne, utrudniają czytelność tekstu, gdy zobaczyłam i porównałam tekst dobrze i źle napisany.</p><p>Z pewnością nie zostanę drugim Cyceronem czy Juliuszem Cezarem. Wszak obaj panowie byli znani ze świetnego stylu wypowiedzi. Na pewno jednak dzięki "Pięknemu stylowi" będę umiała nazwać, jakie błędy stylistyczne popełniam ja i jakie inni popełniają. Polecam! Warto pisać klasycznie.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/104936019?shelf=lit-popularnonaukowa-i-naukowa">lit-popularnonaukowa-i-naukowa</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/5884823-luis"></a></section><section><p>698 reviews139 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2967068919">May 14, 2020</a></section><div><p>¿Qué hace falta para escribir de forma elegante y con la mayor claridad posible?<p>Aunque parezca un reto difícil, Pinker escribe este sencillo manual de estilo para probar que no es tan difícil como se piensa. Simplemente hay que tener presente en todo momento al lector y no tratar de ponerle las cosas difíciles con párrafos oscurantistas ni una sintaxis complicadas. A lo largo de varios ejemplos, que serán una y otra vez reformulados hasta pulirlos de la forma más sencilla posible, el autor expone que lo más versátil puede ser retomar un estilo clásico - como proponen Thomas y Turner - y no dar rodeos innecesarios. Durante el ensayo, derriba unos cuantos mitos, como el de no repetir los mismos términos o el de no usar atajos sintácticos.</p><p>Pese a unos maravillosos capítulos iniciales, recomendados para todo el mundo, en el último capítulo se pone más de manifiesto que antes que el libro está dedicado a un lector inglés, debido a los múltiples ejemplos que se dan analizando textos y oraciones en esta lengua. El traductor, que conste, ha hecho un gran trabajo adaptando la mayoría de definiciones a las problemáticas del español.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/8722637-stacey"></a></section><section><p>29 reviews6 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1153341022">January 4, 2015</a></section><div><p>Earthshattering it is not. Some good cartoons, though.</p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/2242799-temple-cone"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>9 books15 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1821977001">November 26, 2016</a></section><div><p>Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style is a maddening book, much the way doctoral students are maddening. At once a style guide, a work of aesthetics, and an overeducated explanation of writing precepts that many unwashed composition teachers nationwide already understand, it is a book sometimes too smart to get out of its own way.<p>The book’s strengths are evident. Its six chapters use Pinker’s expertise in cognitive psychology and linguistics to demystify and to articulate how writing, both good and bad, gets written. Pinker advocates a “classic style” grounded in the visual and attentive to the action-based, cause-and-effect relations of stories. Such writing avoids the Puritanical parsimony enforced by numerous editors, professors, and grammar purists, a tight-fisted approach to language that often leaves the writer feeling penny-wise, the reader pound-foolish. It strengthens conceptual links between parts of a sentence, earns trust with its directness, and explains abstractions by finding fresh images to illustrate them. Classic style is, as Pinker notes, “congenial to the world view of the scientist.”</p><p>Pinker’s scientific expertise yields interesting explanations for where and why our writing goes wrong, as in his discussion of how the clunky noun phrases and strings of prepositions that typify bad prose are tied to the mental process of “chunking,” or concreting data into manageable blocks of information. For an academic, Pinker is often delightfully lucid and personable, with a flexible, adaptive approach to writing style. Eschewing the trussed-up dogmatism of many contemporary guides, Pinker warns against “the putative rule [that] confuse(s) grammar with formality” and helps understand the difference between ungrammatical writing (which impedes meaning) and unconventional writing (which may be more or less effective in different contexts, but which can nevertheless be understood).</p><p>Pinker also proves a tasteful, appreciative, and creative reader of other authors’ prose. Using a passage from a newspaper column on bird-watching to discuss the judicious application of passive voice, Pinker playfully grants the much-maligned passive a moment of activity: “Though the heron is merely being observed by an unobserved birdwatcher at this point in the passage, the passive voice keeps it in the reader’s spotlight of attention.”</p><p>Readers looking to Pinker’s book as a style guide, à la The Elements of Style, may find it unwieldy overall, but useful at moments, particularly in the final chapter. Here, Pinker explores misconceptions about the ‘rules’ of English, many of which, like the rule against split infinitives, are historical accidents or personal biases that some grammar purists prescribe as commandments. Yet Pinker is no bleeding-heart descriptivist, accepting whatever neologism or grammatical rewiring comes his way; rather, he demonstrates how transformed language can still make sense, yet will prove more or less effective depending on its cultural context. This chapter does not offer specific templates for writing, as a conventional style manual might, but it does guide the reader through the murky waters of these issues.</p><p>With so many strengths, then, what is the problem with The Sense of Style? Like a hog who can’t grasp that other animals don’t love the mudbath, Pinker often wallows too long in his discussions of linguistics, particularly in the fourth chapter, an informed but wearying treatment of Noam Chomsky’s “deep structure,” which Pinker uses ponderously to explain such common writing errors as the confusion of who and whom. (Here’s the error, in three words: nominative / accusative confusion.) Pinker’s writing advice, which he often treats as the miracle by-product of cognitive science research, is generally the tried-and-true wisdom of many college writing instructors: seek a second reader’s feedback, step away from your writing to see it afresh, read it aloud, use paragraph breaks “to give the reader’s eyes a place to alight and rest.”</p><p>Like many a doctoral student, Pinker cherry-picks evidence in order to deride entire disciplines for bad prose, or else to puff up writers and thinkers he admires, going so far as to parse and praise a passage from a novel by his wife, Rebecca Goldstein (“the speaker is a professor who has recently achieved professional and romantic fulfillment,” notes Pinker, in a moment of telling ambiguity). And, finally, when nothing suitable is ready to hand, Pinker invents evidence that, unsurprisingly, supports his points, analyzing several passages he identifies as doctored-up pastiches, and a few more he doesn’t even bother to cite.</p><p>The Sense of Style is maddening because for every instance of intellectual boorishness, there is another of genial lucidity. In an early chapter, Pinker observes: “The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose. It simply doesn’t occur to the writer that her readers don’t know what she knows.” He writes, not unsympathetically, of how experts come to overestimate the common understanding of their jargon: “As we settle in to the clique, it becomes our universe.” And he warns that “one should not confuse clarity with condescension.”</p><p>How much old-fashioned wisdom lies in these remarks! So different from the technological new-fangledness that follows in the next chapter: “Once again, it’s good cognitive psychology: people learn by integrating new information into their existing web of knowledge. They don’t like it when a fact is hurled at them from out of the blue and they have to keep it levitating in short-term memory until they find a relevant background to embed it in a few moments later.”</p><p>At its best, the ‘sense’ in The Sense of Style refers to common sense, and at these moments, Steven Pinker, the thoughtful amateur, deserves praise for insights and instructions that are not bound up with any one expert discourse, but can be used by writers in any field, of any status, on any occasion. Pinker, like many a doctoral student, often operates at his best.</p><p>Often, but not always. There are moments when the ‘sense’ in The Sense of Style refers to faculties of the mind, and then, Steven Pinker, cognitive scientist, takes over. And it’s at moments like these that I’m reminded of a scene in The Big Lebowski, when The Dude says to his trigger-happy bowling partner, Walter Sobchak, “You’re not wrong, Walter, you’re just an asshole.”</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/5686119-book"></a></section><section><p>726 reviews134 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1070013665">October 9, 2014</a></section><div><p>The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by Steven Pinker<p>The Sense of Style is a scholarly and witty book on the art of writing well. Bestselling author, linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker provides readers with a new writing-guide for the twenty-first century. He breaks down grammar rules and challenges purists on the best use of language. This challenging 368-page book includes the following six chapters: 1. Good Writing, 2. A Window onto the World, 3. The Curse of Knowledge, 4. The Web, the Tree, and the String, 5. Arcs of Coherence, and 6. Telling Right from Wrong. </p><p>Positives:<br />1.	Dr. Pinker consistently produces quality work. <br />2.	A “very” unique topic, the art of writing well from a scientific perspective. You don’t have to read the book to get my joke.<br />3.	Good use of wit that adds panache to a book about writing style.<br />4.	Good advice throughout the book. “By replacing dogma about usage with reason and evidence, I hope not just to avoid giving ham-fisted advice but to make the advice that I do give easier to remember than a list of dos and don’ts.”<br />5.	Explains the three main reasons why style matters. <br />6.	Provides insights on how to become a good writer. “Writers acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose.”<br />7.	Supports good style over writing dogma. “The key to good style, far more than obeying any list of commandments, is to have a clear conception of the make-believe world in which you’re pretending to communicate.” “The purpose of writing is presentation, and its motive is disinterested truth. It succeeds when it aligns language with the truth, the proof of success being clarity and simplicity.”<br />8.	The characteristics of classic style. “A writer of classic prose must simulate two experiences: showing the reader something in the world, and engaging her in conversation.”<br />9.	Provides many examples of what constitutes poor prose: “Metadiscourse, signposting, hedging, apologizing, professional narcissism, clichés, mixed metaphors, metaconcepts, zombie nouns, and unnecessary passives.”<br />10.	Hanlon’s Razor, “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” Excellent explanation on how the curse of knowledge may lead to poor prose. “The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose.”<br />11.	Ways on how to improve your prose. “Good prose is never written by a committee.” Think about that.<br />12.	The importance of understanding syntax. “Finally, an awareness of syntax can help you avoid ambiguous, confusing, and convoluted sentences. All of this awareness depends on a basic grasp of what grammatical categories are, how they differ from functions and meanings, and how they fit into trees.”<br />13.	Interesting insights on how our minds work and how that knowledge benefits good writing. “English syntax demands subject before object. Human memory demands light before heavy. Human comprehension demands topic before comment and given before new.”<br />14.	How to construct coherent passages longer than a sentence. “In fact, it’s the hunger for coherence that drives the entire process of understanding language.”<br />15.	Discusses principles of composition. “An important principle in composition is that the amount of verbiage one devotes to a point should not be too far out of line with how central it is to the argument. “<br />16.	Discusses good use of grammar, word choice, and punctuation. Starts off by debunking the myth that all traditional rules must be followed for dogma’s sake. “That’s right: when it comes to correct English, there’s no one in charge; the lunatics are running the asylum. The editors of a dictionary read a lot, keeping their eyes open for new words and senses that are used by many writers in many contexts, and the editors add or change the definitions accordingly. Purists are often offended when they learn that this is how dictionaries are written.”<br />17.	 Presents a list of common usage issues. “These are the ones that repeatedly turn up in style guides, pet-peeve lists, newspaper language columns, irate letters to the editor, and inventories of common errors in student papers.” Great stuff.<br />18.	Includes notes, glossary and a formal bibliography. </p><p>Negatives:<br />1.	This book is intended for writers, not for laypersons. You must possess good command of the English language and grammar in order for this book to make sense. The grammar jargon will overwhelm the average reader. <br />2.	The book’s formatting leads to confusion. For a book predicated on clarity, many times I was lost.<br />3.	The writing may come across as pretentious. <br />4.	I wanted more neuroscience. </p><p>In summary, there is a direct correlation between the amount of stars this book deserves and your expertise on the subject. English majors and writers will give this book either four or five stars. On the other hand, laypersons will struggle with it to say the least. I’m giving this book four stars because even though my engineering brethren balks at reading such a book the avid reader in me recognizes its value. Writers will enjoy this book while the rest will struggle with it. </p><p>Further recommendations: “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk Junior, “On Writing Well” by William Zinsser, “A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations” by Kate L. Turabian, “The Only Grammar Book You’ll Ever Need” by Susan Thurman and Larry Shea, “Book Writing Mistakes” by Jim Edwards, “How to Write Great Blog Posts that Engage Readers” by Steve Scott, “English Grammar for Dummies” by Geraldine Woods, and “Grammar Girl’s Punctuation 911” by Mignon Fogarty.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/5686119?shelf=business">business</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/5686119?shelf=english-grammar">english-grammar</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/17144332"></a></section><section><p>107 reviews</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1927911840">March 3, 2017</a></section><div><p>The single most helpful book on writing (nonfiction, mainly) I have read. If you write in Mongolian (or any other language), this will help too. <p>Chapter 1: How to learn from good prose. B<br />Chapter 2: How to write in the "classical style." (Pinker will explain what that is.) A<br />Chapter 3: "The main cause of incomprehensible prose is the difficulty of imagining what it's like for someone else not to know something that you know." B<br />Chapter 4: On syntax. Makes grammar interesting and very helpful. A<br />Chapter 5: On the "arcs of coherence." B+<br />Chapter 6: On usage, I think. I had no time to get to this.</p><p>The prose does get (just a tiny bit) tedious sometimes, but he's peppered it with lots of fun stuff, so enjoy!</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/17144332?shelf=on-writing-and-literature">on-writing-and-literature</a></ul></section></section></article></div></div>||||I|||| * Home
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 The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

 Steven Pinker

 4.04
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 A short and entertaining book on the modern art of writing well by New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker
 Why is so much writing so bad, and how can we make it better? Is the English language being corrupted by texting and social media? Do the kids today even care about good writing? Why should any of us care?

 In The Sense of Style , the bestselling linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker answers these questions and more. Rethinking the usage guide for the twenty-first century, Pinker doesn’t carp about the decline of language or recycle pet peeves from the rulebooks of a century ago. Instead, he applies insights from the sciences of language and mind to the challenge of crafting clear, coherent, and stylish prose.

 In this short, cheerful, and eminently practical book, Pinker shows how writing depends on imagination, empathy, coherence, grammatical knowhow, and an ability to savor and reverse engineer the good prose of others. He replaces dogma about usage with reason and evidence, allowing writers and editors to apply the guidelines judiciously, rather than robotically, being mindful of what they are designed to accomplish.

 Filled with examples of great and gruesome prose, Pinker shows us how the art of writing can be a form of pleasurable mastery and a fascinating intellectual topic in its own right.
 Genres Writing Nonfiction Language Linguistics Reference Psychology Science
 ...more

 368 pages, Hardcover

 First published September 4, 2014

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 About the author

 Steven Pinker

 66 books 9,341 followers
 Steven Arthur Pinker is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science. Pinker is known for his wide-ranging explorations of human nature and its relevance to language, history, morality, politics, and everyday life. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as the New York Times, Time, and The New Republic, and is the author of numerous books, including The Language Instinct , How the Mind Works , Words and Rules , The Blank Slate , The Stuff of Thought , The Better Angels of Our Nature , The Sense of Style , and most recently, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress .

 He was born in Canada and graduated from Montreal's Dawson College in 1973. He received a bachelor's degree in experimental psychology from McGill University in 1976, and then went on to earn his doctorate in the same discipline at Harvard in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, then became an assistant professor at Harvard and then Stanford University. From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. (Except for a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1995-6.) As of 2008, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard.

 Pinker was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in 2004 and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in 2005. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv, McGill, and the University of Tromsø, Norway. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003. In January 2005, Pinker defended Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, whose comments about the gender gap in mathematics and science angered much of the faculty. On May 13th 2006, Pinker received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.

 In 2007, he was invited on The Colbert Report and asked under pressure to sum up how the brain works in five words – Pinker answered "Brain cells fire in patterns."

 Pinker was born into the English-speaking Jewish community of Montreal. He has said, "I was never religious in the theological sense... I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew." As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969. His father, a trained lawyer, first worked as a traveling salesman, while his mother was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has two younger siblings. His brother is a policy analyst for the Canadian government. His sister, Susan Pinker, is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and the author of The Sexual Paradox and The Village Effect .

 Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too divorced. He is married to the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, the author of 10 books and winner of the National Medal of the Humanities. He has no children.

 His next book will take off from his research on "common knowledge" (knowing that everyone knows something). Its tentative title is: Don't Go There: Common Knowledge and the Science of Civility, Hypocrisy, Outrage, and Taboo .

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 4.04
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 David Rubenstein
 801 reviews 2,502 followers
 November 1, 2014
 I have enjoyed every one of Steven Pinker's books, and this one is no exception. Pinker writes engagingly, with humor, with intelligence, and with authority. He is the chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary , so he has useful insights into how the English language is being used in print. As a linguist, he not only knows all the "rules" of writing, he understands the logic (or illogic) behind them. Moreover, he understands which "rules" are real, and which ones were just dreamed up for the heck of it.

 Pinker shows how many writers fall into a wide range of traps. The chief trap is the curse of knowledge . This occurs when a writer assumes that his reader knows as much as himself. Some people believe that opaque writing is a deliberate choice. Pseudo-intellectuals often dress up their writings with "highfalutin gobbledygook, as shown in this cartoon: But even sincere, intelligent writers can overestimate their readers' knowledge, and this leads to lots of wasted effort.

 Pinker discusses the old-fashioned technique of diagramming a sentence. This technique used to be taught in schools, but he shows that the technique is not the best. He introduces a tree technique that focuses not on the parts of speech, but on the internal structure of a sentence and the relationships between its components. The focus is more on clarity, rather than on grammar.

 Pinker also puts great stock on the quality of coherence. Do sentences fit together, with one leading logically to the next? Are relationships between ideas written clearly, or are they muddled with sloppy organization? Pinker shows how a writer can organize his ideas and make the reader's job easier.

 I learned some fascinating stuff. People confuse the "past tense" with "past time." For example, I learned that the past tense of the words can, will, may, and shall, are could, would, might, and should. Pinker makes it clear when to use one of these words rather than the other. Some rules, like forbidding the use of a preposition at the end of a sentence, or splitting infinitives with an adverb, are simply superstitions. The choice of where to place a preposition, or when to split an infinitive, should depend on clarity and not on someone's say-so.

 Throughout the book, there are side-by-side comparisons between sentences showing two options. The version on the left is usually ungrammatical or unclear, while the corrected version on the right is generally a better example. Pinker discusses the reasons why one alternative is better than the other, and the reasons have nothing to do with blindly following rules; the reasons always explain why one version is clearer or more easily understood.

 If you are a writer, then you will want to read this book. If you are not a writer, but simply curious about language--as I am--then this book can also feed your curiosity. Highly recommended!
 linguistics nonfiction
 104 likes
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 Bradley
 Author 5 books 3,845 followers
 April 4, 2018
 I was thoroughly charmed by this well-written guide on how to write better. :)

 Maybe it's because real language changes. Maybe it's because true clarity comes from the spaces between the words and not absolutely from the rules about the words.

 But that's not to say that this cogent discussion on grammar isn't rife with practical examples and great reflection, because it does. It just happens to bring up the fact that one generation's Haberdash is another's charming fireside chat. Moreover, it uses humor, skepticism, and common sense to throw out the grammar nazism and return us back to the firm hand of insight and delight.

 For writing should not be a chore.

 It should edify, clarify, and wrap us up in a warm comforter and hand us a favorite beverage and ramble on about what it really loved about its day. Am I clear?

 Rules are for chumps, yo. But learn them first before you break them. :)

 (Advice I think I will always have to take to heart.)
 2018-shelf non-fiction writing
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 Andrew
 527 reviews 159 followers
 January 23, 2015
 It started well. Your brain will finish the rest of that sentence.

 Or so Steven Pinker explains. The best way to describe this book is as a style guide that relies on neuroscience. Instead of admonishments based on grammar, old rules, and urban myths, Pinker explains the best way to write based on how our brain understand words on a page. Which makes this one of the more readable style guides out there in that it has a purpose instead of just being a list of literary taboos.

 But the list of taboos makes an appearance in the last third. And then it becomes just another style guide that's better for reference than for reading. Pinker doesn't provide bad advice here - he comes down in favour of the Oxford comma so I'm already a fan - but the scientific explanations make fewer appearances and the whole thing just becomes a little less interesting. He retains a sense of style throughout, which will carry you, just, to the end.

 Also on Twitter
 studies-and-ologies
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 Jimmy
 Author 5 books 199 followers
 April 21, 2018
 Chapter 1 summary:

 1. Insist on fresh wording and concrete imagery over familiar verbiage and abstract summary.
 2. Pay attention to the readers' vantage point and the target of their gaze.
 3. Use the judicious placement of an uncommon word or idiom against a backdrop of simple nouns and verbs.
 4. Use parallel syntax.
 5. Have an occasional planned surprise.
 6. Present a telling detail that obviates an explicit pronouncement.
 7. Use meter and sound that resonates with the meaning and mood.

 Chapter 2 summary:

 1. The author calls attention to habits that "result in soggy prose": metadiscourse, signposting, hedging, apologizing, professional narcissism, cliches, mixed metaphors, metaconcepts, zombie nouns, and unnecessary passives.
 2. "The writer, in conversation with a reader, directs the reader's gaze to something in the world." Each of don'ts in #1 make a writer stray.

 Chapter 3 summary:

 1. Be careful of sharing knowledge that your reader does not understand.

 Chapter 4 summary:

 1. Learn grammar and syntax.
 2. Avoid unnecessary words and phrases.
 3. Avoid sentences beginning with "there is" or "it is."
 4. That does not mean cutting out every single word that is redundant in context.
 5. Make use of structural parallelism and understand its rules.
 6. Pull unrelated (but mutually attracted) phrases apart to avoid confusion.
 7. Save the heaviest for last in a sentence.
 8. "Topic, then comment" or "Given, then new."

 Chapter 5 summary:

 1. Monologophobia is the fear of using the same word more than once. On the other hand, "elegant variation" is using different words to identify the same thing. Both can be a problem.
 2. Coherence is important. A lengthy discussion about this one. For example, it is important NOT to begin with what something is NOT. So after you read this, do NOT think about a white bear.
 3. "A coherent text is a designed object."

 Chapter 6 summary:

 1. An alphabetical list of common problems in grammar. Be sure to read this carefully and follow all suggestions otherwise the planets in our solar system will implode on each other and we will all die. And you do not want to be responsible for that one, do you?


 For a book about writing, this was a real slog to plod through.
 writing
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 Valeriu Gherghel
 Author 6 books 1,149 followers
 June 20, 2021
 Ante Scriptum. După nota de mai jos am pus o mică bibliografie comentată despre arta scrisului.

 Lucrarea lui Pinker nu e neapărat pentru viitorii poeți și prozatori (deși n-ar fi rău să răsfoiască volumul lui Pinker), ci, mai degrabă, pentru jurnaliști și, de ce nu?, pentru bieți eseiști ca subsemnatul.

 Subscriu întru totul la una dintre observațiile autorului (poate e cea mai importantă). Un filosof (un „înțelept”, un om de știință etc.) nu e tenebros fiindcă gîndește mai profund decît vulgul profan (noooooo), e tenebros fiindcă și-a propus deliberat asta. Ce-i drept, articolele academice (legendare pentru opacitatea lor) se adresează, de obicei, unui grup microscopic de aleși (filosofii vorbesc filosofilor, lingviștii lingviștilor, hermeneuții hermeneuților ș.a.m.d.). Doar grupul e chemat să intre în întuneric și să-i măsoare adîncimea.

 Prost e cînd filosofii se adresează umanității (trecute, prezente și viitoare) în întregul ei. Steven Pinkler încearcă să-i scuze. Savanții ar fi atît de orbiți de ceea ce știu / cunosc / gîndesc, încît nu-și dau seama că știința lor îi depășește pe muritorii de rînd și că discursul lor e o complicație „păsărească”. Ei își ignoră complet publicul. Magistrul abscons nu se uită la studenți. Din păcate, mulți scriu în chipul cel mai încîlcit, fiindcă așa și-au propus din capul locului. Pur și simplu! Scopul lor nu este „trezirea” celorlalți, luminarea. Scopul lor e să-i lase cu gura căscată pe cititori. Să-i stupefieze. În treacăt fie spus, asta se numește impostură.

 Reacția cititorului e una singură: „Ai citit, frate? Aici pare a fi ceva foarte adînc. N-am priceput nimic, de aia e așa de adînc”.

 Steven Pinkler are dreptate. Un scriitor (scriptor) cinstit e limpede și coerent. Vrea să-i convingă pe cititori și nu să-i umilească. Stilul lui adaugă frumusețe lumii: „Style adds beauty to the world”...

 Bibliografie

 1. Umberto Eco, Cum se face o teză de licenţă: disciplinele umaniste , traducere de George Popescu, Iaşi: Polirom, 2006, 2020, 264p.
 https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
 2. Stephen King, Misterul Regelui. Despre scris , traducere de Mircea Pricăjan, București: Editura Nemira, 2016, 280p.
 https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
 3. Howard Mittelmark & Sandra Newman, Cum să NU scrii un roman: Arta greșelilor , traducere de Bogdan-Alexandru Stănescu, București: Baroque Books & Arts, 2014, 310p.
 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...
 4. Anne Lamott, Cum înveți să scrii ficțiune pas cu pas. Sugestii despre scris si viață , traducere de Ileana Ioniţă-Iancu, Pitești: Paralela 45, 2013.
 5. Mario Vargas Llosa, Scrisori către un tînăr romancier , traducere de Mihai Cantuniari, București: Humanitas, 2010, 144p.
 https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
 6. William Zinsser, Cum să scriem bine: Ghidul clasic pentru scriitorii de nonficţiune , traducere de Amalia Mărăşescu, Piteşti: Paralela 45, 2013, 224p.
 42 likes
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 Xeon
 34 reviews 258 followers
 January 2, 2023
 As part of my studies, this past semester I had to take an English writing class. Pinker's book The Sense of Style was part of the assigned readings. Throughout the semester we would do feedback loops of the writing process for increasingly demanding essays. And in the middle of the semester, I wrote my worst essay. Initially, I thought it was pretty clever. I had compressed a swath of ideas into the minimum word count while meeting the requirements. The professor, in their wisdom, did not think so. They explained why, and offered the opportunity to rewrite it. This is what led me to actually read this whole book rather than skimming the few selections we were assigned.

 When I had started the course, and the book, what I had noticed immediately was that English writing fit squarely in much of what I believed: this is just applied epistemology, philosophy of language, and logic. Easy peasy I thought. It is the creation, transmission, or expenditure of truth. Language is just the channel through which this was done. And the goal is to most efficiently communicate things, but also balance this with making sure the things that are communicated are worthwhile or effective. However, this is easier said than done.

 In this review, I shall share that original essay, use the lessons of Pinker to point out areas of improvement, and explain some of what I learned. And please, feel free to critique this essay as well (because while I am fairly certain Steven Pinker lives within a mile from me, I do not wish to share this with him for fear he would be left aghast)

 Prompt: essentially, to write anything related to individuality versus society, reference the essay Disciplining the Individual by Patrick Miller and three other sources, and be at least 1000 words.

 The Perfect Citizen, But The Nonexistent Individual by Xeon

 Let us consider a thought experiment. Imagine, a person who forgets their desires and needs to live only in accordance with the laws of their region. Specifically, they use rules and laws as a paradigm of what actions to do, and thus use them to test the limits of such constraints. This would be their sole purpose, the activity to which they spend all their time upon. Then, doing the same thing for, say, different ethical paradigms. As shall be seen, such a thought experiment would yield paradoxes or inefficiencies, but also permits the extraction of the societal properties which individuals suffer from, benefit from, or can leverage.


 There are similar real world instances of this. For example, it could be argued labs and scientists live in accordance with but at the limits of reality. By virtue of this, they discover new truths of reality. Furthermore, living under an authoritarian government may be analogously similar. On the same line of reasoning, such a thought experiment would yield new truths for the functioning of society itself. For example, to do so in regards to laws might demonstrate existing contradictions within domains of law or interesting permutations of constraints that make up singular circumstances (such as ill-fortuned individuals), and thus that these laws and rules may be in need of reformation. In the context of ethics, it would be difficult since these are subjective and up to the individual. Nonetheless, one way such could be performed is that the constant interpretation of whatever chosen ethical systems to every single action may yield ambiguities within the theories. Alternatively, since many ethical theories are seemingly compatible or overlap with each other, interpreting and applying the ethical systems to every single action may yield ambiguities amongst theories. Lastly, what could be demonstrated is how the degree to which the deontological ideals of a given means of living can not be consistently fulfilled in the backdrop of balancing other practical duties. Such were the findings of a stunt journalist when trying to live as literally to the Bible and as the most healthy person possible (Jacobs 2007; Jacobs 2012).


 More specifically, to analyze the ramifications and nuances of such a thought experiment, an attribute presents itself. This is that there are multiple layers and spheres in which rules are circumscribed, dynamically constraining the individual. For example, from the international level, national level, state level, and local level of laws. Then there are also different rules or policies at specific institutions, such as school as a student, at the company one is an employee at, or the business one is a customer at. Strongly tied, though not necessarily always the same, is that of geographical locations. For example, take the case of embassies or consulates, specially sanctioned buildings within countries. By simply stepping into the premises of such, one can garner various international protections (United Nations 1963). Here the point that may be observed is that whether by socially construed institutions or physically existent locations, these combine to create specific contexts as preconditions which if fulfilled, then certain things should or should not be conducted. Here, the most intriguing distinction is that either laws or ethics can be written in the manner of negative or positive instantiations such as “If X, do not Y” or “If X, do Y.” Thus, to assimilate the aforementioned, an individual is simply the remainder of thousands of dynamically activating conditional statements; an individual is the remainder after social rules.


 However, social rules can also be the very thing which best permits the potential flourishing of individuals. From others’ specialization, comparative advantages, and economies of scale, the pie grows larger for everyone (Mankiw 2021). Or as it is said, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” Furthermore, the purpose of formal or informal rules may be said to be because of a prisoner’s dilemma (Poundstone 1993). However in this case it would not be a two player game, but an eight billion player game (United Nations 2022). Whereby for the long term equilibrium of society, it is best for everyone to abide by the same rules, which also happens to be the most mutually beneficial. This can be seen whereby preexisting social institutions, incrementally improved over time, perpetuate into the future via socialization by cycling through their constituent members: society is but one large Ship of Theseus, and individuals reap the benefits from the labor of those who came before them.


 The issue is, the very benefit of social institutions can be their flaw. The manifest functions of robustness via cultural reproduction has the latent dysfunction of resilience to change (Merton 1957; Taleb 2012). So, “Every time you see an injustice or an inefficiency or an abnormality” you can in fact only “wish that there were someone or something” (Miller 2019). For it becomes evident it is difficult to correct issues of the system without copious amounts of resources and time. The most one can often do is either attempt to influence those in key positions of power, or conduct their influence by virtue of second order effects via other endeavors.


 How then can individuals most flourish? The solution for both a life of excess stringency to rules as well as objective systemic change is that of balance (and action, of course). Whether as best originally posited as the golden mean in Western philosophy or tao in Eastern philosophy, a more specific, but modern and technical, instantiation of this would be that of optimizations from math. For even in the jungle of the constraints and confines of society, there is hope. One simply need be creative. This is balance at its truest; when one can effortlessly glide through, find gaps within, or take advantage of the existing structures of society. If society truly can be symbolically represented as but sets of conditional statements, what is physically possible yet socially unaddressed? Such as how there are hidden gem locations in cities around the world, how the guise of setting up an entity can provide individuals additional rights and protections, how a corporation can have its own county and surrogate city where it even provides the infrastructure, or how certain individuals can travel anywhere in the world anytime without the need of visas. Regardless of whatever predicament, the other more underlying solution is, as always, to work on oneself to the degree that is possible. For as famed Russian writer Leo Tolstoy once put it, “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”


 Works Cited
 Jacobs, A. J. Drop Dead Healthy: One Man's Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection. Simon &
 Schuster, 2012.
 Jacobs, A. J. The Year of Living Biblically. Simon & Schuster, 2007.
 Mankiw, Nicholas Gregory. Principles of Economics. Cengage Learning, 2021.
 Miller, Patrick Lee. Disciplining the Individual. Medium, Arc Digital, 29 March 2019,
 https://medium.com/arc-digital/discip....
 Merton, Robert King. Social Theory and Social Structure. Free Press, 1957.
 Poundstone, William. Prisoner's Dilemma. Anchor Books, 1993.
 Taleb, Nassim. Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder. Random House, 2012.
 United Nations. Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. 1963.
 https://legal.un.org/ilc/texts/instru....
 United Nations. World Population Prospects. 2022.
 https://www.un.org/development/desa/p...

 Now, you must understand: Coming in, the developmental capacities of young Xeon were stagnant. He had trouble referring to himself in his own writing. He keenly tried to speak only of facts. He avoided using his beliefs and deferred to the words of authority figures. He utilized theory much. He did not care about pandering to readers. He placed the burden of connections and background information on the reader.

 But, Pinker swiftly corrected all this.

 My favorite quotes include the following (but trust me, there are a lot of other tips in the book):

 "As Thomas and Turner note, “When we open a cookbook, we completely put aside—and expect the author to put aside—the kind of question that leads to the heart of certain philosophic and religious traditions. Is it possible to talk about cooking? Do eggs really exist? Is food something about which knowledge is possible? Can anyone else ever tell us anything true about cooking? … Classic style similarly puts aside as inappropriate philosophical questions about its enterprise. If it took those questions up, it could never get around to treating its subject, and its purpose is exclusively to treat its subject.”"


 "Classic style is not the same as the common but unhelpful advice to “avoid abstraction.” Sometimes we do have to write about abstract ideas. What classic style does is explain them as if they were objects and forces that would be recognizable to anyone standing in a position to see them."


 "Classic writing, with its assumption of equality between writer and reader, makes the reader feel like a genius. Bad writing makes the reader feel like a dunce."


 "Could you recognize a “level” or a “perspective” if you met one on the street? Could you point it out to someone else? What about an approach, an assumption, a concept, a condition, a context, a framework, an issue, a model, a process, a range, a role, a strategy, a tendency, or a variable?"


 "Often the pronouns I, me, and you are not just harmless but downright helpful. They simulate a conversation, as classic style recommends, and they are gifts to the memory-challenged reader."

 “"Please, sir; I didn’t do it! It was done! Try to conquer your cowardice, and start your concluding chapter with the creative assertion: Lo! I found …"”


 Pinker advocates for something called the Classical style. Being a researcher, he would use evidence from cognitive psychology to support claims as well as experiences and examples of bad academic or technical writing to contrast with. Both aspects uniquely resonated with me.

 Even for technical writing, my essay is not written well. And it really need not be that way. Here's why:
 1. I could have written a clearer and better thesis statement.
 2. For the thought experiment I posit, I should at least have applied it or made it relevant for the normal person. The point is to ask: who cares? And I do not think I really addressed this.
 3. For the amount of sociology and economics I mentioned, I should have at least provided examples of each. Besides this, I could have also defined the advanced vocabulary I used along the way. I did neither of these things, thus making it too abstract.
 4. Rereading, I do not think I make a reader feel enlightened. I believe it is because I was just throwing up information, rather than walking through it.
 5. The quote on identifying something on the street was the most impactful: the questions. I feel like a kid, with an older sibling giving me a tirade. As it relates to this essay, little can be pointed to or has real world referents, or at least I did not even attempt to do so. Once more, I could have used more examples.
 6. On the use of pronouns to refer to myself, Pinker explained that it is okay, and in fact helpful in a variety of ways, to refer to oneself and to siphon from one's own experiences. As my professor explained, this is what gives writing our voice, a means of speaking our personal truths.

 I wish I could share my other essays, because I really did improve and had an excellent comeback. But this review is becoming too long as it is.

 The book, overall, was very useful. I wonder if I am one of the few readers who got the most out of it, because the advice and instruction were peculiarly useful for me. Admittedly, I think I was in dire need of repair: reading textbooks and old texts has tainted me, and I had forgotten the very language of our times. I ascended from the abyss I was in, to a new light that I knew not of. And for that, I am grateful.
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 Roy Lotz
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 June 7, 2016
 I’ve long admired Pinker’s poise with the pen. Both The Blank Slate and The Language Instinct (the two books of his I’d before read) are, in my opinion at least, conspicuously well-written. Popular science is, contrary to what one might expect, a difficult genre; the writer must take complex ideas from esoteric subjects—ideas usually mired in technical terminology—and release them from their provincial prisons. Added to this complicated task of exegesis, the writer of popular science must also work hard to entertain; for popular science, like popular music, isn’t a success unless it sells. So when I heard that Pinker had just come out with a style guide, I quite naturally noticed; as I am in perfect agreement with Pinker when he says:
 I love style manuals. Ever since I was assigned Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style in an introductory psychology course, the writing guide has been among my favorite literary genres. It’s not just that I welcome advice on the lifelong challenge of perfecting the craft of writing. It’s also that credible guidance on writing must itself be well written, and the best of the manuals are paragons of their own advice.

 So, with my usual overblown expectations, I cracked open the pages of this book, hoping to hear secrets from a professional. I will spoil the surprise and say that I was a bit disappointed; the book was quite good, but could have been much better. So allow me, if you will, to go through it chapter by chapter, noting the good, the bad, and the boring.

 This book starts out strong. Pinker acknowledges what I wish more style guides would: that the foundation of good writing is not abiding by “proper” grammar, nor mastering some rhetorical tricks, but is simply being a sensitive reader. In this vein, Pinker chooses four examples of good writing, and pulls them apart, providing us with a quick glimpse inside Pinker’s readerly mind. (Speaking for myself, I think I’ve learned more about the art of writing from acquiring the habit of writing down attractive quotations than from all of the style guides put together.) Pinker also acknowledges something that many guides do not address: that most guides are not properly guides to writing, but to revising. Perhaps there are some who naturally speak in balanced phrases and arresting metaphors; but for most of us, elegance is a product of careful reworking, of obsessive rewriting, of assiduous editing.

 Pinker’s next two chapters are also strong. First, he discusses a certain philosophy of style: Classic Style. This view is guided by two metaphors: conversation and vision. The writer of classic prose treats the reader as a conversation partner—that is, as an equal. Thus, new information is not presented as oracular pronouncements, but as a guiding of the reader’s eye to previously unexamined bits of terrain—just like one might tell an interesting factoid to a friend. The implication is that the knowledge was there all along, and that the reader only needed the kindly writer to direct his gaze. It is unsurprising that Pinker chooses this view to endorse; this style is well-suited for popular nonfiction (and book reviews), what with its emphasis on concreteness, simplicity, and directness. Of course, no philosophy of style could embrace all genres (imagine how boring the world would be if everyone wrote like Pinker?). With that caveat on mind, I thought this view, and Pinker’s presentation of it, very attractive.

 Next, Pinker discusses what he calls the Curse of Knowledge. This is simply the difficulty that we all have in imagining what it's like not to know something we do know. This has been proven in experiment, but daily life is full of copious examples: how many times have instructions from a teacher or a boss struck you as ambiguous, vague, confusing? People aren't good at giving instructions because they aren't good at imagining what it's like to need instructions for something they know how to do. And even when people are made aware of this tendency—namely, the tendency to assume that other people are aware of the same knowledge as are you—they aren’t very good at making the leap to clarity. The only remedy, Pinker suggests, is an outside editor: “Social psychologists have found that we are overconfident, sometimes to the point of delusion, about our ability to infer what other people think, even the people who are closest to us. Only when we ask those people do we discover that what’s obvious to us isn’t obvious to them. That’s why professional writers have editors.” (Speaking for myself again, it’s an alarming experience to have somebody single out a sentence as being obscure, which you found, after copious editing, to be clear as day.)

 The next chapter is where the book petered out. Pinker, perhaps himself suffering from the curse of knowledge, launches into an explanation of the tree-like nature of grammatical relationships. For readers of The Language Instinct , this will be partially old ground. His presentation here, however, is somehow less compelling. The tree diagrams struck me as unnecessary; I don’t need a picture to understand why “The impact, which theories of economics predict are bound to be felt sooner or later, could be enormous” is wrong. Further, I don’t need tree diagrams to understand the utility of passive voice, or why sentences like this one, penned by Bob Dole, should be avoided: “The view that beating a third-rate Serbian military that for the third time in a decade is brutally targeting civilians is hardly worth the effort is not based on a lack of understanding of what is occurring on the ground.” In short, in Pinker's attempt to make the subject of grammar more clear using linguistics, his explanations became tiresome and superfluous.

 With chapter 5, the book begins to be interesting once more. Here, Pinker discusses the art of composition on a larger scale—how to put ideas into an orderly succession, how to signal transitions of topic, etc. He has some sensible things to say, but nothing very new, I’m afraid. It is, however, inevitable that there be a large degree of overlap between style guides. Good writing is, of course, various in style and form; but certain lessons are basic, such as how to arrange points coherently.

 Then we get to the final chapter, which occupies almost half the book. I predict that this chapter will be either the most useful or the most tedious for readers: if you write often, this will seem like the real meat; but if you don’t, it will seem pointless and pedantic. What Pinker does here is disassemble, point by point, many of the bugbears and hobgoblins of purists, such as the proverbial split infinitive. These rules, as Pinker points out, are usually based on linguistic and historical ignorance, adopted only because their proponents have been vituperative and vocal, not because the rules were reflective of good writing. I personally feel a kind of Schadenfreude seeing Pinker make know-it-alls sound like fools, but perhaps I am just particularly sadistic. Pinker is, however, careful to make a subtle point: just because there are some bad rules, doesn’t mean that all rules should be flouted:
 Phony rules, which proliferate like urban legends and are just as hard to eradicate, are responsible for vast amounts of ham-fisted copyediting and smarty-pants one-upmanship. Yet when language scholars try to debunk the spurious rules, the dichotomizing mindset imagines that they are trying to abolish all standards of good writing. It is as if anyone who proposed repealing a stupid law, like the one forbidding interracial marriage, must be a black-cloaked, bomb-clutching anarchist.

 So Pinker is not saying there are no rules to language, and no common characteristics to good writing; all he is saying is that these rules and advice should be based on evidence, not ignorance. Clearly, if Pinker didn’t think there were any common characteristics of good writing, he wouldn’t write a style guide. (And, while I’m at it, if he didn’t think that cultural and environmental influences were important—as some people who accuse him of being a genetic deterministic claim—then he wouldn’t write a style guide, either.)

 Style guides are stuck in a bit of a paradox. This book is aimed at somebody who reads and writes habitually; it is full of technical advice for the frequent practitioner. Thus, Pinker isn't working as hard to be as entertaining as in his other books, so the tone is somewhat more dry than in, say, The Blank Slate ; this quite naturally restricts his readership to a subset of those who often write. On the other hand, if you read and write much, Pinker won’t say much that is surprising; frequent practice gives one a feel for the correct and the spurious rule, the elegant and the jumbled grammatical form. Thus, Pinker is in the odd position of delivering a sermon to a congregation of priests: the nonwriter will be bored because the advice is irrelevant, and the writer will be bored because the advice is old news.

 But I'll admit that Pinker did clear up some things I was a bit shaky on. For example, the rules governing singular and plural can get a little hairy. We say “The mac and cheese is ,” but “Fred and Joe are ”—because mac and cheese is treated as one thing, whereas Fred and Joe are two separate things. But what about phrases less common than mac and cheese, such as “flora and fauna”? I recently encountered this very problem when writing a review of Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle : I was unsure whether to say “the flora and fauna is ,” or “the flora and fauna are .” Are they two separate things, or one inclusive thing like mac and cheese? Or consider other ambiguous cases, like with the word “or.” What’s better: “ Was the bicycle or the scooters damaged?” or “ Were the bicycle or the scooters damaged?” Both sound a bit odd to me.

 Perhaps the biggest drawback of this book, aside from the tree diagrams, was simply the formatting. It’s laid out like a work of popular science, not a work of reference; thus, it would be fairly tedious to look up any specific questions one had. For that reason, I can’t see it becoming terribly influential; writers can’t point to a specific bullet-point or principle in order to debate punctilious copy-editors. That’s a shame, because Pinker has some really useful things to say on the subject. Writing is hard enough without dogmatic pedants screaming in your ear. But while I don't think this book is destined for classic status, it is still certainly worth reading. Pinker manages to present a nuanced, evidence-based view of grammar, while upholding the values that all careful readers and writers hold dear: consistency, clarity, and grace.
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 K.J. Charles
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 July 23, 2022
 Pretty good style guide, especially re sentence/structure organisation. The focus is very much on clarity and bringing across what you want to achieve, which means he doesn't indulge in sweeping prescriptivist instructions like "cut unnecessary words"--the point is to consider what words in what order best do the job. A useful corrective to the shibboleth-ridden world of style advice.
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 jenny✨
 563 reviews 772 followers
 February 17, 2021
 The Sense of Style was mandatory reading for me and the rest of my tenth-grade English class. We were so dismayed when this was assigned; I remember thinking, “Great! On top of learning grammar in class, now we have to read about it at home too.” I skimmed The Sense of Style and called it a day. (Which is probably why I never realized this book isn’t about grammar. At least, not entirely.)

 Years later, I’ve picked this up of my own volition. And I have found Steven Pinker’s style manual to be immensely helpful in articulating and elucidating not only the thornier parts of my own writing—the sentences that sound a smidge off but I can’t pinpoint why—but also the esoteric academic prose I now have to read every day for my master’s degree.

 In fact, I’m thinking of sending a copy to each of my professors. Too unsubtle, you think?
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 Diane
 1,079 reviews 2,609 followers
 March 25, 2018
 Steven Pinker has created a writer's guide that is interesting, useful, amusing, and also frustrating.

 I enjoyed the first part of this book, but the middle section got bogged down in parsing sentences and grammar exercises. I put the book down and took a week-long break from it, and debated whether to pick it up again. I finally did finish, but it was a slog.

 My big takeaways from this book were 1) language is constantly changing, and the English language is so inventive that when the grammar police come hollerin' at you that you've written something wrong, chances are there is a dispute over what is correct. 2) Few things in language are correct, and even then, if enough people adopt that word or style, it may eventually be considered correct. 3) This knowledge won't stop the grammar fussbudgets from complaining that "people used to write better," which is also nonsense. Language and writing are created by mankind, and creative writers love to break the rules, so 4) the fussbudgets need to knock it off, already.

 I listened to this book on audio, and I think the boggy sections might have been less frustrating (and easier to skim) if I had read that section in print.

 Recommended, with reservations, for those who like writers writing about writing.

 Opening Passage
 "I love style manuals. Ever since I was assigned Strunk and White's The Elements of Style in an introductory psychology course, the writing guide has been among my favorite literary genres. It's not just that I welcome advice on the lifelong challenge of perfecting the craft of writing. It's also that credible guidance on writing must itself be well written, and the best of the manuals are paragons of their own advice. William Strunk's course notes on writing, which his student E. B. White turned into their famous little book, was studded with gems of self-exemplifcation such as "Write with nouns and verbs," "Put the emphatic words of a sentence at the end," and best of all, his prime directive, "Omit needless words."
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 Amir Tesla
 161 reviews 655 followers
 November 15, 2018
 Superb book on writing.
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 Rafal
 304 reviews 18 followers
 October 19, 2019
 Świetna książka. Obowiązkowa pozycja w każdej redakcji. Zamierzam zadbać, żeby w mojej redakcji znalazł się egzemplarz, by wszyscy dziennikarze mogli w wolnych chwilach poczytać. Bo w tej książce każdy rozdział, podrozdział czy akapit wnosi coś wartościowego dla kogoś, kto zajmuje się pisaniem (nawet krótkich dziennikarskich form).

 Lubię tę książkę między innymi za to, że wyjaśnia w prostych słowach to, co często czuje się intuicyjnie, czytając słabo napisane teksty. Czyta się, widzi się, że coś jest nie halo, nawet wie się co... ale nie bardzo wiadomo, jak to nazwać i wyjaśnić przyczyny. Dzięki tej książce takie intuicje zyskują definicję. A do tego jest oczywiście świetnie napisana a chwilami bardzo dowcipna.

 P.S. Nie przeczytałem na razie angielskiego aneksu. We wstępie przeczytałem, że jest specyficznie skierowany do osób piszących po angielsku. Więc ponieważ po angielsku pisuję głównie maile lub SMS-y, więc uznałem, że na razie nie jestem odbiorcą takiego tekstu. Ale może kiedyś do tego wrócę... bo część polskojęzyczną zamierzam podczytywać bardzo często.
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 David Huff
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 July 16, 2017
 Having just embarked on a fairly intensive writing course, I asked my mentor for some recommendations of books on the craft of writing. This book, "The Sense of Style" was at the top of his list, and I can see why.

 The author, Steven Pinker, is a Psychology professor at Harvard, and has also done much research on language and cognition (he's described as a Cognitive Scientist). Further, he is chair of the Usage Panel of The American Heritage Dictionary. And it shows. All of it. He has written a very readable, engaging, and entertaining manual on writing, providing a wealth of information which will help anyone write better prose. He also goes into considerable detail on the mechanics of good writing, including syntax, noun piles, quantifiers, remote conditionals .... you get the idea.

 Even though he goes quite deep on the technical side, he is very generous with clear, helpful examples of everything, a good many of which are laugh out loud funny. I found the book to be a solid 4 or 4.5, but the final chapter, "Telling Right From Wrong", was a lengthy and very practical compendium of many additional illustrations and applications that took it to a 5. If you are interested in becoming a better writer, you will benefit from this book!
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 Craig
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 June 20, 2022
 One thing starts to seem pretty clear early on here: Steven Pinker rarely teaches undergraduates, or at least rarely has to slog through a pile of their written work himself.

 No surprises there: professors who are much less famous and fancy than Pinker often teach just a handful of grad students a year and that’s it. Under those conditions you might tend to see most writers as smart, keen, already pretty skilful good-faith actors whose writing is just sadly held back now and then by the foibles of the human mind. As he declares in the handy one-line summary at the beginning of Chapter 3, “The Curse of Knowledge,” Pinker thinks “the main cause of incomprehensible prose is the difficulty of imagining what it’s like for someone else not to know something that you know.” That’s certainly got a role to play much of the time. But speaking as someone who spends an enormous number of his professional hours sifting through and assessing unintelligible prose written by rookie writers, I’m not so sure it’s “the main cause” of incomprehensibility. At least as often, it’s having intentionally troweled on a thick layer of vagueness and bafflegab designed to conceal ignorance, avoid the hard work of thought, and big up the author’s knowledge rather than a struggle with an imprisoning selfhood that blinds us to the sensibilities of others.

 Likewise later, in Chapter 5, “Arcs of Knowledge,” where psycholinguist Pinker has all sorts of complicated theories involving trees of linked phrases and elaborate syntactic systems to account for failures to “ensure that readers will grasp the topic, get the point, keep track of the players, and see how one idea follows from another”—when the problem seems at least as likely to be that the confusing writer is simply lazily typing away on autopilot, only half-grasps the topic, doesn’t have good working methods for “keeping track of the players” themselves, and hasn’t yet fully worked out “how one idea follows from another.”

 Pinker is proposing interesting alternative accounts of the origins of incomprehensible prose, but these seem like the main writing problems of just a few. They’re interesting, then, but really only of value if Pinker is contentedly preaching to the composition choir rather than trying to teach people how to write. Maybe it’s the fate of style guides like this to preach to that choir in the end, especially books like Pinker’s that aren’t even organized like a coil-bound composition textbook that would allow for looking up specific topics easily, but are instead meant for you to just curl up in your easy chair and read like any other book. One other thing seems pretty clear here, then: while I liked this book and found much of it interesting—especially the earlier, more manageable and much shorter chapters—I wouldn’t dream of giving it to one of my struggling students.

 In the long closing chapter, “Telling Right from Wrong” (187-304), there’s something of an abiding claim or point having to do with the need to jettison many sticklers’ rules about usage, but it’s a kind of disorganized mini handbook rather than a chapter, a curio cabinet of entries under category headings. And in this regard it highlights that same fundamental problem with many usage guides, the question of who and what they’re ultimately for. You can’t really look things up here for ad-hoc advice because you must already be in the know to use the chapter that way. Want to sort out whether it’s okay to split an infinitive? There you’re fine, because that’s filed under “split infinitives” (228-30). But if you’re wondering whether it should be She approved of Sheila taking the job or She approved of Sheila’s taking the job , are you master enough of the argot of the grammarian to know that this is found under “fused participles” (212-3)? You’ll need to be—which is to say, you’ll need to know as much as those who don’t need Pinker’s advice to know where to find Pinker’s advice.

 And some of the time, you’re probably better off ignoring that advice anyway. I, for one, part company with him almost as often as I’m with him. Take, for example, the section in which he devotes three pages to a weak defense of very unique on the grounds that things are only ever truly unique in certain of their respects, never in all of them. The argument is casuistic, unconvincing, hair-splitting and ultimately beside the point. I know it’s the done thing in style guides now to distance yourself from the fussy prescriptivist Strunks and Whites, loosen your tie, turn your chair around backwards, and have a cool descriptivist real-talk session where you try to be seen tossing out as many of the rules as possible, but defending very unique is just a little too “hey guys it’s Steve your cool grammar uncle” for me. (And I’m not much of a stickler, even when I’m grading essays on the clock.)

 All that said, Pinker is at least somewhat serious about protecting the finely tuned technical instrument of language from the destructive power of reckless use. This always seems to me the best kind of argument for prescriptions in the end rather than the silly arbitrariness of etymology, false analogies with Latin, the question of whether Shakespeare or Austen ever did it, to say nothing of the more sinister kinds of usage policing that originate in racism, classism, etc. The English language is robust and various, but we need it for tons of high-precision work, so sometimes we need to sharpen its blades and oil its moving parts. Yes, it’s true: more and more people use literally as an intensifier, for example. But intensifiers are generally empty and weak, and I think we can see that the language is already really rather extremely very absolutely highly totally utterly full of them. But there’s no synonym for literally that precisely captures the “not figuratively but strictly speaking” sense that sticklers advocate reserving the word for. So there are good reasons to protect literally that don’t make a monster, a fool or a fanatic nitpicker of the protector. In the end, Pinker seems to agree, I think, and he does eventually acknowledge the point about bafflegabbers and thoughtless show-offs, too: “When a not-so-careful writer tries to gussy up his prose with an upmarket word that he mistakenly thinks is a synonym of a common one, like simplistic for simple or fulsome for full , his readers are likely to conclude the worst: that he has paid little attention to what he has read, is affecting an air of sophistication on the cheap, and is polluting a common resource” (198).

 Amen—all that sentence needs is the singular “they” (255-62).
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 Ross Blocher
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 August 20, 2021
 What up, word nerds! If you find yourself contemplating the finer points of sentence structure, word usage, and punctuation (and especially if you spend time correcting the speech and writing of others), this is the book for you. Steven Pinker is a polymath who writes on language, cognitive psychology and a host of scientific topics: here he applies his erudition and good humor, as well as his experience as Chair of the Usage Panel of The American Heritage Dictionary , to the topic of clear communication in The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century . As ever, Pinker offers brilliant explanations that reveal the structure of seemingly arbitrary conventions of thought and speech. Rather than writing a sop to pedants, he challenges us to think in terms of the reader and how she parses words on the page (for example, you just formed thoughts about my choice to use the pronoun "she": the gender-neutral singular is covered extensively here). This book is bound to change the way you think about language and will joyously confirm some of your personal preferences while mercilessly smashing others. Everyone who cares deeply about the English language should read it.

 It's a lot of fun (there are comic strips aplenty and laugh-out-loud usage examples), but it’s not easy reading. You'll have to put your thinking cap on for this one. I don't mean to say that it's all subjunctive and pluperfect and modal auxiliary, but those highfalutin terms are invoked where necessary and may come flying at your head. Pinker dutifully unpacks these concepts, but there are times in which I had to stop and re-read or simply resign myself to duck and not get hit. I employed one of my new favorite ways of reading: listening to the audio book while reading the text. This is a delightful way to get into the zone. Arthur Morey does a yeoman's job of dictating charts and punctuation and describing illustrations, but I'd have been lost without the sentence tree diagrams and the 3-column grids to look at. If you have to choose one, go with the text copy.

 Any thorough accounting of the topics addressed would be a massive undertaking, but I'll share a few highlights. Pinker lampoons our tendency to decry the death of English with new each generation, providing dire predictions of its imminent decline from the 1970s, 1960s, 1910s, 1800s, 1700s and... well, you get the idea. The CU L8TRs and IMHOs of texting are no more indicative of forgotten formal language than the elided and truncated staccato of telegrams in their heyday. A key to being a good writer is to be a good reader, and most of what we learn comes from observing masters at work: Pinker provides examples and breaks down what makes them so satisfying. It's important to use words to form images in the reader's head: "A writer, like a cinematographer, manipulates the viewer's perspective on an ongoing story, with the verbal equivalent of camera angles and quick cuts." We see how a carefully chosen word can break up cliché, invoke a shared cultural reference, or yield clues that save a paragraph of description. "The key to good style, far more than obeying any list of commandments, is to have a clear conception of the make-believe world in which you're pretending to communicate." We are urged to be mindful of our assumed relationship to the reader. "Classic writing, with its assumption of equality between writer and reader, makes the reader feel like a genius. Bad writing makes the reader feel like a dunce." A self-heeding nugget of wisdom: “Omit needless words.” The fault of academese, legalese and jargon is less attributable to intentional obfuscation, and more a problem of "The Curse of Knowledge": our tendency to assume that others already know what we know. One cure can be to have others read your work, or to wait and then re-read your own, addressing instances in which you've assumed everyone shares your familiarity with a topic, or simply catching constructions that are hard to read aloud. "The advice in this and other stylebooks is not so much on how to write as on how to revise."

 Here I shall break these notes up with a new paragraph; which, Pinker reminds us, does not consistently correspond to any unit of discourse (and can even be, contra an army of grade school teachers, a single sentence). Much of the book consists of taking the received "rules" of grammar - don't end a sentence with a preposition, don't split the infinitive, or don't use "like" as "as" - and turning them on their heads. He provides counterexamples from English's most respected writers, popular songs, and common idioms, and dashes their false-analogies-to-Latin, spurious logic, and appeals-to-authority upon the rocks. I stuck with the Oxford comma (aka the serial comma, I’ve now learned) in the previous sentence, inspired by the argument in this book that it is typically the clearer construction. Pinker does not bemoan the loss of sentence diagrams, but employs cascading trees to visualize how our brains uptake sentences as we form meaning from component words. The order matters. A given sentence might need reorganization if it forces the reader to hold a thought for too long or to suspend multiple clauses in her head before the crucial information finally arrives. So much confusion with case- and tense- and subject/verb-agreement arises from those gaps in the tree that are placed too far from their logical partners. Pinker is sensitive to how language is used in the real world, and willing to let conventions slide when language evolves. He provides numerous examples of similar concessions: vestiges of previous generations in which usage battles were fought and lost. And yet, he argues convincingly against select malapropisms and miscarriages of language that he insists will cause trouble for the careful reader. His attack upon the figurative use of "literally" gave me a good laugh: "Like other intensifiers it is usually superfluous, whereas the 'actual fact' sense is indispensable and has no equivalent. And since the figurative use can evoke ludicrous imagery (e.g. The press has literally emasculated the president ), it screams, 'I don't think about what my words mean.'"

 There are many additional insights and explanations, new terminology (coordinator, subordinator and determiner will be particularly helpful), things I had never thought of before, and concepts I had previously misunderstood… but hopefully you get an idea of the observations herein. If you need more convincing, a delightful way to hear Pinker present the salient points is in this 54-minute lecture titled Linguistics, Style and Writing in the 21st Century . Happy reading, and happy writing!
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 Genevieve
 Author 7 books 123 followers
 June 28, 2015
 * Originally reviewed on the Night Owls Press blog here . *

 Heads-up, editors. In The Sense of Style , author Steven Pinker challenges every authoritarian grammarian and language purist who has held sway over the rules of the English language with their dogmatic style books.

 A psycholinguist by profession, Pinker is a scholar of the science of language. So it's no surprise that The Sense of Style feels like a modern alternative to the classic but tired guides of Strunk and White and others. In my days as an English undergrad, Strunk and White's The Elements of Style was the biblical tome of writing. But Pinker arrives with this iconoclastic book to show us that sometimes rules can be tone-deaf to what really makes for transparent and compelling prose.

 Purists often forget that the English language is rife with idiosyncrasies that can't be fit so neatly into rule boxes. You'll see the best kind of rule-breaking among poets and novelists, who often have the better "ear" and feel for language than your clumsy grammarian. Language is chiefly a medium for expression, not just an embodiment of rules. Literature's most gifted writers have often 'broken' the rules using constructions that might have been edited into sterility by heavy-handed editors. The expressive possibilities of language often rely on the rules being bent.

 As you can see, this book isn't your typical manual on grammar and usage. You won't find a list of dos and don'ts in an effort to indoctrinate. Pinker shows us instead that unthinking adherence to manuals actually makes for bad, clunky writing. For example, one of the signature rules in writing is to avoid using the passive voice at all costs. But Pinker argues that if you change every passive sentence into an active one, you're not necessarily improving the prose. The main problem is that the passive construction exists for a purpose—but most people don't know when to use it effectively. Sure, both active and passive constructions convey the same information but they have cognitive differences because of the order of information given. Pinker's rule of thumb: Passive is the preferred construction when the affected entity (the item that receives the action) is the topic of the preceding discussion or when the agent of action is irrelevant to the discussion. In other words, good writing is about having a "sense," about letting your communication goals dictate the writing.

 This book isn't for beginners. Pinker is clear in the Introduction about this and writes that this book is for experienced writers. You will benefit the most from this book if you are a relatively experienced writer and reader, and are familiar with the basic rules of language and grammar. You have to know the rules in order to bend them with style and with compelling reason, to know when to take advantage of loopholes and irregularities.

 The "sense" in The Sense of Style is knowing how a masterful writer moves fluidly between logical rules and combinations, and knows those idiomatic usages and irregularities. The book is packed with examples and is wonderfully readable, which surprised me. Pinker is great at reverse engineering passages and illuminating what writers have done well (or not done well) to convey their ideas. Take lots of notes!

 For those who still crave the utility of a reference manual, the later chapters in the book include lists of words and rules that can be bent and those that can't (in Pinker's opinion). Or, for a bite-size taste of the grammar rules Pinker explores in this book, check out this article by Pinker in The Guardian .

 Overall, a great, informative read. I'll be keeping this on my reference shelf.

 [Disclaimer: I received an ARC copy of this book from the publisher through the Goodreads First Reads Program in exchange for an honest review.]
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 Amirography
 198 reviews 123 followers
 November 15, 2017
 A great book on the considerations for writing non-fiction.
 This book was written with the amazing style of Pinker's usual writings and it was about that style and practical advice to improve one's writings. I am implementing the lessons I've learned from pinker in my writing process for my blog. And it improved my effectiveness to a great degree.
 It is worth knowing that most advice on the book contains pretty solid arguments for them. So you can use the arguments to find ways to improve writing, regardless of what language you are writing with.
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 Daniel Afloarei
 88 reviews 23 followers
 May 8, 2017
 Un geniu și un must read pentru orice tip de scriitor.

 Recenzia aici:

 https://youtu.be/L0c3cXcuzXY
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 Bloodorange
 655 reviews 179 followers
 February 7, 2017
 What I expect from a writing guide is either a comprehensive reference book where I can easily find answers to my questions, or - much more valued - explanations so memorable that my writing - or my students' writing - is changed forever. ( Sin Boldly!: Dr. Dave's Guide To Writing The College Paper worked quite well this year; in one case, the shock of reading the Torah was so strong that a student of mine started to write clearly, because he understood that communicating ideas is the key to good writing. True story.)

 With this book, we get neither. The explanations are long-winded, frequently involving tree diagrams (meaning they can cause brain damage in grammar-illiterate 16-year-olds), and ultimately unmemorable. I have enjoyed reading it - mostly - but this book is no miracle cure and not a go-to resource. Still, Pinker provides some excellent study material, such as incorrect and doctored sentences, or analysed samples of good writing, which I found very effective for teaching kids close reading.
 us writing-guides
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 Stetson
 182 reviews 133 followers
 January 25, 2023
 This has to be the best style guide for intelligent and clear writing. Immensely practical, clever, and information dense. I will definitely buy a copy of this!
 linguistics non-fiction practical-guide
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 Steve
 116 reviews 4 followers
 September 6, 2014
 Thanks to a Goodreads Firstreads giveaway, I had a chance to read an advanced copy of Pinker's Sense of Style. My thoughts on the book are a bit mixed. Here goes:

 The Good:
 --Well, let's be honest--I just read a stylebook cover to cover; it must have SOMETHING going for it!
 --I found Pinker's wit to be on full display here, and that was a welcome addition to what can sometimes become dry material (i.e., talk of grammar). Pinker's wit is at its best when he slyly breaks all the grammar rules he's discussing in the midst of discussing them only to reveal the trick a paragraph later. An instance of the old aphorism "form follows function" at its best.
 --In a piece of writing I completed this week, I found myself utilizing advice I'd read in this book and/or considering the constructions of my sentences based on the logic Pinker provides in the book. If a stylebook--a utilitarian genre if there ever was one--turns out to be useful, that certainly bodes well for it.

 The Not-so-good:
 --I found the structure/form of the book to be a bit two-headed. It was as though the book couldn't decide whether it wanted to be a scholarly monograph about style (to be read cover-to-cover) or a textbook/reference book (to be consulted piecemeal). I chose to approach the book as a monograph; however, I found that there were chapters that read like a monograph and chapters that read like a reference book. Needless to say, the "referencey" chapters were not quite as read-able.
 --In addition, several of the chapters were far too long to be useful in a textbook setting. Truth be told, perhaps Pinker wasn't shooting for textbook use for his book, but the incongruity here is that the chapters that were most like textbook chapters in their content were the longest (and therefore the least like textbook chapters in their functionality).

 In sum, this was a readable stylebook (a feat in and of itself) that has a lot of 21st-century insights that it would do a lot of us a lot of good to internalize. However, it was also a book that just couldn't make up its mind about its identity.
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 Sherri
 81 reviews
 September 7, 2014
 I started out reading this book as I thought it was intended: a style manual for the modern day writer. I ended up equating it more to a textbook and reference guide for the modern day writer. I can easily see this book being required for college level courses. It is deep into sentence structure,and the entire last chapter is fantastic for reference.
 I liked his approach of writing so that one's brain has the most effective cognitive response to what it's reading. There were moments when I admit I had to go back and re-read some parts, as it was a bit too dry to keep me engaged but, overall, I found this book to be one of the most original I've read on structure.
 I will keep this book on my reference shelf; as I've highlighted parts throughout for quick reference. I have not read any of his other books, although I have to say he is a very good writer, and an author I will look for should I want to purchase other books on writing.
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 Thomas Edmund
 881 reviews 50 followers
 March 6, 2016
 I love Pinker, and I love writing, so this really was the book for me. It was denser than I expected, and I thus I wouldn't recommend it for any looking for a light read in writing.

 The focus is more on academic non-fiction than other forms of non-fiction or fiction, but offers generally timeless advice about style and clarity. Pinker strikes a good balance between useful rules and avoiding pedantry. He occasionally breaks his own advice by overusing his large and eccentric vocabulary, but its all in good fun.

 Will require a bit of time to get through but well recommended.
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 Tymciolina
 211 reviews 50 followers
 February 29, 2020
 Pisać każdy może,
 Trochę lepiej, lub trochę gorzej.

 Steven Pinker w "Pięknym stylu" odpowiada na pytanie jak pisać lepiej. Odpowiedź brzmi - prosto i czytelnie. Niektóre jego zalecenia są oczywiste - "unikaj słów które ledwo rozumiesz". Inne mogą być zaskakujące - "broń Cię Panie Boże, nie przekształcaj czasownika w rzeczownik". Ja, jako użytkownik potępianego przez niego prawniczego żargonu, dowiedziałam się jak dużo wykroczeń przeciwko stylowi, nieświadomie popełniałam. Setnie się przy tym ubawiłam, bo Steven Pinker swoje uwagi przedstawił w zabawny sposób.

 Wyjątkowo przypadła mi do gustu forma książki - zestawienie zdań źle napisanych ze zdaniami poprawnie sformułowanymi. Wizualizacja (rzeczownik zombie) pozwoliła lepiej zrozumieć jakich lapsusów językowych nie należy popełniać (konstrukcja bezprzedmiotowa), ponieważ przez to wzrasta wrażenie nieczytelności tekstu (podwójna negacja), co wpływa na ograniczenie komunikatywności i klarowności tegoż (trudne słowa i synonimomania). A mogłam napisać inaczej - łatwiej zrozumiałam, dlaczego błędy stylistyczne, utrudniają czytelność tekstu, gdy zobaczyłam i porównałam tekst dobrze i źle napisany.

 Z pewnością nie zostanę drugim Cyceronem czy Juliuszem Cezarem. Wszak obaj panowie byli znani ze świetnego stylu wypowiedzi. Na pewno jednak dzięki "Pięknemu stylowi" będę umiała nazwać, jakie błędy stylistyczne popełniam ja i jakie inni popełniają. Polecam! Warto pisać klasycznie.
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 Luis
 698 reviews 139 followers
 May 14, 2020
 ¿Qué hace falta para escribir de forma elegante y con la mayor claridad posible?

 Aunque parezca un reto difícil, Pinker escribe este sencillo manual de estilo para probar que no es tan difícil como se piensa. Simplemente hay que tener presente en todo momento al lector y no tratar de ponerle las cosas difíciles con párrafos oscurantistas ni una sintaxis complicadas. A lo largo de varios ejemplos, que serán una y otra vez reformulados hasta pulirlos de la forma más sencilla posible, el autor expone que lo más versátil puede ser retomar un estilo clásico - como proponen Thomas y Turner - y no dar rodeos innecesarios. Durante el ensayo, derriba unos cuantos mitos, como el de no repetir los mismos términos o el de no usar atajos sintácticos.

 Pese a unos maravillosos capítulos iniciales, recomendados para todo el mundo, en el último capítulo se pone más de manifiesto que antes que el libro está dedicado a un lector inglés, debido a los múltiples ejemplos que se dan analizando textos y oraciones en esta lengua. El traductor, que conste, ha hecho un gran trabajo adaptando la mayoría de definiciones a las problemáticas del español.
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 Owlseyes
 1,634 reviews 257 followers
 Want to read
 February 13, 2020
 https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/...

 Being irrational may pay off, sometimes:
 https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/...

 UPDATE

 THIS IS A LEFT-LEANING, IMPEACHMENT-AT-ANY-COST INTERPRETATION OF THE WRITTEN EXCHANGES TRUMP-ZELENSKY:
 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/07/op...

 UPDATE
 Pinker should be analyzing the little texts ahead




 UPDATE

 https://getpocket.com/explore/item/th...
 i-read-trump-zelensky-exchange pinker-confusing-cause-and-effect pinker-takes-smoke-not-the-fire
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 Stacey
 29 reviews 6 followers
 January 4, 2015
 Earthshattering it is not. Some good cartoons, though.
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 Temple Cone
 Author 9 books 15 followers
 November 26, 2016
 Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style is a maddening book, much the way doctoral students are maddening. At once a style guide, a work of aesthetics, and an overeducated explanation of writing precepts that many unwashed composition teachers nationwide already understand, it is a book sometimes too smart to get out of its own way.

 The book’s strengths are evident. Its six chapters use Pinker’s expertise in cognitive psychology and linguistics to demystify and to articulate how writing, both good and bad, gets written. Pinker advocates a “classic style” grounded in the visual and attentive to the action-based, cause-and-effect relations of stories. Such writing avoids the Puritanical parsimony enforced by numerous editors, professors, and grammar purists, a tight-fisted approach to language that often leaves the writer feeling penny-wise, the reader pound-foolish. It strengthens conceptual links between parts of a sentence, earns trust with its directness, and explains abstractions by finding fresh images to illustrate them. Classic style is, as Pinker notes, “congenial to the world view of the scientist.”

 Pinker’s scientific expertise yields interesting explanations for where and why our writing goes wrong, as in his discussion of how the clunky noun phrases and strings of prepositions that typify bad prose are tied to the mental process of “chunking,” or concreting data into manageable blocks of information. For an academic, Pinker is often delightfully lucid and personable, with a flexible, adaptive approach to writing style. Eschewing the trussed-up dogmatism of many contemporary guides, Pinker warns against “the putative rule [that] confuse(s) grammar with formality” and helps understand the difference between ungrammatical writing (which impedes meaning) and unconventional writing (which may be more or less effective in different contexts, but which can nevertheless be understood).

 Pinker also proves a tasteful, appreciative, and creative reader of other authors’ prose. Using a passage from a newspaper column on bird-watching to discuss the judicious application of passive voice, Pinker playfully grants the much-maligned passive a moment of activity: “Though the heron is merely being observed by an unobserved birdwatcher at this point in the passage, the passive voice keeps it in the reader’s spotlight of attention.”

 Readers looking to Pinker’s book as a style guide, à la The Elements of Style, may find it unwieldy overall, but useful at moments, particularly in the final chapter. Here, Pinker explores misconceptions about the ‘rules’ of English, many of which, like the rule against split infinitives, are historical accidents or personal biases that some grammar purists prescribe as commandments. Yet Pinker is no bleeding-heart descriptivist, accepting whatever neologism or grammatical rewiring comes his way; rather, he demonstrates how transformed language can still make sense, yet will prove more or less effective depending on its cultural context. This chapter does not offer specific templates for writing, as a conventional style manual might, but it does guide the reader through the murky waters of these issues.

 With so many strengths, then, what is the problem with The Sense of Style? Like a hog who can’t grasp that other animals don’t love the mudbath, Pinker often wallows too long in his discussions of linguistics, particularly in the fourth chapter, an informed but wearying treatment of Noam Chomsky’s “deep structure,” which Pinker uses ponderously to explain such common writing errors as the confusion of who and whom. (Here’s the error, in three words: nominative / accusative confusion.) Pinker’s writing advice, which he often treats as the miracle by-product of cognitive science research, is generally the tried-and-true wisdom of many college writing instructors: seek a second reader’s feedback, step away from your writing to see it afresh, read it aloud, use paragraph breaks “to give the reader’s eyes a place to alight and rest.”

 Like many a doctoral student, Pinker cherry-picks evidence in order to deride entire disciplines for bad prose, or else to puff up writers and thinkers he admires, going so far as to parse and praise a passage from a novel by his wife, Rebecca Goldstein (“the speaker is a professor who has recently achieved professional and romantic fulfillment,” notes Pinker, in a moment of telling ambiguity). And, finally, when nothing suitable is ready to hand, Pinker invents evidence that, unsurprisingly, supports his points, analyzing several passages he identifies as doctored-up pastiches, and a few more he doesn’t even bother to cite.

 The Sense of Style is maddening because for every instance of intellectual boorishness, there is another of genial lucidity. In an early chapter, Pinker observes: “The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose. It simply doesn’t occur to the writer that her readers don’t know what she knows.” He writes, not unsympathetically, of how experts come to overestimate the common understanding of their jargon: “As we settle in to the clique, it becomes our universe.” And he warns that “one should not confuse clarity with condescension.”

 How much old-fashioned wisdom lies in these remarks! So different from the technological new-fangledness that follows in the next chapter: “Once again, it’s good cognitive psychology: people learn by integrating new information into their existing web of knowledge. They don’t like it when a fact is hurled at them from out of the blue and they have to keep it levitating in short-term memory until they find a relevant background to embed it in a few moments later.”

 At its best, the ‘sense’ in The Sense of Style refers to common sense, and at these moments, Steven Pinker, the thoughtful amateur, deserves praise for insights and instructions that are not bound up with any one expert discourse, but can be used by writers in any field, of any status, on any occasion. Pinker, like many a doctoral student, often operates at his best.

 Often, but not always. There are moments when the ‘sense’ in The Sense of Style refers to faculties of the mind, and then, Steven Pinker, cognitive scientist, takes over. And it’s at moments like these that I’m reminded of a scene in The Big Lebowski, when The Dude says to his trigger-happy bowling partner, Walter Sobchak, “You’re not wrong, Walter, you’re just an asshole.”
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 Book
 726 reviews 134 followers
 October 9, 2014
 The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by Steven Pinker


 The Sense of Style is a scholarly and witty book on the art of writing well. Bestselling author, linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker provides readers with a new writing-guide for the twenty-first century. He breaks down grammar rules and challenges purists on the best use of language. This challenging 368-page book includes the following six chapters: 1. Good Writing, 2. A Window onto the World, 3. The Curse of Knowledge, 4. The Web, the Tree, and the String, 5. Arcs of Coherence, and 6. Telling Right from Wrong.

 Positives:
 1. Dr. Pinker consistently produces quality work.
 2. A “very” unique topic, the art of writing well from a scientific perspective. You don’t have to read the book to get my joke.
 3. Good use of wit that adds panache to a book about writing style.
 4. Good advice throughout the book. “By replacing dogma about usage with reason and evidence, I hope not just to avoid giving ham-fisted advice but to make the advice that I do give easier to remember than a list of dos and don’ts.”
 5. Explains the three main reasons why style matters.
 6. Provides insights on how to become a good writer. “Writers acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose.”
 7. Supports good style over writing dogma. “The key to good style, far more than obeying any list of commandments, is to have a clear conception of the make-believe world in which you’re pretending to communicate.” “The purpose of writing is presentation, and its motive is disinterested truth. It succeeds when it aligns language with the truth, the proof of success being clarity and simplicity.”
 8. The characteristics of classic style. “A writer of classic prose must simulate two experiences: showing the reader something in the world, and engaging her in conversation.”
 9. Provides many examples of what constitutes poor prose: “Metadiscourse, signposting, hedging, apologizing, professional narcissism, clichés, mixed metaphors, metaconcepts, zombie nouns, and unnecessary passives.”
 10. Hanlon’s Razor, “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” Excellent explanation on how the curse of knowledge may lead to poor prose. “The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose.”
 11. Ways on how to improve your prose. “Good prose is never written by a committee.” Think about that.
 12. The importance of understanding syntax. “Finally, an awareness of syntax can help you avoid ambiguous, confusing, and convoluted sentences. All of this awareness depends on a basic grasp of what grammatical categories are, how they differ from functions and meanings, and how they fit into trees.”
 13. Interesting insights on how our minds work and how that knowledge benefits good writing. “English syntax demands subject before object. Human memory demands light before heavy. Human comprehension demands topic before comment and given before new.”
 14. How to construct coherent passages longer than a sentence. “In fact, it’s the hunger for coherence that drives the entire process of understanding language.”
 15. Discusses principles of composition. “An important principle in composition is that the amount of verbiage one devotes to a point should not be too far out of line with how central it is to the argument. “
 16. Discusses good use of grammar, word choice, and punctuation. Starts off by debunking the myth that all traditional rules must be followed for dogma’s sake. “That’s right: when it comes to correct English, there’s no one in charge; the lunatics are running the asylum. The editors of a dictionary read a lot, keeping their eyes open for new words and senses that are used by many writers in many contexts, and the editors add or change the definitions accordingly. Purists are often offended when they learn that this is how dictionaries are written.”
 17. Presents a list of common usage issues. “These are the ones that repeatedly turn up in style guides, pet-peeve lists, newspaper language columns, irate letters to the editor, and inventories of common errors in student papers.” Great stuff.
 18. Includes notes, glossary and a formal bibliography.

 Negatives:
 1. This book is intended for writers, not for laypersons. You must possess good command of the English language and grammar in order for this book to make sense. The grammar jargon will overwhelm the average reader.
 2. The book’s formatting leads to confusion. For a book predicated on clarity, many times I was lost.
 3. The writing may come across as pretentious.
 4. I wanted more neuroscience.

 In summary, there is a direct correlation between the amount of stars this book deserves and your expertise on the subject. English majors and writers will give this book either four or five stars. On the other hand, laypersons will struggle with it to say the least. I’m giving this book four stars because even though my engineering brethren balks at reading such a book the avid reader in me recognizes its value. Writers will enjoy this book while the rest will struggle with it.

 Further recommendations: “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk Junior, “On Writing Well” by William Zinsser, “A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations” by Kate L. Turabian, “The Only Grammar Book You’ll Ever Need” by Susan Thurman and Larry Shea, “Book Writing Mistakes” by Jim Edwards, “How to Write Great Blog Posts that Engage Readers” by Steve Scott, “English Grammar for Dummies” by Geraldine Woods, and “Grammar Girl’s Punctuation 911” by Mignon Fogarty.
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 Б. Ачболд
 107 reviews
 March 3, 2017
 The single most helpful book on writing (nonfiction, mainly) I have read. If you write in Mongolian (or any other language), this will help too.

 Chapter 1: How to learn from good prose. B
 Chapter 2: How to write in the "classical style." (Pinker will explain what that is.) A
 Chapter 3: "The main cause of incomprehensible prose is the difficulty of imagining what it's like for someone else not to know something that you know." B
 Chapter 4: On syntax. Makes grammar interesting and very helpful. A
 Chapter 5: On the "arcs of coherence." B+
 Chapter 6: On usage, I think. I had no time to get to this.

 The prose does get (just a tiny bit) tedious sometimes, but he's peppered it with lots of fun stuff, so enjoy!
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801 reviews2,502 followers     November 1, 2014   I have enjoyed every one of Steven Pinker's books, and this one is no exception. Pinker writes engagingly, with humor, with intelligence, and with authority. He is the chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, so he has useful insights into how the English language is being used in print. As a linguist, he not only knows all the "rules" of writing, he understands the logic (or illogic) behind them. Moreover, he understands which "rules" are real, and which ones were just dreamed up for the heck of it. Pinker shows how many writers fall into a wide range of traps. The chief trap is the curse of knowledge. This occurs when a writer assumes that his reader knows as much as himself. Some people believe that opaque writing is a deliberate choice. Pseudo-intellectuals often dress up their writings with "highfalutin gobbledygook, as shown in this cartoon: But even sincere, intelligent writers can overestimate their readers' knowledge, and this leads to lots of wasted effort. Pinker discusses the old-fashioned technique of diagramming a sentence. This technique used to be taught in schools, but he shows that the technique is not the best. He introduces a tree technique that focuses not on the parts of speech, but on the internal structure of a sentence and the relationships between its components. The focus is more on clarity, rather than on grammar. Pinker also puts great stock on the quality of coherence. Do sentences fit together, with one leading logically to the next? Are relationships between ideas written clearly, or are they muddled with sloppy organization? Pinker shows how a writer can organize his ideas and make the reader's job easier. I learned some fascinating stuff. People confuse the "past tense" with "past time." For example, I learned that the past tense of the words can, will, may, and shall, are could, would, might, and should. Pinker makes it clear when to use one of these words rather than the other. Some rules, like forbidding the use of a preposition at the end of a sentence, or splitting infinitives with an adverb, are simply superstitions. The choice of where to place a preposition, or when to split an infinitive, should depend on clarity and not on someone's say-so. Throughout the book, there are side-by-side comparisons between sentences showing two options. The version on the left is usually ungrammatical or unclear, while the corrected version on the right is generally a better example. Pinker discusses the reasons why one alternative is better than the other, and the reasons have nothing to do with blindly following rules; the reasons always explain why one version is clearer or more easily understood. If you are a writer, then you will want to read this book. If you are not a writer, but simply curious about language--as I am--then this book can also feed your curiosity. Highly recommended!     linguistics nonfiction               Author  5 books3,845 followers     April 4, 2018   I was thoroughly charmed by this well-written guide on how to write better. :) Maybe it's because real language changes. Maybe it's because true clarity comes from the spaces between the words and not absolutely from the rules about the words. But that's not to say that this cogent discussion on grammar isn't rife with practical examples and great reflection, because it does. It just happens to bring up the fact that one generation's Haberdash is another's charming fireside chat. Moreover, it uses humor, skepticism, and common sense to throw out the grammar nazism and return us back to the firm hand of insight and delight. For writing should not be a chore.  It should edify, clarify, and wrap us up in a warm comforter and hand us a favorite beverage and ramble on about what it really loved about its day. Am I clear?  Rules are for chumps, yo. But learn them first before you break them. :) (Advice I think I will always have to take to heart.)     2018-shelf non-fiction writing               527 reviews159 followers     January 23, 2015   It started well. Your brain will finish the rest of that sentence.Or so Steven Pinker explains. The best way to describe this book is as a style guide that relies on neuroscience. Instead of admonishments based on grammar, old rules, and urban myths, Pinker explains the best way to write based on how our brain understand words on a page. Which makes this one of the more readable style guides out there in that it has a purpose instead of just being a list of literary taboos. But the list of taboos makes an appearance in the last third. And then it becomes just another style guide that's better for reference than for reading. Pinker doesn't provide bad advice here - he comes down in favour of the Oxford comma so I'm already a fan - but the scientific explanations make fewer appearances and the whole thing just becomes a little less interesting. He retains a sense of style throughout, which will carry you, just, to the end. Also on Twitter      studies-and-ologies               Author  5 books199 followers     April 21, 2018   Chapter 1 summary: 1. Insist on fresh wording and concrete imagery over familiar verbiage and abstract summary. 2. Pay attention to the readers' vantage point and the target of their gaze. 3. Use the judicious placement of an uncommon word or idiom against a backdrop of simple nouns and verbs. 4. Use parallel syntax. 5. Have an occasional planned surprise. 6. Present a telling detail that obviates an explicit pronouncement. 7. Use meter and sound that resonates with the meaning and mood.  Chapter 2 summary:  1. The author calls attention to habits that "result in soggy prose": metadiscourse, signposting, hedging, apologizing, professional narcissism, cliches, mixed metaphors, metaconcepts, zombie nouns, and unnecessary passives. 2. "The writer, in conversation with a reader, directs the reader's gaze to something in the world." Each of don'ts in #1 make a writer stray.  Chapter 3 summary:  1. Be careful of sharing knowledge that your reader does not understand.  Chapter 4 summary:  1. Learn grammar and syntax. 2. Avoid unnecessary words and phrases. 3. Avoid sentences beginning with "there is" or "it is." 4. That does not mean cutting out every single word that is redundant in context. 5. Make use of structural parallelism and understand its rules. 6. Pull unrelated (but mutually attracted) phrases apart to avoid confusion. 7. Save the heaviest for last in a sentence. 8. "Topic, then comment" or "Given, then new."  Chapter 5 summary:  1. Monologophobia is the fear of using the same word more than once. On the other hand, "elegant variation" is using different words to identify the same thing. Both can be a problem. 2. Coherence is important. A lengthy discussion about this one. For example, it is important NOT to begin with what something is NOT. So after you read this, do NOT think about a white bear. 3. "A coherent text is a designed object."  Chapter 6 summary:  1. An alphabetical list of common problems in grammar. Be sure to read this carefully and follow all suggestions otherwise the planets in our solar system will implode on each other and we will all die. And you do not want to be responsible for that one, do you?  For a book about writing, this was a real slog to plod through.      writing               Author  6 books1,149 followers     June 20, 2021   Ante Scriptum. După nota de mai jos am pus o mică bibliografie comentată despre arta scrisului.Lucrarea lui Pinker nu e neapărat pentru viitorii poeți și prozatori (deși n-ar fi rău să răsfoiască volumul lui Pinker), ci, mai degrabă, pentru jurnaliști și, de ce nu?, pentru bieți eseiști ca subsemnatul.  Subscriu întru totul la una dintre observațiile autorului (poate e cea mai importantă). Un filosof (un „înțelept”, un om de știință etc.) nu e tenebros fiindcă gîndește mai profund decît vulgul profan (noooooo), e tenebros fiindcă și-a propus deliberat asta. Ce-i drept, articolele academice (legendare pentru opacitatea lor) se adresează, de obicei, unui grup microscopic de aleși (filosofii vorbesc filosofilor, lingviștii lingviștilor, hermeneuții hermeneuților ș.a.m.d.). Doar grupul e chemat să intre în întuneric și să-i măsoare adîncimea. Prost e cînd filosofii se adresează umanității (trecute, prezente și viitoare) în întregul ei. Steven Pinkler încearcă să-i scuze. Savanții ar fi atît de orbiți de ceea ce știu / cunosc / gîndesc, încît nu-și dau seama că știința lor îi depășește pe muritorii de rînd și că discursul lor e o complicație „păsărească”. Ei își ignoră complet publicul. Magistrul abscons nu se uită la studenți. Din păcate, mulți scriu în chipul cel mai încîlcit, fiindcă așa și-au propus din capul locului. Pur și simplu! Scopul lor nu este „trezirea” celorlalți, luminarea. Scopul lor e să-i lase cu gura căscată pe cititori. Să-i stupefieze. În treacăt fie spus, asta se numește impostură. Reacția cititorului e una singură: „Ai citit, frate? Aici pare a fi ceva foarte adînc. N-am priceput nimic, de aia e așa de adînc”. Steven Pinkler are dreptate. Un scriitor (scriptor) cinstit e limpede și coerent. Vrea să-i convingă pe cititori și nu să-i umilească. Stilul lui adaugă frumusețe lumii: „Style adds beauty to the world”... Bibliografie 1. Umberto Eco, Cum se face o teză de licenţă: disciplinele umaniste, traducere de George Popescu, Iaşi: Polirom, 2006, 2020, 264p. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... 2. Stephen King, Misterul Regelui. Despre scris, traducere de Mircea Pricăjan, București: Editura Nemira, 2016, 280p. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... 3. Howard Mittelmark &amp; Sandra Newman, Cum să NU scrii un roman: Arta greșelilor, traducere de Bogdan-Alexandru Stănescu, București: Baroque Books &amp; Arts, 2014, 310p. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2... 4. Anne Lamott, Cum înveți să scrii ficțiune pas cu pas. Sugestii despre scris si viață, traducere de Ileana Ioniţă-Iancu, Pitești: Paralela 45, 2013.5. Mario Vargas Llosa, Scrisori către un tînăr romancier, traducere de Mihai Cantuniari, București: Humanitas, 2010, 144p. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... 6. William Zinsser, Cum să scriem bine: Ghidul clasic pentru scriitorii de nonficţiune, traducere de Amalia Mărăşescu, Piteşti: Paralela 45, 2013, 224p.                   34 reviews258 followers     January 2, 2023   As part of my studies, this past semester I had to take an English writing class. Pinker's book The Sense of Style was part of the assigned readings. Throughout the semester we would do feedback loops of the writing process for increasingly demanding essays. And in the middle of the semester, I wrote my worst essay. Initially, I thought it was pretty clever. I had compressed a swath of ideas into the minimum word count while meeting the requirements. The professor, in their wisdom, did not think so. They explained why, and offered the opportunity to rewrite it. This is what led me to actually read this whole book rather than skimming the few selections we were assigned. When I had started the course, and the book, what I had noticed immediately was that English writing fit squarely in much of what I believed: this is just applied epistemology, philosophy of language, and logic. Easy peasy I thought. It is the creation, transmission, or expenditure of truth. Language is just the channel through which this was done. And the goal is to most efficiently communicate things, but also balance this with making sure the things that are communicated are worthwhile or effective. However, this is easier said than done. In this review, I shall share that original essay, use the lessons of Pinker to point out areas of improvement, and explain some of what I learned. And please, feel free to critique this essay as well (because while I am fairly certain Steven Pinker lives within a mile from me, I do not wish to share this with him for fear he would be left aghast) Prompt: essentially, to write anything related to individuality versus society, reference the essay Disciplining the Individual by Patrick Miller and three other sources, and be at least 1000 words.   The Perfect Citizen, But The Nonexistent Individual by Xeon  Let us consider a thought experiment. Imagine, a person who forgets their desires and needs to live only in accordance with the laws of their region. Specifically, they use rules and laws as a paradigm of what actions to do, and thus use them to test the limits of such constraints. This would be their sole purpose, the activity to which they spend all their time upon. Then, doing the same thing for, say, different ethical paradigms. As shall be seen, such a thought experiment would yield paradoxes or inefficiencies, but also permits the extraction of the societal properties which individuals suffer from, benefit from, or can leverage. There are similar real world instances of this. For example, it could be argued labs and scientists live in accordance with but at the limits of reality. By virtue of this, they discover new truths of reality. Furthermore, living under an authoritarian government may be analogously similar. On the same line of reasoning, such a thought experiment would yield new truths for the functioning of society itself. For example, to do so in regards to laws might demonstrate existing contradictions within domains of law or interesting permutations of constraints that make up singular circumstances (such as ill-fortuned individuals), and thus that these laws and rules may be in need of reformation. In the context of ethics, it would be difficult since these are subjective and up to the individual. Nonetheless, one way such could be performed is that the constant interpretation of whatever chosen ethical systems to every single action may yield ambiguities within the theories. Alternatively, since many ethical theories are seemingly compatible or overlap with each other, interpreting and applying the ethical systems to every single action may yield ambiguities amongst theories. Lastly, what could be demonstrated is how the degree to which the deontological ideals of a given means of living can not be consistently fulfilled in the backdrop of balancing other practical duties. Such were the findings of a stunt journalist when trying to live as literally to the Bible and as the most healthy person possible (Jacobs 2007; Jacobs 2012). More specifically, to analyze the ramifications and nuances of such a thought experiment, an attribute presents itself. This is that there are multiple layers and spheres in which rules are circumscribed, dynamically constraining the individual. For example, from the international level, national level, state level, and local level of laws. Then there are also different rules or policies at specific institutions, such as school as a student, at the company one is an employee at, or the business one is a customer at. Strongly tied, though not necessarily always the same, is that of geographical locations. For example, take the case of embassies or consulates, specially sanctioned buildings within countries. By simply stepping into the premises of such, one can garner various international protections (United Nations 1963). Here the point that may be observed is that whether by socially construed institutions or physically existent locations, these combine to create specific contexts as preconditions which if fulfilled, then certain things should or should not be conducted. Here, the most intriguing distinction is that either laws or ethics can be written in the manner of negative or positive instantiations such as “If X, do not Y” or “If X, do Y.” Thus, to assimilate the aforementioned, an individual is simply the remainder of thousands of dynamically activating conditional statements; an individual is the remainder after social rules. However, social rules can also be the very thing which best permits the potential flourishing of individuals. From others’ specialization, comparative advantages, and economies of scale, the pie grows larger for everyone (Mankiw 2021). Or as it is said, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” Furthermore, the purpose of formal or informal rules may be said to be because of a prisoner’s dilemma (Poundstone 1993). However in this case it would not be a two player game, but an eight billion player game (United Nations 2022). Whereby for the long term equilibrium of society, it is best for everyone to abide by the same rules, which also happens to be the most mutually beneficial. This can be seen whereby preexisting social institutions, incrementally improved over time, perpetuate into the future via socialization by cycling through their constituent members: society is but one large Ship of Theseus, and individuals reap the benefits from the labor of those who came before them. The issue is, the very benefit of social institutions can be their flaw. The manifest functions of robustness via cultural reproduction has the latent dysfunction of resilience to change (Merton 1957; Taleb 2012). So, “Every time you see an injustice or an inefficiency or an abnormality” you can in fact only “wish that there were someone or something” (Miller 2019). For it becomes evident it is difficult to correct issues of the system without copious amounts of resources and time. The most one can often do is either attempt to influence those in key positions of power, or conduct their influence by virtue of second order effects via other endeavors. How then can individuals most flourish? The solution for both a life of excess stringency to rules as well as objective systemic change is that of balance (and action, of course). Whether as best originally posited as the golden mean in Western philosophy or tao in Eastern philosophy, a more specific, but modern and technical, instantiation of this would be that of optimizations from math. For even in the jungle of the constraints and confines of society, there is hope. One simply need be creative. This is balance at its truest; when one can effortlessly glide through, find gaps within, or take advantage of the existing structures of society. If society truly can be symbolically represented as but sets of conditional statements, what is physically possible yet socially unaddressed? Such as how there are hidden gem locations in cities around the world, how the guise of setting up an entity can provide individuals additional rights and protections, how a corporation can have its own county and surrogate city where it even provides the infrastructure, or how certain individuals can travel anywhere in the world anytime without the need of visas. Regardless of whatever predicament, the other more underlying solution is, as always, to work on oneself to the degree that is possible. For as famed Russian writer Leo Tolstoy once put it, “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” Works CitedJacobs, A. J. Drop Dead Healthy: One Man's Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection. Simon &amp; 	Schuster, 2012. Jacobs, A. J. The Year of Living Biblically. Simon &amp; Schuster, 2007. Mankiw, Nicholas Gregory. Principles of Economics. Cengage Learning, 2021. Miller, Patrick Lee. Disciplining the Individual. Medium, Arc Digital, 29 March 2019, 	https://medium.com/arc-digital/discip.... Merton, Robert King. Social Theory and Social Structure. Free Press, 1957. Poundstone, William. Prisoner's Dilemma. Anchor Books, 1993. Taleb, Nassim. Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder. Random House, 2012. United Nations. Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. 1963. 	https://legal.un.org/ilc/texts/instru....United Nations. World Population Prospects. 2022. https://www.un.org/development/desa/p...  Now, you must understand: Coming in, the developmental capacities of young Xeon were stagnant. He had trouble referring to himself in his own writing. He keenly tried to speak only of facts. He avoided using his beliefs and deferred to the words of authority figures. He utilized theory much. He did not care about pandering to readers. He placed the burden of connections and background information on the reader. But, Pinker swiftly corrected all this.  My favorite quotes include the following (but trust me, there are a lot of other tips in the book):  "As Thomas and Turner note, “When we open a cookbook, we completely put aside—and expect the author to put aside—the kind of question that leads to the heart of certain philosophic and religious traditions. Is it possible to talk about cooking? Do eggs really exist? Is food something about which knowledge is possible? Can anyone else ever tell us anything true about cooking? … Classic style similarly puts aside as inappropriate philosophical questions about its enterprise. If it took those questions up, it could never get around to treating its subject, and its purpose is exclusively to treat its subject.”" "Classic style is not the same as the common but unhelpful advice to “avoid abstraction.” Sometimes we do have to write about abstract ideas. What classic style does is explain them as if they were objects and forces that would be recognizable to anyone standing in a position to see them." "Classic writing, with its assumption of equality between writer and reader, makes the reader feel like a genius. Bad writing makes the reader feel like a dunce." "Could you recognize a “level” or a “perspective” if you met one on the street? Could you point it out to someone else? What about an approach, an assumption, a concept, a condition, a context, a framework, an issue, a model, a process, a range, a role, a strategy, a tendency, or a variable?" "Often the pronouns I, me, and you are not just harmless but downright helpful. They simulate a conversation, as classic style recommends, and they are gifts to the memory-challenged reader."“"Please, sir; I didn’t do it! It was done! Try to conquer your cowardice, and start your concluding chapter with the creative assertion: Lo! I found …"”  Pinker advocates for something called the Classical style. Being a researcher, he would use evidence from cognitive psychology to support claims as well as experiences and examples of bad academic or technical writing to contrast with. Both aspects uniquely resonated with me. Even for technical writing, my essay is not written well. And it really need not be that way. Here's why: 1. I could have written a clearer and better thesis statement.2. For the thought experiment I posit, I should at least have applied it or made it relevant for the normal person. The point is to ask: who cares? And I do not think I really addressed this. 3. For the amount of sociology and economics I mentioned, I should have at least provided examples of each. Besides this, I could have also defined the advanced vocabulary I used along the way. I did neither of these things, thus making it too abstract.4. Rereading, I do not think I make a reader feel enlightened. I believe it is because I was just throwing up information, rather than walking through it.5. The quote on identifying something on the street was the most impactful: the questions. I feel like a kid, with an older sibling giving me a tirade. As it relates to this essay, little can be pointed to or has real world referents, or at least I did not even attempt to do so. Once more, I could have used more examples.6. On the use of pronouns to refer to myself, Pinker explained that it is okay, and in fact helpful in a variety of ways, to refer to oneself and to siphon from one's own experiences. As my professor explained, this is what gives writing our voice, a means of speaking our personal truths.  I wish I could share my other essays, because I really did improve and had an excellent comeback. But this review is becoming too long as it is.The book, overall, was very useful. I wonder if I am one of the few readers who got the most out of it, because the advice and instruction were peculiarly useful for me. Admittedly, I think I was in dire need of repair: reading textbooks and old texts has tainted me, and I had forgotten the very language of our times. I ascended from the abyss I was in, to a new light that I knew not of. And for that, I am grateful.     handbooks               Author  1 book8,092 followers     June 7, 2016   I’ve long admired Pinker’s poise with the pen. Both The Blank Slate and The Language Instinct (the two books of his I’d before read) are, in my opinion at least, conspicuously well-written. Popular science is, contrary to what one might expect, a difficult genre; the writer must take complex ideas from esoteric subjects—ideas usually mired in technical terminology—and release them from their provincial prisons. Added to this complicated task of exegesis, the writer of popular science must also work hard to entertain; for popular science, like popular music, isn’t a success unless it sells. So when I heard that Pinker had just come out with a style guide, I quite naturally noticed; as I am in perfect agreement with Pinker when he says: I love style manuals. Ever since I was assigned Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style in an introductory psychology course, the writing guide has been among my favorite literary genres. It’s not just that I welcome advice on the lifelong challenge of perfecting the craft of writing. It’s also that credible guidance on writing must itself be well written, and the best of the manuals are paragons of their own advice. So, with my usual overblown expectations, I cracked open the pages of this book, hoping to hear secrets from a professional. I will spoil the surprise and say that I was a bit disappointed; the book was quite good, but could have been much better. So allow me, if you will, to go through it chapter by chapter, noting the good, the bad, and the boring.	This book starts out strong. Pinker acknowledges what I wish more style guides would: that the foundation of good writing is not abiding by “proper” grammar, nor mastering some rhetorical tricks, but is simply being a sensitive reader. In this vein, Pinker chooses four examples of good writing, and pulls them apart, providing us with a quick glimpse inside Pinker’s readerly mind. (Speaking for myself, I think I’ve learned more about the art of writing from acquiring the habit of writing down attractive quotations than from all of the style guides put together.) Pinker also acknowledges something that many guides do not address: that most guides are not properly guides to writing, but to revising. Perhaps there are some who naturally speak in balanced phrases and arresting metaphors; but for most of us, elegance is a product of careful reworking, of obsessive rewriting, of assiduous editing. 	Pinker’s next two chapters are also strong. First, he discusses a certain philosophy of style: Classic Style. This view is guided by two metaphors: conversation and vision. The writer of classic prose treats the reader as a conversation partner—that is, as an equal. Thus, new information is not presented as oracular pronouncements, but as a guiding of the reader’s eye to previously unexamined bits of terrain—just like one might tell an interesting factoid to a friend. The implication is that the knowledge was there all along, and that the reader only needed the kindly writer to direct his gaze. It is unsurprising that Pinker chooses this view to endorse; this style is well-suited for popular nonfiction (and book reviews), what with its emphasis on concreteness, simplicity, and directness. Of course, no philosophy of style could embrace all genres (imagine how boring the world would be if everyone wrote like Pinker?). With that caveat on mind, I thought this view, and Pinker’s presentation of it, very attractive. 	Next, Pinker discusses what he calls the Curse of Knowledge. This is simply the difficulty that we all have in imagining what it's like not to know something we do know. This has been proven in experiment, but daily life is full of copious examples: how many times have instructions from a teacher or a boss struck you as ambiguous, vague, confusing? People aren't good at giving instructions because they aren't good at imagining what it's like to need instructions for something they know how to do. And even when people are made aware of this tendency—namely, the tendency to assume that other people are aware of the same knowledge as are you—they aren’t very good at making the leap to clarity. The only remedy, Pinker suggests, is an outside editor: “Social psychologists have found that we are overconfident, sometimes to the point of delusion, about our ability to infer what other people think, even the people who are closest to us. Only when we ask those people do we discover that what’s obvious to us isn’t obvious to them. That’s why professional writers have editors.” (Speaking for myself again, it’s an alarming experience to have somebody single out a sentence as being obscure, which you found, after copious editing, to be clear as day.) 	The next chapter is where the book petered out. Pinker, perhaps himself suffering from the curse of knowledge, launches into an explanation of the tree-like nature of grammatical relationships. For readers of The Language Instinct, this will be partially old ground. His presentation here, however, is somehow less compelling. The tree diagrams struck me as unnecessary; I don’t need a picture to understand why “The impact, which theories of economics predict  are bound to be felt sooner or later, could be enormous” is wrong. Further, I don’t need tree diagrams to understand the utility of passive voice, or why sentences like this one, penned by Bob Dole, should be avoided: “The view that beating a third-rate Serbian military that for the third time in a decade is brutally targeting civilians is hardly worth the effort is not based on a lack of understanding of what is occurring on the ground.” In short, in Pinker's attempt to make the subject of grammar more clear using linguistics, his explanations became tiresome and superfluous.	With chapter 5, the book begins to be interesting once more. Here, Pinker discusses the art of composition on a larger scale—how to put ideas into an orderly succession, how to signal transitions of topic, etc. He has some sensible things to say, but nothing very new, I’m afraid. It is, however, inevitable that there be a large degree of overlap between style guides. Good writing is, of course, various in style and form; but certain lessons are basic, such as how to arrange points coherently. 	Then we get to the final chapter, which occupies almost half the book. I predict that this chapter will be either the most useful or the most tedious for readers: if you write often, this will seem like the real meat; but if you don’t, it will seem pointless and pedantic. What Pinker does here is disassemble, point by point, many of the bugbears and hobgoblins of purists, such as the proverbial split infinitive. These rules, as Pinker points out, are usually based on linguistic and historical ignorance, adopted only because their proponents have been vituperative and vocal, not because the rules were reflective of good writing. I personally feel a kind of Schadenfreude seeing Pinker make know-it-alls sound like fools, but perhaps I am just particularly sadistic. Pinker is, however, careful to make a subtle point: just because there are some bad rules, doesn’t mean that all rules should be flouted: Phony rules, which proliferate like urban legends and are just as hard to eradicate, are responsible for vast amounts of ham-fisted copyediting and smarty-pants one-upmanship. Yet when language scholars try to debunk the spurious rules, the dichotomizing mindset imagines that they are trying to abolish all standards of good writing. It is as if anyone who proposed repealing a stupid law, like the one forbidding interracial marriage, must be a black-cloaked, bomb-clutching anarchist. So Pinker is not saying there are no rules to language, and no common characteristics to good writing; all he is saying is that these rules and advice should be based on evidence, not ignorance. Clearly, if Pinker didn’t think there were any common characteristics of good writing, he wouldn’t write a style guide. (And, while I’m at it, if he didn’t think that cultural and environmental influences were important—as some people who accuse him of being a genetic deterministic claim—then he wouldn’t write a style guide, either.)	Style guides are stuck in a bit of a paradox. This book is aimed at somebody who reads and writes habitually; it is full of technical advice for the frequent practitioner. Thus, Pinker isn't working as hard to be as entertaining as in his other books, so the tone is somewhat more dry than in, say, The Blank Slate; this quite naturally restricts his readership to a subset of those who often write. On the other hand, if you read and write much, Pinker won’t say much that is surprising; frequent practice gives one a feel for the correct and the spurious rule, the elegant and the jumbled grammatical form. Thus, Pinker is in the odd position of delivering a sermon to a congregation of priests: the nonwriter will be bored because the advice is irrelevant, and the writer will be bored because the advice is old news. 	But I'll admit that Pinker did clear up some things I was a bit shaky on. For example, the rules governing singular and plural can get a little hairy. We say “The mac and cheese  is,” but “Fred and Joe are”—because mac and cheese is treated as one thing, whereas Fred and Joe are two separate things. But what about phrases less common than mac and cheese, such as “flora and fauna”? I recently encountered this very problem when writing a review of Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle: I was unsure whether to say “the flora and fauna is,” or “the flora and fauna are.” Are they two separate things, or one inclusive thing like mac and cheese? Or consider other ambiguous cases, like with the word “or.” What’s better: “Was the bicycle or the scooters damaged?” or “Were the bicycle or the scooters damaged?” Both sound a bit odd to me.	Perhaps the biggest drawback of this book, aside from the tree diagrams, was simply the formatting. It’s laid out like a work of popular science, not a work of reference; thus, it would be fairly tedious to look up any specific questions one had. For that reason, I can’t see it becoming terribly influential; writers can’t point to a specific bullet-point or principle in order to debate punctilious copy-editors. That’s a shame, because Pinker has some really useful things to say on the subject. Writing is hard enough without dogmatic pedants screaming in your ear. But while I don't think this book is destined for classic status, it is still certainly worth reading. Pinker manages to present a nuanced, evidence-based view of grammar, while upholding the values that all careful readers and writers hold dear: consistency, clarity, and grace.     help-me-help-myself prose-style               Author  57 books7,650 followers      Read  July 23, 2022   Pretty good style guide, especially re sentence/structure organisation. The focus is very much on clarity and bringing across what you want to achieve, which means he doesn't indulge in sweeping prescriptivist instructions like "cut unnecessary words"--the point is to consider what words in what order best do the job. A useful corrective to the shibboleth-ridden world of style advice.    writing               563 reviews772 followers     February 17, 2021    The Sense of Style was mandatory reading for me and the rest of my tenth-grade English class. We were so dismayed when this was assigned; I remember thinking, “Great! On top of learning grammar in class, now we have to read about it at home too.” I skimmed The Sense of Style and called it a day. (Which is probably why I never realized this book isn’t about grammar. At least, not entirely.)Years later, I’ve picked this up of my own volition. And I have found Steven Pinker’s style manual to be immensely helpful in articulating and elucidating not only the thornier parts of my own writing—the sentences that sound a smidge off but I can’t pinpoint why—but also the esoteric academic prose I now have to read every day for my master’s degree.  In fact, I’m thinking of sending a copy to each of my professors. Too unsubtle, you think?     audiobook beautiful-writing canadian-author               1,079 reviews2,609 followers     March 25, 2018   Steven Pinker has created a writer's guide that is interesting, useful, amusing, and also frustrating.I enjoyed the first part of this book, but the middle section got bogged down in parsing sentences and grammar exercises. I put the book down and took a week-long break from it, and debated whether to pick it up again. I finally did finish, but it was a slog.  My big takeaways from this book were 1) language is constantly changing, and the English language is so inventive that when the grammar police come hollerin' at you that you've written something wrong, chances are there is a dispute over what is correct. 2) Few things in language are correct, and even then, if enough people adopt that word or style, it may eventually be considered correct. 3) This knowledge won't stop the grammar fussbudgets from complaining that "people used to write better," which is also nonsense. Language and writing are created by mankind, and creative writers love to break the rules, so 4) the fussbudgets need to knock it off, already. I listened to this book on audio, and I think the boggy sections might have been less frustrating (and easier to skim) if I had read that section in print.  Recommended, with reservations, for those who like writers writing about writing.  Opening Passage "I love style manuals. Ever since I was assigned Strunk and White's The Elements of Style in an introductory psychology course, the writing guide has been among my favorite literary genres. It's not just that I welcome advice on the lifelong challenge of perfecting the craft of writing. It's also that credible guidance on writing must itself be well written, and the best of the manuals are paragons of their own advice. William Strunk's course notes on writing, which his student E. B. White turned into their famous little book, was studded with gems of self-exemplifcation such as "Write with nouns and verbs," "Put the emphatic words of a sentence at the end," and best of all, his prime directive, "Omit needless words."     audiobooks nonfiction writers-on-writing               304 reviews18 followers     October 19, 2019   Świetna książka. Obowiązkowa pozycja w każdej redakcji. Zamierzam zadbać, żeby w mojej redakcji znalazł się egzemplarz, by wszyscy dziennikarze mogli w wolnych chwilach poczytać. Bo w tej książce każdy rozdział, podrozdział czy akapit wnosi coś wartościowego dla kogoś, kto zajmuje się pisaniem (nawet krótkich dziennikarskich form). Lubię tę książkę między innymi za to, że wyjaśnia w prostych słowach to, co często czuje się intuicyjnie, czytając słabo napisane teksty. Czyta się, widzi się, że coś jest nie halo, nawet wie się co... ale nie bardzo wiadomo, jak to nazwać i wyjaśnić przyczyny. Dzięki tej książce takie intuicje zyskują definicję. A do tego jest oczywiście świetnie napisana a chwilami bardzo dowcipna.  P.S. Nie przeczytałem na razie angielskiego aneksu. We wstępie przeczytałem, że jest specyficznie skierowany do osób piszących po angielsku. Więc ponieważ po angielsku pisuję głównie maile lub SMS-y, więc uznałem, że na razie nie jestem odbiorcą takiego tekstu. Ale może kiedyś do tego wrócę... bo część polskojęzyczną zamierzam podczytywać bardzo często.      steven-pinker               153 reviews46 followers     July 16, 2017   Having just embarked on a fairly intensive writing course, I asked my mentor for some recommendations of books on the craft of writing. This book, "The Sense of Style" was at the top of his list, and I can see why.The author, Steven Pinker, is a Psychology professor at Harvard, and has also done much research on language and cognition (he's described as a Cognitive Scientist). Further, he is chair of the Usage Panel of The American Heritage Dictionary. And it shows. All of it. He has written a very readable, engaging, and entertaining manual on writing, providing a wealth of information which will help anyone write better prose. He also goes into considerable detail on the mechanics of good writing, including syntax, noun piles, quantifiers, remote conditionals .... you get the idea.  Even though he goes quite deep on the technical side, he is very generous with clear, helpful examples of everything, a good many of which are laugh out loud funny. I found the book to be a solid 4 or 4.5, but the final chapter, "Telling Right From Wrong", was a lengthy and very practical compendium of many additional illustrations and applications that took it to a 5. If you are interested in becoming a better writer, you will benefit from this book!                   59 reviews18 followers     June 20, 2022   One thing starts to seem pretty clear early on here: Steven Pinker rarely teaches undergraduates, or at least rarely has to slog through a pile of their written work himself. No surprises there: professors who are much less famous and fancy than Pinker often teach just a handful of grad students a year and that’s it. Under those conditions you might tend to see most writers as smart, keen, already pretty skilful good-faith actors whose writing is just sadly held back now and then by the foibles of the human mind. As he declares in the handy one-line summary at the beginning of Chapter 3, “The Curse of Knowledge,” Pinker thinks “the main cause of incomprehensible prose is the difficulty of imagining what it’s like for someone else not to know something that you know.” That’s certainly got a role to play much of the time. But speaking as someone who spends an enormous number of his professional hours sifting through and assessing unintelligible prose written by rookie writers, I’m not so sure it’s “the main cause” of incomprehensibility. At least as often, it’s having intentionally troweled on a thick layer of vagueness and bafflegab designed to conceal ignorance, avoid the hard work of thought, and big up the author’s knowledge rather than a struggle with an imprisoning selfhood that blinds us to the sensibilities of others.  Likewise later, in Chapter 5, “Arcs of Knowledge,” where psycholinguist Pinker has all sorts of complicated theories involving trees of linked phrases and elaborate syntactic systems to account for failures to “ensure that readers will grasp the topic, get the point, keep track of the players, and see how one idea follows from another”—when the problem seems at least as likely to be that the confusing writer is simply lazily typing away on autopilot, only half-grasps the topic, doesn’t have good working methods for “keeping track of the players” themselves, and hasn’t yet fully worked out “how one idea follows from another.”  Pinker is proposing interesting alternative accounts of the origins of incomprehensible prose, but these seem like the main writing problems of just a few. They’re interesting, then, but really only of value if Pinker is contentedly preaching to the composition choir rather than trying to teach people how to write. Maybe it’s the fate of style guides like this to preach to that choir in the end, especially books like Pinker’s that aren’t even organized like a coil-bound composition textbook that would allow for looking up specific topics easily, but are instead meant for you to just curl up in your easy chair and read like any other book. One other thing seems pretty clear here, then: while I liked this book and found much of it interesting—especially the earlier, more manageable and much shorter chapters—I wouldn’t dream of giving it to one of my struggling students. In the long closing chapter, “Telling Right from Wrong” (187-304), there’s something of an abiding claim or point having to do with the need to jettison many sticklers’ rules about usage, but it’s a kind of disorganized mini handbook rather than a chapter, a curio cabinet of entries under category headings. And in this regard it highlights that same fundamental problem with many usage guides, the question of who and what they’re ultimately for. You can’t really look things up here for ad-hoc advice because you must already be in the know to use the chapter that way. Want to sort out whether it’s okay to split an infinitive? There you’re fine, because that’s filed under “split infinitives” (228-30). But if you’re wondering whether it should be She approved of Sheila taking the job or She approved of Sheila’s taking the job, are you master enough of the argot of the grammarian to know that this is found under “fused participles” (212-3)? You’ll need to be—which is to say, you’ll need to know as much as those who don’t need Pinker’s advice to know where to find Pinker’s advice. 	And some of the time, you’re probably better off ignoring that advice anyway. I, for one, part company with him almost as often as I’m with him. Take, for example, the section in which he devotes three pages to a weak defense of very unique on the grounds that things are only ever truly unique in certain of their respects, never in all of them. The argument is casuistic, unconvincing, hair-splitting and ultimately beside the point. I know it’s the done thing in style guides now to distance yourself from the fussy prescriptivist Strunks and Whites, loosen your tie, turn your chair around backwards, and have a cool descriptivist real-talk session where you try to be seen tossing out as many of the rules as possible, but defending very unique is just a little too “hey guys it’s Steve your cool grammar uncle” for me. (And I’m not much of a stickler, even when I’m grading essays on the clock.) All that said, Pinker is at least somewhat serious about protecting the finely tuned technical instrument of language from the destructive power of reckless use. This always seems to me the best kind of argument for prescriptions in the end rather than the silly arbitrariness of etymology, false analogies with Latin, the question of whether Shakespeare or Austen ever did it, to say nothing of the more sinister kinds of usage policing that originate in racism, classism, etc. The English language is robust and various, but we need it for tons of high-precision work, so sometimes we need to sharpen its blades and oil its moving parts. Yes, it’s true: more and more people use literally as an intensifier, for example. But intensifiers are generally empty and weak, and I think we can see that the language is already really rather extremely very absolutely highly totally utterly full of them. But there’s no synonym for literally that precisely captures the “not figuratively but strictly speaking” sense that sticklers advocate reserving the word for. So there are good reasons to protect literally that don’t make a monster, a fool or a fanatic nitpicker of the protector. In the end, Pinker seems to agree, I think, and he does eventually acknowledge the point about bafflegabbers and thoughtless show-offs, too: “When a not-so-careful writer tries to gussy up his prose with an upmarket word that he mistakenly thinks is a synonym of a common one, like simplistic for simple or fulsome for full, his readers are likely to conclude the worst: that he has paid little attention to what he has read, is affecting an air of sophistication on the cheap, and is polluting a common resource” (198).  Amen—all that sentence needs is the singular “they” (255-62).                   429 reviews1,336 followers     August 20, 2021   What up, word nerds! If you find yourself contemplating the finer points of sentence structure, word usage, and punctuation (and especially if you spend time correcting the speech and writing of others), this is the book for you. Steven Pinker is a polymath who writes on language, cognitive psychology and a host of scientific topics: here he applies his erudition and good humor, as well as his experience as Chair of the Usage Panel of The American Heritage Dictionary, to the topic of clear communication in The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. As ever, Pinker offers brilliant explanations that reveal the structure of seemingly arbitrary conventions of thought and speech. Rather than writing a sop to pedants, he challenges us to think in terms of the reader and how she parses words on the page (for example, you just formed thoughts about my choice to use the pronoun "she": the gender-neutral singular is covered extensively here). This book is bound to change the way you think about language and will joyously confirm some of your personal preferences while mercilessly smashing others. Everyone who cares deeply about the English language should read it.It's a lot of fun (there are comic strips aplenty and laugh-out-loud usage examples), but it’s not easy reading. You'll have to put your thinking cap on for this one. I don't mean to say that it's all subjunctive and pluperfect and modal auxiliary, but those highfalutin terms are invoked where necessary and may come flying at your head. Pinker dutifully unpacks these concepts, but there are times in which I had to stop and re-read or simply resign myself to duck and not get hit. I employed one of my new favorite ways of reading: listening to the audio book while reading the text. This is a delightful way to get into the zone. Arthur Morey does a yeoman's job of dictating charts and punctuation and describing illustrations, but I'd have been lost without the sentence tree diagrams and the 3-column grids to look at. If you have to choose one, go with the text copy. Any thorough accounting of the topics addressed would be a massive undertaking, but I'll share a few highlights. Pinker lampoons our tendency to decry the death of English with new each generation, providing dire predictions of its imminent decline from the 1970s, 1960s, 1910s, 1800s, 1700s and... well, you get the idea. The CU L8TRs and IMHOs of texting are no more indicative of forgotten formal language than the elided and truncated staccato of telegrams in their heyday. A key to being a good writer is to be a good reader, and most of what we learn comes from observing masters at work: Pinker provides examples and breaks down what makes them so satisfying. It's important to use words to form images in the reader's head: "A writer, like a cinematographer, manipulates the viewer's perspective on an ongoing story, with the verbal equivalent of camera angles and quick cuts." We see how a carefully chosen word can break up cliché, invoke a shared cultural reference, or yield clues that save a paragraph of description. "The key to good style, far more than obeying any list of commandments, is to have a clear conception of the make-believe world in which you're pretending to communicate." We are urged to be mindful of our assumed relationship to the reader. "Classic writing, with its assumption of equality between writer and reader, makes the reader feel like a genius. Bad writing makes the reader feel like a dunce." A self-heeding nugget of wisdom: “Omit needless words.” The fault of academese, legalese and jargon is less attributable to intentional obfuscation, and more a problem of "The Curse of Knowledge": our tendency to assume that others already know what we know. One cure can be to have others read your work, or to wait and then re-read your own, addressing instances in which you've assumed everyone shares your familiarity with a topic, or simply catching constructions that are hard to read aloud. "The advice in this and other stylebooks is not so much on how to write as on how to revise." Here I shall break these notes up with a new paragraph; which, Pinker reminds us, does not consistently correspond to any unit of discourse (and can even be, contra an army of grade school teachers, a single sentence). Much of the book consists of taking the received "rules" of grammar - don't end a sentence with a preposition, don't split the infinitive, or don't use "like" as "as" - and turning them on their heads. He provides counterexamples from English's most respected writers, popular songs, and common idioms, and dashes their false-analogies-to-Latin, spurious logic, and appeals-to-authority upon the rocks. I stuck with the Oxford comma (aka the serial comma, I’ve now learned) in the previous sentence, inspired by the argument in this book that it is typically the clearer construction. Pinker does not bemoan the loss of sentence diagrams, but employs cascading trees to visualize how our brains uptake sentences as we form meaning from component words. The order matters. A given sentence might need reorganization if it forces the reader to hold a thought for too long or to suspend multiple clauses in her head before the crucial information finally arrives. So much confusion with case- and tense- and subject/verb-agreement arises from those gaps in the tree that are placed too far from their logical partners. Pinker is sensitive to how language is used in the real world, and willing to let conventions slide when language evolves. He provides numerous examples of similar concessions: vestiges of previous generations in which usage battles were fought and lost. And yet, he argues convincingly against select malapropisms and miscarriages of language that he insists will cause trouble for the careful reader. His attack upon the figurative use of "literally" gave me a good laugh: "Like other intensifiers it is usually superfluous, whereas the 'actual fact' sense is indispensable and has no equivalent. And since the figurative use can evoke ludicrous imagery (e.g. The press has literally emasculated the president), it screams, 'I don't think about what my words mean.'" There are many additional insights and explanations, new terminology (coordinator, subordinator and determiner will be particularly helpful), things I had never thought of before, and concepts I had previously misunderstood… but hopefully you get an idea of the observations herein. If you need more convincing, a delightful way to hear Pinker present the salient points is in this 54-minute lecture titled Linguistics, Style and Writing in the 21st Century. Happy reading, and happy writing!                   Author  7 books123 followers     June 28, 2015   * Originally reviewed on the Night Owls Press blog here. *Heads-up, editors. In The Sense of Style, author Steven Pinker challenges every authoritarian grammarian and language purist who has held sway over the rules of the English language with their dogmatic style books.  A psycholinguist by profession, Pinker is a scholar of the science of language. So it's no surprise that The Sense of Style feels like a modern alternative to the classic but tired guides of Strunk and White and others. In my days as an English undergrad, Strunk and White's The Elements of Style was the biblical tome of writing. But Pinker arrives with this iconoclastic book to show us that sometimes rules can be tone-deaf to what really makes for transparent and compelling prose.  Purists often forget that the English language is rife with idiosyncrasies that can't be fit so neatly into rule boxes. You'll see the best kind of rule-breaking among poets and novelists, who often have the better "ear" and feel for language than your clumsy grammarian. Language is chiefly a medium for expression, not just an embodiment of rules. Literature's most gifted writers have often 'broken' the rules using constructions that might have been edited into sterility by heavy-handed editors. The expressive possibilities of language often rely on the rules being bent.  As you can see, this book isn't your typical manual on grammar and usage. You won't find a list of dos and don'ts in an effort to indoctrinate. Pinker shows us instead that unthinking adherence to manuals actually makes for bad, clunky writing. For example, one of the signature rules in writing is to avoid using the passive voice at all costs. But Pinker argues that if you change every passive sentence into an active one, you're not necessarily improving the prose. The main problem is that the passive construction exists for a purpose—but most people don't know when to use it effectively. Sure, both active and passive constructions convey the same information but they have cognitive differences because of the order of information given. Pinker's rule of thumb: Passive is the preferred construction when the affected entity (the item that receives the action) is the topic of the preceding discussion or when the agent of action is irrelevant to the discussion. In other words, good writing is about having a "sense," about letting your communication goals dictate the writing. This book isn't for beginners. Pinker is clear in the Introduction about this and writes that this book is for experienced writers. You will benefit the most from this book if you are a relatively experienced writer and reader, and are familiar with the basic rules of language and grammar. You have to know the rules in order to bend them with style and with compelling reason, to know when to take advantage of loopholes and irregularities. The "sense" in The Sense of Style is knowing how a masterful writer moves fluidly between logical rules and combinations, and knows those idiomatic usages and irregularities. The book is packed with examples and is wonderfully readable, which surprised me. Pinker is great at reverse engineering passages and illuminating what writers have done well (or not done well) to convey their ideas. Take lots of notes! For those who still crave the utility of a reference manual, the later chapters in the book include lists of words and rules that can be bent and those that can't (in Pinker's opinion). Or, for a bite-size taste of the grammar rules Pinker explores in this book, check out this article by Pinker in The Guardian. Overall, a great, informative read. I'll be keeping this on my reference shelf. [Disclaimer: I received an ARC copy of this book from the publisher through the Goodreads First Reads Program in exchange for an honest review.]     first-reads-arc how-to nonfiction               198 reviews123 followers     November 15, 2017   A great book on the considerations for writing non-fiction.This book was written with the amazing style of Pinker's usual writings and it was about that style and practical advice to improve one's writings. I am implementing the lessons I've learned from pinker in my writing process for my blog. And it improved my effectiveness to a great degree. It is worth knowing that most advice on the book contains pretty solid arguments for them. So you can use the arguments to find ways to improve writing, regardless of what language you are writing with.     favorites linguistics               655 reviews179 followers     February 7, 2017   What I expect from a writing guide is either a comprehensive reference book where I can easily find answers to my questions, or - much more valued - explanations so memorable that my writing - or my students' writing - is changed forever. (Sin Boldly!: Dr. Dave's Guide To Writing The College Paper worked quite well this year; in one case, the shock of reading the Torah was so strong that a student of mine started to write clearly, because he understood that communicating ideas is the key to good writing. True story.) With this book, we get neither. The explanations are long-winded, frequently involving tree diagrams (meaning they can cause brain damage in grammar-illiterate 16-year-olds), and ultimately unmemorable. I have enjoyed reading it - mostly - but this book is no miracle cure and not a go-to resource. Still, Pinker provides some excellent study material, such as incorrect and doctored sentences, or analysed samples of good writing, which I found very effective for teaching kids close reading.     us writing-guides               116 reviews4 followers     September 6, 2014   Thanks to a Goodreads Firstreads giveaway, I had a chance to read an advanced copy of Pinker's Sense of Style. My thoughts on the book are a bit mixed. Here goes:The Good:--Well, let's be honest--I just read a stylebook cover to cover; it must have SOMETHING going for it!--I found Pinker's wit to be on full display here, and that was a welcome addition to what can sometimes become dry material (i.e., talk of grammar). Pinker's wit is at its best when he slyly breaks all the grammar rules he's discussing in the midst of discussing them only to reveal the trick a paragraph later. An instance of the old aphorism "form follows function" at its best.--In a piece of writing I completed this week, I found myself utilizing advice I'd read in this book and/or considering the constructions of my sentences based on the logic Pinker provides in the book. If a stylebook--a utilitarian genre if there ever was one--turns out to be useful, that certainly bodes well for it. The Not-so-good:--I found the structure/form of the book to be a bit two-headed. It was as though the book couldn't decide whether it wanted to be a scholarly monograph about style (to be read cover-to-cover) or a textbook/reference book (to be consulted piecemeal). I chose to approach the book as a monograph; however, I found that there were chapters that read like a monograph and chapters that read like a reference book. Needless to say, the "referencey" chapters were not quite as read-able.--In addition, several of the chapters were far too long to be useful in a textbook setting. Truth be told, perhaps Pinker wasn't shooting for textbook use for his book, but the incongruity here is that the chapters that were most like textbook chapters in their content were the longest (and therefore the least like textbook chapters in their functionality).  In sum, this was a readable stylebook (a feat in and of itself) that has a lot of 21st-century insights that it would do a lot of us a lot of good to internalize. However, it was also a book that just couldn't make up its mind about its identity.                    81 reviews     September 7, 2014   I started out reading this book as I thought it was intended: a style manual for the modern day writer. I ended up equating it more to a textbook and reference guide for the modern day writer. I can easily see this book being required for college level courses. It is deep into sentence structure,and the entire last chapter is fantastic for reference. I liked his approach of writing so that one's brain has the most effective cognitive response to what it's reading. There were moments when I admit I had to go back and re-read some parts, as it was a bit too dry to keep me engaged but, overall, I found this book to be one of the most original I've read on structure. I will keep this book on my reference shelf; as I've highlighted parts throughout for quick reference. I have not read any of his other books, although I have to say he is a very good writer, and an author I will look for should I want to purchase other books on writing.                  881 reviews50 followers     March 6, 2016   I love Pinker, and I love writing, so this really was the book for me. It was denser than I expected, and I thus I wouldn't recommend it for any looking for a light read in writing.The focus is more on academic non-fiction than other forms of non-fiction or fiction, but offers generally timeless advice about style and clarity. Pinker strikes a good balance between useful rules and avoiding pedantry. He occasionally breaks his own advice by overusing his large and eccentric vocabulary, but its all in good fun. Will require a bit of time to get through but well recommended.                   211 reviews50 followers     February 29, 2020   Pisać każdy może,Trochę lepiej, lub trochę gorzej.Steven Pinker w "Pięknym stylu" odpowiada na pytanie jak pisać lepiej. Odpowiedź brzmi - prosto i czytelnie. Niektóre jego zalecenia są oczywiste - "unikaj słów które ledwo rozumiesz". Inne mogą być zaskakujące - "broń Cię Panie Boże, nie przekształcaj czasownika w rzeczownik". Ja, jako użytkownik potępianego przez niego prawniczego żargonu, dowiedziałam się jak dużo wykroczeń przeciwko stylowi, nieświadomie popełniałam. Setnie się przy tym ubawiłam, bo Steven Pinker swoje uwagi przedstawił w zabawny sposób.  Wyjątkowo przypadła mi do gustu forma książki - zestawienie zdań źle napisanych ze zdaniami poprawnie sformułowanymi. Wizualizacja (rzeczownik zombie) pozwoliła lepiej zrozumieć jakich lapsusów językowych nie należy popełniać (konstrukcja bezprzedmiotowa), ponieważ przez to wzrasta wrażenie nieczytelności tekstu (podwójna negacja), co wpływa na ograniczenie komunikatywności i klarowności tegoż (trudne słowa i synonimomania). A mogłam napisać inaczej - łatwiej zrozumiałam, dlaczego błędy stylistyczne, utrudniają czytelność tekstu, gdy zobaczyłam i porównałam tekst dobrze i źle napisany. Z pewnością nie zostanę drugim Cyceronem czy Juliuszem Cezarem. Wszak obaj panowie byli znani ze świetnego stylu wypowiedzi. Na pewno jednak dzięki "Pięknemu stylowi" będę umiała nazwać, jakie błędy stylistyczne popełniam ja i jakie inni popełniają. Polecam! Warto pisać klasycznie.     lit-popularnonaukowa-i-naukowa               698 reviews139 followers     May 14, 2020   ¿Qué hace falta para escribir de forma elegante y con la mayor claridad posible?Aunque parezca un reto difícil, Pinker escribe este sencillo manual de estilo para probar que no es tan difícil como se piensa. Simplemente hay que tener presente en todo momento al lector y no tratar de ponerle las cosas difíciles con párrafos oscurantistas ni una sintaxis complicadas. A lo largo de varios ejemplos, que serán una y otra vez reformulados hasta pulirlos de la forma más sencilla posible, el autor expone que lo más versátil puede ser retomar un estilo clásico - como proponen Thomas y Turner - y no dar rodeos innecesarios. Durante el ensayo, derriba unos cuantos mitos, como el de no repetir los mismos términos o el de no usar atajos sintácticos. Pese a unos maravillosos capítulos iniciales, recomendados para todo el mundo, en el último capítulo se pone más de manifiesto que antes que el libro está dedicado a un lector inglés, debido a los múltiples ejemplos que se dan analizando textos y oraciones en esta lengua. El traductor, que conste, ha hecho un gran trabajo adaptando la mayoría de definiciones a las problemáticas del español.                   29 reviews6 followers     January 4, 2015   Earthshattering it is not. Some good cartoons, though.                  Author  9 books15 followers     November 26, 2016   Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style is a maddening book, much the way doctoral students are maddening. At once a style guide, a work of aesthetics, and an overeducated explanation of writing precepts that many unwashed composition teachers nationwide already understand, it is a book sometimes too smart to get out of its own way.The book’s strengths are evident. Its six chapters use Pinker’s expertise in cognitive psychology and linguistics to demystify and to articulate how writing, both good and bad, gets written. Pinker advocates a “classic style” grounded in the visual and attentive to the action-based, cause-and-effect relations of stories. Such writing avoids the Puritanical parsimony enforced by numerous editors, professors, and grammar purists, a tight-fisted approach to language that often leaves the writer feeling penny-wise, the reader pound-foolish. It strengthens conceptual links between parts of a sentence, earns trust with its directness, and explains abstractions by finding fresh images to illustrate them. Classic style is, as Pinker notes, “congenial to the world view of the scientist.” Pinker’s scientific expertise yields interesting explanations for where and why our writing goes wrong, as in his discussion of how the clunky noun phrases and strings of prepositions that typify bad prose are tied to the mental process of “chunking,” or concreting data into manageable blocks of information. For an academic, Pinker is often delightfully lucid and personable, with a flexible, adaptive approach to writing style. Eschewing the trussed-up dogmatism of many contemporary guides, Pinker warns against “the putative rule [that] confuse(s) grammar with formality” and helps understand the difference between ungrammatical writing (which impedes meaning) and unconventional writing (which may be more or less effective in different contexts, but which can nevertheless be understood). Pinker also proves a tasteful, appreciative, and creative reader of other authors’ prose. Using a passage from a newspaper column on bird-watching to discuss the judicious application of passive voice, Pinker playfully grants the much-maligned passive a moment of activity: “Though the heron is merely being observed by an unobserved birdwatcher at this point in the passage, the passive voice keeps it in the reader’s spotlight of attention.” Readers looking to Pinker’s book as a style guide, à la The Elements of Style, may find it unwieldy overall, but useful at moments, particularly in the final chapter. Here, Pinker explores misconceptions about the ‘rules’ of English, many of which, like the rule against split infinitives, are historical accidents or personal biases that some grammar purists prescribe as commandments. Yet Pinker is no bleeding-heart descriptivist, accepting whatever neologism or grammatical rewiring comes his way; rather, he demonstrates how transformed language can still make sense, yet will prove more or less effective depending on its cultural context. This chapter does not offer specific templates for writing, as a conventional style manual might, but it does guide the reader through the murky waters of these issues. With so many strengths, then, what is the problem with The Sense of Style? Like a hog who can’t grasp that other animals don’t love the mudbath, Pinker often wallows too long in his discussions of linguistics, particularly in the fourth chapter, an informed but wearying treatment of Noam Chomsky’s “deep structure,” which Pinker uses ponderously to explain such common writing errors as the confusion of who and whom. (Here’s the error, in three words: nominative / accusative confusion.) Pinker’s writing advice, which he often treats as the miracle by-product of cognitive science research, is generally the tried-and-true wisdom of many college writing instructors: seek a second reader’s feedback, step away from your writing to see it afresh, read it aloud, use paragraph breaks “to give the reader’s eyes a place to alight and rest.” Like many a doctoral student, Pinker cherry-picks evidence in order to deride entire disciplines for bad prose, or else to puff up writers and thinkers he admires, going so far as to parse and praise a passage from a novel by his wife, Rebecca Goldstein (“the speaker is a professor who has recently achieved professional and romantic fulfillment,” notes Pinker, in a moment of telling ambiguity). And, finally, when nothing suitable is ready to hand, Pinker invents evidence that, unsurprisingly, supports his points, analyzing several passages he identifies as doctored-up pastiches, and a few more he doesn’t even bother to cite. The Sense of Style is maddening because for every instance of intellectual boorishness, there is another of genial lucidity. In an early chapter, Pinker observes: “The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose. It simply doesn’t occur to the writer that her readers don’t know what she knows.” He writes, not unsympathetically, of how experts come to overestimate the common understanding of their jargon: “As we settle in to the clique, it becomes our universe.” And he warns that “one should not confuse clarity with condescension.” How much old-fashioned wisdom lies in these remarks! So different from the technological new-fangledness that follows in the next chapter: “Once again, it’s good cognitive psychology: people learn by integrating new information into their existing web of knowledge. They don’t like it when a fact is hurled at them from out of the blue and they have to keep it levitating in short-term memory until they find a relevant background to embed it in a few moments later.” At its best, the ‘sense’ in The Sense of Style refers to common sense, and at these moments, Steven Pinker, the thoughtful amateur, deserves praise for insights and instructions that are not bound up with any one expert discourse, but can be used by writers in any field, of any status, on any occasion. Pinker, like many a doctoral student, often operates at his best. Often, but not always. There are moments when the ‘sense’ in The Sense of Style refers to faculties of the mind, and then, Steven Pinker, cognitive scientist, takes over. And it’s at moments like these that I’m reminded of a scene in The Big Lebowski, when The Dude says to his trigger-happy bowling partner, Walter Sobchak, “You’re not wrong, Walter, you’re just an asshole.”                   726 reviews134 followers     October 9, 2014   The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by Steven PinkerThe Sense of Style is a scholarly and witty book on the art of writing well. Bestselling author, linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker provides readers with a new writing-guide for the twenty-first century. He breaks down grammar rules and challenges purists on the best use of language. This challenging 368-page book includes the following six chapters: 1. Good Writing, 2. A Window onto the World, 3. The Curse of Knowledge, 4. The Web, the Tree, and the String, 5. Arcs of Coherence, and 6. Telling Right from Wrong.  Positives:1.	Dr. Pinker consistently produces quality work. 2.	A “very” unique topic, the art of writing well from a scientific perspective. You don’t have to read the book to get my joke.3.	Good use of wit that adds panache to a book about writing style.4.	Good advice throughout the book. “By replacing dogma about usage with reason and evidence, I hope not just to avoid giving ham-fisted advice but to make the advice that I do give easier to remember than a list of dos and don’ts.”5.	Explains the three main reasons why style matters. 6.	Provides insights on how to become a good writer. “Writers acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose.”7.	Supports good style over writing dogma. “The key to good style, far more than obeying any list of commandments, is to have a clear conception of the make-believe world in which you’re pretending to communicate.” “The purpose of writing is presentation, and its motive is disinterested truth. It succeeds when it aligns language with the truth, the proof of success being clarity and simplicity.”8.	The characteristics of classic style. “A writer of classic prose must simulate two experiences: showing the reader something in the world, and engaging her in conversation.”9.	Provides many examples of what constitutes poor prose: “Metadiscourse, signposting, hedging, apologizing, professional narcissism, clichés, mixed metaphors, metaconcepts, zombie nouns, and unnecessary passives.”10.	Hanlon’s Razor, “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” Excellent explanation on how the curse of knowledge may lead to poor prose. “The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose.”11.	Ways on how to improve your prose. “Good prose is never written by a committee.” Think about that.12.	The importance of understanding syntax. “Finally, an awareness of syntax can help you avoid ambiguous, confusing, and convoluted sentences. All of this awareness depends on a basic grasp of what grammatical categories are, how they differ from functions and meanings, and how they fit into trees.”13.	Interesting insights on how our minds work and how that knowledge benefits good writing. “English syntax demands subject before object. Human memory demands light before heavy. Human comprehension demands topic before comment and given before new.”14.	How to construct coherent passages longer than a sentence. “In fact, it’s the hunger for coherence that drives the entire process of understanding language.”15.	Discusses principles of composition. “An important principle in composition is that the amount of verbiage one devotes to a point should not be too far out of line with how central it is to the argument. “16.	Discusses good use of grammar, word choice, and punctuation. Starts off by debunking the myth that all traditional rules must be followed for dogma’s sake. “That’s right: when it comes to correct English, there’s no one in charge; the lunatics are running the asylum. The editors of a dictionary read a lot, keeping their eyes open for new words and senses that are used by many writers in many contexts, and the editors add or change the definitions accordingly. Purists are often offended when they learn that this is how dictionaries are written.”17.	 Presents a list of common usage issues. “These are the ones that repeatedly turn up in style guides, pet-peeve lists, newspaper language columns, irate letters to the editor, and inventories of common errors in student papers.” Great stuff.18.	Includes notes, glossary and a formal bibliography.  Negatives:1.	This book is intended for writers, not for laypersons. You must possess good command of the English language and grammar in order for this book to make sense. The grammar jargon will overwhelm the average reader. 2.	The book’s formatting leads to confusion. For a book predicated on clarity, many times I was lost.3.	The writing may come across as pretentious. 4.	I wanted more neuroscience.  In summary, there is a direct correlation between the amount of stars this book deserves and your expertise on the subject. English majors and writers will give this book either four or five stars. On the other hand, laypersons will struggle with it to say the least. I’m giving this book four stars because even though my engineering brethren balks at reading such a book the avid reader in me recognizes its value. Writers will enjoy this book while the rest will struggle with it.  Further recommendations: “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk Junior, “On Writing Well” by William Zinsser, “A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations” by Kate L. Turabian, “The Only Grammar Book You’ll Ever Need” by Susan Thurman and Larry Shea, “Book Writing Mistakes” by Jim Edwards, “How to Write Great Blog Posts that Engage Readers” by Steve Scott, “English Grammar for Dummies” by Geraldine Woods, and “Grammar Girl’s Punctuation 911” by Mignon Fogarty.     business english-grammar               107 reviews     March 3, 2017   The single most helpful book on writing (nonfiction, mainly) I have read. If you write in Mongolian (or any other language), this will help too. Chapter 1: How to learn from good prose. BChapter 2: How to write in the "classical style." (Pinker will explain what that is.) AChapter 3: "The main cause of incomprehensible prose is the difficulty of imagining what it's like for someone else not to know something that you know." BChapter 4: On syntax. Makes grammar interesting and very helpful. AChapter 5: On the "arcs of coherence." B+Chapter 6: On usage, I think. I had no time to get to this. The prose does get (just a tiny bit) tedious sometimes, but he's peppered it with lots of fun stuff, so enjoy!     on-writing-and-literature
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Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language
1999-10-28
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 Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language

 Steven Pinker

 3.90
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 In Words and Rules , Steven Pinker explains the mysteries of language by examining a single construction from a dozen viewpoints, proposing that the essence of language is a mental dictionary of memorized words, and a mental grammar of creative rules.
 Genres Linguistics Language Nonfiction Science Psychology Writing Philosophy
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 397 pages, Paperback

 First published October 28, 1999

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 Steven Pinker

 63 books 9,942 followers
 Steven Arthur Pinker is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science. Pinker is known for his wide-ranging explorations of human nature and its relevance to language, history, morality, politics, and everyday life. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as the New York Times, Time, and The New Republic, and is the author of numerous books, including The Language Instinct , How the Mind Works , Words and Rules , The Blank Slate , The Stuff of Thought , The Better Angels of Our Nature , The Sense of Style , and most recently, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress .

 He was born in Canada and graduated from Montreal's Dawson College in 1973. He received a bachelor's degree in experimental psychology from McGill University in 1976, and then went on to earn his doctorate in the same discipline at Harvard in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, then became an assistant professor at Harvard and then Stanford University. From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. (Except for a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1995-6.) As of 2008, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard.

 Pinker was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in 2004 and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in 2005. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv, McGill, and the University of Tromsø, Norway. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003. In January 2005, Pinker defended Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, whose comments about the gender gap in mathematics and science angered much of the faculty. On May 13th 2006, Pinker received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.

 In 2007, he was invited on The Colbert Report and asked under pressure to sum up how the brain works in five words – Pinker answered "Brain cells fire in patterns."

 Pinker was born into the English-speaking Jewish community of Montreal. He has said, "I was never religious in the theological sense... I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew." As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969. His father, a trained lawyer, first worked as a traveling salesman, while his mother was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has two younger siblings. His brother is a policy analyst for the Canadian government. His sister, Susan Pinker, is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and the author of The Sexual Paradox and The Village Effect .

 Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too divorced. He is married to the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, the author of 10 books and winner of the National Medal of the Humanities. He has no children.

 His next book will take off from his research on "common knowledge" (knowing that everyone knows something). Its tentative title is: Don't Go There: Common Knowledge and the Science of Civility, Hypocrisy, Outrage, and Taboo .

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 Lara Messersmith-Glavin
 Author 5 books 80 followers
 May 6, 2008
 Steven Pinker's work is generally very readable, and so he has become something of a champion popularizer of linguistics and all the fun, quirky, nifty tidbits of knowledge that come with the field. Unfortunately, he also does two things that annoy the hell out of me:

 1) He writes from a controversial position as if it were the only view,

 and

 2) He had one good idea a few decades back, and has proceeded to spin it out into a small cottage industry involving a number of volumes and essays; in reality, he wrote one book six or seven times.

 Words and Rules is, in my mind, the most fun of the lot, mainly because it introduces some pretty fundamental linguistics concepts in clear, accessible language and effectively blows the mind of the lay reader. What could be better than that? Other books, like The Language Instinct and The Blank Slate delve more deeply into his affiliation with Noam Chomsky's ideas of Universal Grammar and the innate human tendency toward language production, or the dubiously named/conceived "Language Acquisition Device." I recommend these latter two only in conjunction with critical, post-Chomsky work on universalism and language development.
 linguistics mind
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 Matt
 752 reviews 570 followers
 September 1, 2017

 [ante reading]

 The book has some intriguing chapter titles, especially chapter 8 The Horrors of the German Language . Picking up the gauntlet, Dear Sir, Mr Pinker :)
 __________

 [post reading]

 From the preface:
 This book tries to illuminate the nature of language and mind by choosing a single phenomenon and examining it from every angle imaginable. That phenomenon is regular and irregular verbs, the bane of every language student.
 That’s no mean goal the author has set here. At least he didn’t write “will illuminate”, because that, to me, would have been wrong. Elsewhere, however, the author was not so modest in his utterances. It seems to me that the scientific field of linguistics is not void of some strong headed individuals. In the dispute between Noam Chomsky and his early students one even spoke of Linguistics Wars , an expression I do not like at all. On the other hand it doesn’t surprise me much. Language is one of our most valuable possessions and anyone who expresses something about language that does not agree with one’s own opinion must, of course, expect a violent headwind. That’s also the reason why I read this book in the first place. Naturally, as a German native speaker, I instantly felt a little offended by the above chapter title (that is, I took the bait). But I do not want to get involved in any kind of war. In addition, this book is not about linguistics wars at all (well, maybe a little, if your read between the lines).

 This book is about – now get this! – Words and Rules . The words are mostly verbs, but also some nouns. And the rules specify how to turn a verb into past tense, or how to build the plural of a noun. Verbs, in English and other languages, come in two flavors: regular and irregular. Building the past tense of a regular verb in English is fairly easy, even for ESLs like me. Just add -ed to the end of the verb and you’re done. The case of irregular verbs is far more outlandish, and therefore much more fun. Pinker, it seems, knows all the irregular verbs, and is obviously happy to mention them again and again. Although the context is different each time, I think the sections and word lists could have been shorted significantly to make for a better reading. On the other hand I learned about some verbs (and their past tense and past participle) which I never experienced before, like to geld or to chide .

 Building plurals of most nouns in English is even easier (an kind of boring) than past-tensing regular verbs. Just add an -s . Praised be German in that regard. We have five different suffixes to choose from in order to build the plural of a noun (plus three more if you consider changing of a vowel to its umlaut), and there is no actual ironclad rule that tells you how to do it. This fact about the German language is a welcome confirmation for Pinker of his theory on words and rules which he develops throughout the book. In this respect, the Horror of the German language is quite obviously meant ironic.

 The whole book is not particularly exciting to read; the author should work on this, but it is also not too academic or even dry. There are some really funny comments included, newspaper articles he collected over the years, cartoons, and even some jokes. Personally, however, I would have been more satisfied with a shorter text. Unfortunately there are also some typos in here. Of course there are typos in every book, but in case of a work about language that also contains lecture-like sections on splling I found doubly embarrassing.



 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License .

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 Trevor
 1,341 reviews 22.8k followers
 January 4, 2008
 I think I know how to tell if a book by Pinker is going to be a great read or an effort to get through - how thick it is. I've read most of his stuff, but this is my favourite - closely followed by The Language Instinct (which is also a great read). How the Mind Works is quite a difficult, though probably worth it in the end, and The Blank Slate - well, I barely remember any of it now.

 This is magnificent, particularly on how children learn language and how they make predictable mistakes in whatever language they are learning.

 He really does write beautifully in this book, always with a clarity that is as sharp as a spotlight. This is a wonderful introduction to Chomsky and his linguistics.

 Chomsky’s view can be summed up like this: how do kids learn a language at all. When we try to teach them we say things like “Oh, coo, coo, coochims, who’s a boopsie, woopsie, darlin’ angel?” Now, clearly, this is not the most obvious sort of instruction for learning grammatically correct sentences we could offer our children. So, how do kids ever manage it – given how crap we adults would seem to be at language instruction. The only thing that seems to make sense is that we don’t learn, but are born already knowing the key things they need to know about languages. Just as walking is something we have to learn, but also have a genetic predisposition towards, so it is the same with language.

 This sounds like some sort of mystic rubbish the first time you hear the argument, how could we possibly be born knowing a language – particularly given there are so many different languages – but that isn’t really the point. The point is that kids learn all of these languages in similar ways and that all languages have remarkably similar features. A universal grammar.

 I have problems with some aspects of this theory – and Pinker points out elsewhere that it does not fit at all with Chomsky’s social and political theories – but the fact kids have ‘sensitive periods’ when learning particular aspects of grammar either happen or don’t happen does seem to be a very strong confirmation of the innateness of language learning structures in the brain.

 For the maths nut in me - being a boy I do like numbers and odd little statistics - if we end up knowing 40,000 words by the age of twelve that means from they day we are born we have had to learn eight words per day. Doesn't that just amaze you?

 This is a much more accessible book than this review is turning out – Pinker at his best.
 language psychology
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 Jamie Smith
 500 reviews 81 followers
 May 31, 2020
 “Cats and dogs.” Say the phrase, and note that the -s in cats is pronounced s, while the -s in dogs in pronounced z. Welcome to the strange and sometimes wacky world of linguistics, where things are regular until they’re not; where some irregular words were regular once upon a time but we have forgotten the rules that made them regular; where regular English verbs have four endings but are used seventeen different ways. For example, in open/opens/opened/opening the -ed suffix is used for past tense (It opened.), perfect participle (It has opened.), passive participle (It was being opened.), and verbal adjective (A recently-opened box). Even so, consider yourself lucky, “The verb in Spanish or Italian comes in about fifty forms: first, second, and third persons, each singular and plural, each in present, past, and future tenses, each in indicative, subjunctive and conditional moods, plus some imperative, participle, and infinitive forms.”

 The book looks at how we process vocabulary and grammar, and uses research and some cleverly designed experiments to illuminate the techniques the mind employs to recall stored words and apply rules for regular and irregular nouns and verbs. The first three chapters are a primer on the basic concepts of language; they are well written, easy to understand, and form a good base for the rest of the book. Chapter 4 is about theories of language. The two most common are a connectionist model, which uses artificial intelligence to try to establish rules that can then be applied to new words, and the Chomskyan model of universal grammar, which holds that the brain is hard-wired for certain language constructs such as nouns and verbs, along with a rule set for using them.

 Chapter 5 discusses how we use language in real time. For instance, “The meaning of a spoken word is accessed by a listener’s brain in about a fifth of a second, before the speaker has finished pronouncing it. The meaning of a printed word is registered even more quickly, in about an eighth of a second.” There are only between 150 and 180 irregular verbs in English (depending on how you count), and no new ones have been added in recent decades. Interestingly, though, the ten most common English verbs are all irregular: be, have, do, say, make, go, take, come, see, and get. Experimental evidences indicates that the mind memorizes the irregular forms, but applies standard rules for the regular ones, e.g.: adding -s for plurals and -ing for participles.

 The sixth chapter is the most fun. It would not seem that an extended discussion of noun and verb phrases would be interesting to anyone except a linguist, but in fact it reveals some amazing bits of information at the intersection of language, culture, and history. In baseball, for example, why do we say, he “flied out” instead of he “flew out”? There is a reason, and the author does a good job explaining the factors involved, unraveling them across successive stages of meaning. (For that matter, why do we say “unravel,” when it means the same as “ravel”? Hmm.)

 Chapter 7 deals with how children acquire language.

 Children begin to learn words before their first birthday, and by their second they hoover them up at a rate of one every two hours. By the time they enter school children command 13,000 words, and then the pace picks up, because new words rain down on them from both speech and print. A typical high-school graduate knows about 60,000 words; a literate adult, perhaps twice that number.

 The neuroplasticity of a young child’s brain is remarkable, as they internalize grammatical rules and add vocabulary, moving quickly from individual words to verb and noun phrases to full sentences by the age of five, while continually picking up and incorporating new words and expressions.

 Chapter 8 is an amusing discussion of the German language. Anyone who thinks that German is logical and methodical has been watching too many World War II movies. The language is wildly irregular, in a way that makes English look like a model of clarity. “Of the thousand commonest verbs in English, a majority, 86 percent, are regular, but of the thousand commonest verbs in German, a minority, only 45 percent, are regular.” In English almost all plurals take -s, but in German there are five different plural suffixes, plus three more ways to make plurals that use umlauts.

 Chapter 8 looks at what happens when things go wrong in the language centers of the brain, through accident, injury, or genetics. As always, deficiencies can be studied to show how healthy brains process language. CAT scans of the brain show which areas light up under different circumstance. Not surprisingly, the brain spreads language skills over multiple areas, exactly the way one would predict from evolution’s undirected approach, where it can only apply natural selection to what already exists, and cannot anticipate future developments.

 The book was published in 2000, so it is likely that some of its assertions and hypotheses have now been superseded by additional research. More precise brain scanning equipment, along with additional studies and experimentation yields new insights and better theories. Nevertheless, this book is still a good introduction to how language works. It is written in a non-technical manner, and is full of remarkable insights into how we string together thoughts and create meaning.

 Finally, there were a number of interesting passages that I highlighted that did not seem to fit anywhere else in this review, so I am appending them here:

 - Irregular forms are relics of history. They fall into families because originally they were generated in matched sets by rules, but the rules died long ago and the families have been disintegrating ever since. Vowels drift, consonants get swallowed, words lose their popularity, dialects break apart or coalesce. After centuries or millennia irregular forms are no longer the orderly outputs of a rule, nor are they a list of unrelated sounds; they are a family resemblance category.

 - three irregular plurals take the old Anglo-Saxon suffix -en rather than -s: child—children, ox—oxen, brother—brethren

 - that is how we got the strangest plural in Standard English, children. Once it was childer, with the old plural suffix -er also seen in the German equivalent Kinder. But people stopped hearing it as a plural, and when they had to refer to more than one child, they added a second plural marker, -en. Today many rural and foreign speakers still don’t think of children as plural, and have added a third suffix, yielding the triply plural childrens.

 - Today the old [stressed -ed] syllabic suffix survives in a handful of adjectives: accursed, aged, beloved, bended (in the expression on bended knees), blessed, crooked, cussed, dogged, jagged, learned, naked, ragged, wicked, and wretched.

 - [A small number of English plurals] change their vowel instead of adding -s: man-men, woman—women (pronounced wĭmɨn), foot—feet, goose—geese, tooth—teeth, mouse—mice, louse—lice

 - In English they can sound the same—[the infinitive form] to open and I open—which disguises the fact that they are different versions of the verb. In other languages the form of the verb that you look up in a dictionary cannot be pronounced. For example, in Spanish you can say canto, cantéis, canten, and so on, leaving cant- as the stem, but you can never say cant- by itself.

 - The third-person singular -s, as in Dog bites man, steps aside for irregular forms in only four verbs: be—is (not be’s), have—has, do—does (pronounced dŭz), and say—says (pronounced sĕz). These, by the way, are the four most frequent verbs in the English language.

 - It should be “Fellow octopuses.” The -us in octopus is not the Latin noun ending that switches to -i in the plural, but the Greek pous (foot). The etymologically defensible octopodes is not an improvement.

 - The participle ‘has got’ is British, ‘has gotten’ American. As with many differences between the dialects, it was the Mother Country that corrupted the mother tongue; gotten was the form used in England when the first colonists left in the seventeenth century, and the Americans preserved it while it vanished in the British Isles.

 - Old English, spoken from about 400 to 1100, had three verbs for be: beon, esan, and wesan. They probably differed in meaning, with beon referring to permanent states and the other bes to temporary ones. (The distinction is similar to the one in modern Spanish between ser and estar: Yo soy Americano [I am American], a long-term trait, contrasts with Yo estoy contento [I am happy], a temporary state.)

 - Beon supplied the base form be; esan supplied am, is, and are; wesan supplied was and were.

 - Many people have to be reminded that there is no such thing as a kudo: The noun kudos is singular, from the Greek word for glory.

 - English has about twenty-five irregular verbs that don’t change their forms in the past tense, such as cut, set, and put. These verbs are ambiguous between past and nonpast: On Tuesday I put the trash out could mean last Tuesday, next Tuesday, or every Tuesday.
 language
 5 likes
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 Deborah Lynch
 277 reviews 3 followers
 June 9, 2017
 Yikes - I went back and forth between two stars and three stars for this but in the end the star ratings said it all. Two stars - it was OK. three stars - I liked it. It was OK and I didn't really like it. This looked like a slam dunk. I loved the Blank Slate, liked Pinker's writing style in that and I eat language books for breakfast but alas this one was not a marriage made anywhere heavenly. I just wanted it to END. Repetition, repeating yourself, which is like saying the same thing over and over, which takes you back to repetition and is also very similar to sameness. On and on and on. Rare for me to rate down in the one and two stars but this was tough to endure. It was packed full of information but the means of delivery was so repetitive (if you're sick of me repeating myself in this review don't go near the book) it was near impossible to focus on the content. There was very little to lift the book up and out of delivering screeds of information. It didn't help that I chose this in audiobook format. Normally language books are very digestible in audio form but I think that may have compounded the issue.
 humanities-language non-fiction
 6 likes
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 Nicky
 4,138 reviews 1,069 followers
 July 26, 2017
 If you’ve read The Language Instinct, you don’t really need to read this book. It’s very much the same theory, with perhaps some different examples, maybe a slightly different slant. Reading it, there was nothing new to me, and I think that it isn’t new because it was all covered in The Language Instinct (though it may be some other books have filled in some gaps in my knowledge before this, in the interim).

 Pinker’s work is reasonably easy to read and well-illustrated with examples; he’s very convincing in the way he sets forth his ideas, which does make me rather tempted to find someone who disagrees with him equally convincingly and see what I think after that. Any ideas, friends?

 Reviewed for The Bibliophibian.
 non-fiction
 4 likes
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 Nancy Mills
 414 reviews 30 followers
 December 2, 2020
 Great book for people like me who are interested in linguistics. Beautifully and humorously written, it considers how our brains might be wired to give us instant and instinctual knowledge of how to properly use grammar. Yes, sometimes we goof, but that is the exception rather than the rule although one would expect far more errors in such an extremely complicated endeavor.
 Wild guess here, my opinion only: 3 year old kids have a far more sophisticated grasp on language than the most complex AI I know of.
 Pinker discusses people with certain injuries, brain damage or genetic defects that cause specificlanguage problems. These studies have been very helpful in pinpointing certain areas of the brain responsible for different language functions. It's not just Broca and Wernicke. A lot of it is circuitry.
 3 likes
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 Katya Epstein
 172 reviews 5 followers
 July 27, 2011
 This man is a great writer. He explains familiar rules in a way that is not only more interesting and comprehensible than the standard expositions, but also gives you a completely new understanding of what the rule is about.
 That said, the book is very repetitive.The first three chapters are a very entertaining presentation of the relevant phenomena and his argument about how the mind creates speech. In the following six chapters he presents all of the evidence he can find to support his theory: Same argument, over and over again, with evidence from different disciplines. If you love detail, want tons of examples, or are planning to write a paper about Pinker's "words and rules" theory, read them. Otherwise skip to the last chapter, in which he extrapolates on how the mind works in general.
 3 likes
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 Troy Blackford
 Author 22 books 2,496 followers
 February 9, 2016
 A masterful exploration of language and cognition from the world expert on both, this book explores the processes in the brain that enable us to describe the world around us. Additionally, it sheds light on the history of irregular verb forms. It might be hard to see how an in-depth study of regular and irregular verbs could illuminate so much about how the mind and language work, but after you've read this, you will be puzzled no longer. One of the best language books I've encountered.
 3 likes
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 Baal Of
 1,243 reviews 60 followers
 December 25, 2016
 This is a deep dive into an area I don't know very well, so my opinions are pretty irrelevant. I found this to be a fascinating read, but I can understand why most people would find it somewhat boring. Pinker spends a lot of time discussing the minutia of how people form various tenses of verbs, for example, and not just in English but other languages as well. He is clearly arguing from a particular viewpoint, and I don't know enough to judge whether his position would be close to the current scientific consensus, or if there even is one in linguistics, but he does make his arguments clear and persuasive.
 The author of the current top review of this book says "He writes from a controversial position as if it were the only view" which is just plain wrong. Throughout the entire book Pinker discusses opposing viewpoints in detail, explaining where the fit the data, and where they don't. In fact it's a major portion of the book, for example where he presents connectionist models and their attempts to replicate human behavior with respect to language. It's like she didn't actually read the book.
 I found a lot of consilience between this book and another I read earlier this year, "Surfaces and Essences" by Douglas Hofstadter, especially in the last chapter where he discusses categorization, word clusters, and the development of languages. As Pinker puts it "Darwin himself illustrated his key idea - that the similarities and differences among organisms could be explained by their family history - by analogy to how words change in languages." I love it when disparate books tie together like that.
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 Gendou
 605 reviews 311 followers
 January 23, 2016
 This book covers two unassuming grammatical forms, the past and plural tenses. By examining almost exclusively these two parts of grammar, Pinker surveys the history, successes, and failures of two schools of thought with regard to how we (humans) learn and use language.

 The connectionist model, which uses artificial neural networks to learn conjugation by studying patterns in an input set of known words and use this to predict the conjugation of new words. Pinker says this fails because the neural networks lack the ability to use variables, necessary to mimic the human habit of recognizing the important features of a new word, such as the head and tail.

 Chomskyan model of universal grammar. Pinker shows how this model can't predict interesting features of the plural and past tenses, such as irregular verbs and the learning curve children undergo when they start to understand and use conjugation instead of merely repeating words.

 In Pinker's "Words and Rules" theory the human brain under certain conditions, such as remembering an irregular "word" will suppress the conjugation "rule" that would otherwise cause output of the word interpreted as though it were regular instead of irregular. It also explains those mysterious features of language acquisition because the rules are developed after words. It also treats words as complex objects with a "head" and "tail" which govern how we choose to conjugate.

 Pinker uses this theory to shed light on some misguided pedantry, defending the names of the Toronto "Maple Leafs" or the fictional monster "Mice-eater".
 non-fiction science
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 M.W. Lee
 Author 1 book 4 followers
 March 20, 2019
 Steven Pinker's _Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language_ receives four stars from me based simply on his ability to take a rather dry topic and write about it interesting enough to keep my attention.

 I'm unsure why I both this book. I teach language but I'm not much of a linguist. Regardless, I bought it as an audio to help me read it as it tends to be rather dry. I found the reader very good which kept me interested in the text. Pinker's writing is excellent, and he writes so that anyone can understand the science. If you are a student of linguistics, I think this is an excellent book that explains the Words and Rules theory well. If you are mildly interested in this topic, an audio book my be better.

 1 like
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 Julia
 33 reviews 22 followers
 August 19, 2021
 Me ha costado bastante terminarlo, pero la verdad ha sido cosa de mi situación mental más que del libro, así que no tengáis en cuenta el período de lectura como referente.

 Ha presentado una teoría sumamente interesante de la que no estaba muy segura de qué esperar. Creo que todos deberíamos leer libros de lingüística para entender mejor qué es o no hablar "bien" (spoiler: nadie habla mal) y por qué deberíamos acabar con el prescriptivismo lingüístico. Saber cómo funcionan las cosas ayuda mucho, aunque sea una teoría aún por demostrar 100% (como todo en este campo).
 1 like
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 Carole Martin
 9 reviews
 December 4, 2023
 Had some interesting points that related to my field of speech-language pathology. Overall he harped so much on regular and irregular verbs. Would have been easier to digest if he used bullets for main points in the book.
 1 like
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 alex stanley
 15 reviews 5 followers
 May 14, 2023
 The content is super interesting, but each chapter could be about ten page shorter. Each example was dragged on way too long, and this made the book too dense.
 1 like
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 Sara
 69 reviews 4 followers
 July 25, 2010
 This is my first Steven Pinker book. It's written well in that it makes material that could be dry and incomprehensible instead both engaging and able to be understood by someone who is not yet as savvy as she'd like to be about some aspects of linguistics and how language functions in the brain. The book also is organized in a way that its subject matter builds understandably on itself throughout and then extends its fundamental premises about regular and irregular verbs to get at the way the brain works more generally and further at the way people work as agents of thought. The second to last chapter runs through the many different neuroimaging technologies now available for the study of how language functions in the brain, which cast a sort of epiphanic light back onto material introduced in the preceding chapters. The investigation doesn't stop here, though. I would like to look into the studies whose conclusions Pinker refutes in the book.
 linguistics
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 Becky
 1,454 reviews 1,815 followers
 January 1, 2019
 Ugh, this is SO BORING. I can't listen to anymore 500 item example lists of verb forms that follow such and such rule, not to be confused with the 500 items on the example list of verb forms that follow that OTHER rule.

 Since a whole lot of this book (at least the parts I've stayed conscious through) seem to indicate that the rules are intuitive and learned as we go, I'm not quite sure why they need to be spelled out in such infinitely particular detail.

 I like etymology and stuff... I picked this up because I thought it would be interesting in a similar way. It is not. So, yep, I'm calling it done on this one.
 audiobook dnf made-my-eyes-bleed
 ...more
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 Charly
 205 reviews 61 followers
 Currently reading
 March 3, 2011
 The edition I am currently reading has a hideous '90s purple and orange cover--so that's a downside.

 I've found this to be the most philosophical of the linguistics books I've been hoarding lately . . . a good thing so far. Will update when I have the stamina to finish. Since it's not a novel, I've been reading chapters of this, going back and forth to later works . . . a quite enjoyable way to take it all in. The part on causation has blown my mind thus far. First chapter sort of boring.
 1 like
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 Dave
 31 reviews 2 followers
 April 15, 2011
 This guy knows way too much about language. Still, he did a good job of compacting complex linguistic ideas into understandable vignettes. His witticisms and use of comic strips helped lighten things up as well. I would definitely recommend Words and Rules for anyone looking for a comprehensive and comprehensible crash course in linguistics.
 1 like
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 Meg Briers
 212 reviews 8 followers
 August 20, 2020
 This book was challenging, I couldn't even listen to music with lyrics (my usual) when reading it. I read it during breaks from my intensive language course that I'm on and it really helped me think about English and questions that I have for the language I'm learning, just a bit on the heavy side for me. Must read more linguistic books soon.
 2020-non-fiction philosophy-science
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 Prachi Pande
 9 reviews 113 followers
 June 18, 2011
 Guy's got me ready to jump into a career in linguistics. In an age when all you have to do to spit out a bestseller is tack 'Quantum' onto the front of the title, this is real, hardcore, purely magnificent science writing.

 Neural networks. Neurobiology. Combinatorial languages. Irresistible. ^_^
 1 like
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 A.Qadrius
 39 reviews 2 followers
 January 14, 2021
 WARNING: IF YOU THINK NON-FICTION SHOULD BE READ BLIND DO NOT READ THIS REVIEW

 The book is well constructed and highly informative. The aim of the book goes beyond regularity and irregularity in languages i.e. regular = cat-cats, walk-walked; irregulars = foot-feet, sing-sang-sung. Pinker is attempting to discuss and prove, with overwhelming evidence supported by scientific research, his theory of Words and Rules. Words and Rules here implies Memory and Rules.

 Throughout the first sections of the book, Pinker introduces bases and premises, more-or-less, for contemporary linguistics, at least i.e. what are irregulars, the recursiveness of language, morphology, syntax, semantics, etc. simply for the reader to know.

 Later he discusses other proposed theories that attempted to explain regularity and irregularity in language. From Chomsky and Halle's perspective (Generative Phonology), and Rumelhart and Mcclelland's perspective using the associative model (connectionist). He will show the instances in which the two approaches fail. In most cases the connectionist approach fails to deal with regulars and does fairly well with irregulars (more-or-less). And the Chomsky and Halle's All Rules approach is the mirror image of the aforementioned; well with regulars, with irregulars not so.

 The Words and Rules theory combines both approaches. It states that irregulars are memorized, and regulars are not so much. Regulars rely on rules almost exclusively. Of course, the memory is accessed, Pinker states, in cases in which words are commonly used instead of going through a whole new computational procedure every time one wants to use a word.

 The distinction between memory and rules will be evidenced by experiments such as priming tests, wug-tests, etc. On subjects such as children, agrammatics (patients that are incapable of using grammar rules), anomatics (patients who have difficulty naming objects), etc. And will also explore brain activity using modern technology fMRI, MRI, PET (abbreviation which I admit, cannot recall what do they abbreviate) which might help Pinker state the case that V patient with damage to their Y area has difficulty using irregulars but not regulars, and X patient with damaged Z area has difficulty in using grammar but not using irregulars.

 At the end, he claims the parallel similarities between words and evolutionary speciation. And that the mind operates by the Classical (Aristotalion) categorization and the modern family resemblance categorization; which corresponds with his Words and Theory model of operation. In his third to the last paragraph of the book he states it thus:

 "We have seen that much of the richness of language comes from the tension between words and rules. In the same way, much of the richness of the public sphere of life come from tensions between family resemblance categories built from experience and the classical categories defined by science, law, or custom".

 To know how these two ideas are in harmony with one another, one must read the book.

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 Boethia
 33 reviews 28 followers
 March 4, 2019
 Since many reviewers describe Pinker's books as rather readable, I was pretty surprised by the fact I struggled quite a bit with this book. Although the topics of the individual chapters are definitely interesting (my favourite being The Horrors of the German language ), Pinker's not an expert at keeping the reader's attention - at least that's the notion I got; mainly because of his borderline obsessive tendency to provide countless, absolutely exhaustive lists of examples, so it almost arouses the idea of a student desperately trying to reach the minimum word count in his thesis, or - which is more likely - an equally desperate attempt to prove his own proposition, which is not needed at all, as he manages to be quite persuasive even when listing just a few examples.

 However, I'm at fault as well, as it probably wasn't the best idea to read this book in my native language (obviously not English). Though the translation was very well done and I'm sure it'd make the book interesting even for people without good command of the English language, it didn't felt exactly intuitive to constantly ''mind-switch'' between the two languages.

 Ultimately, the theme (and sole focus just on verbs) of this book is a double-edged sword. It's almost equally fascinating and, unfortunately, quite often also tedious.
 linguistics non-fiction
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 Kevin
 141 reviews 5 followers
 December 15, 2018
 Words and Rules is a real page turner. Who knew that irregular verbs could be so fascinating? But, like many Steven Pinker books, Words and Rules drags on a bit. Pinker wants to explain every facet from every angle until all the sing-sang-sungs start to blend into one big blob and I wished for the book to end.

 My favourite bit of the book had me silently mouth "sing...sang...sung" to focus my attention on the 5 attributes of a vowel sound and how my mouth's shape changes to make each one. Did you know that the difference in mouth shape between sing and sang is that the hump of the tongue moves further back in your mouth as you say the past tense form. Did you know that your tongue performs the same trick when you say most irregular past tense forms? There are lots of delicious little nuggets like that one in Words and Rules.

 I'm glad I read the book but I was relieved to come to the end.
 linguistics psychology
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 Alana
 114 reviews 4 followers
 May 12, 2022
 I really appreciate the (irregular) words and rules hypothesis presented in this book. The other day, a friend and I tried to come up with a word for "to admire and appreciate". We couldn't recall a good word, so we agreed to coin "apprire", in which I then consciously inflected in the sentence "I've always apprired your approach to life."

 Once you understand the proposed inflection model presented in this book, it's so easy to recognize its applications in our everyday lives. It's also great that there's a chapter that hones in the neurological basis of our ability to learn/use words and rules, another that explains the frequency distribution that lets irregular words survive or not, and the commonality of this concept among several languages that help establish the words and rules concept in memory.

 Some annoyances in the audiobook are how butchered the chinese was and how much the book drags when examples are being read. The latter is hard to solve; the former is unexcusable: I don't expect non-tonal language speakers to nail tones, but butchering vowel sounds that do exist in the their phonetic inventory is unjustifiable. (eg. 個，should use a schwa, not a mid-high front vowel.)
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 Kevin Y Chen
 28 reviews 2 followers
 September 16, 2020
 I had a lot of fun reading this. The main point is that the language faculty involves both rules (regular verbs) and a lexicon that is mostly arbitrary but still exhibits patterns (irregular verbs). The rules part overlaps a lot with Pinker's other books, esp. Language Instinct. The pattern matching part was really interesting though, particularly his arguments around what things are explained well by a pattern matching model, and what things are not.

 It's unfortunate that these general-audience linguistics books always have to perform the ritual of spending 50 pages discussing the -s/-ed phonological rules in English and tediously listing out examples of all the different cases. Words and Rules does it at the very beginning, which I think is the biggest problem with the book. Just skim through it and save your brain energy for reading about the cooler things later on.
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 Yofish
 450 reviews 2 followers
 May 29, 2023
 This was locally interesting. That is to say, each page had interesting material---he’s a very good writer---but it wasn’t really a page-turner.

 The big idea is that it’s not clear how we can all keep in our minds which past tense verbs are regular (just add “ed”) or irregular (like go/went, sink/sunk, etc). A reasonable theory is that we have these general rules (like add “ed” for past tense), and we also memorize particular words.

 He attacks this from every which way: brain chemistry, how children learn, how it works in other languages, active experiments performed on native speakers, how it works for (regular and irregular) plurals. But it never quite seems like a book-length whole.
 read-language-essay
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 Jo
 254 reviews
 August 23, 2018
 Steven Pinker is a man with a lively mind who clearly loves language - especially English - and champions the common man's speech against purists and language mavens everywhere.

 I had a harder time tracking with this book than with the other two I've read ( The Language Instinct and The Sense of Style ), but that's mostly due to my own dullness of mind. Even if I can't reproduce his main arguments, I still enjoyed the author's cheerful tour through wug -tests, bahuvrihi compounds, pluralia tantum , the history of English irregulars, and rationalism versus empiricism in philosophy generally.
 linguistics philosophy
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 Neotony21
 8 reviews 8 followers
 June 30, 2017
 This is a book primarily about the processes by which our mind manages the use of both regular and irregular forms of the past tenses of verbs, and manages the formation of plurals of nouns. Eight (of ten) chapters cover these processes in engaging detail. Steven Pinker fills the book with interesting insights which generally prevents the subject matter from becoming overly dry to someone without a technical understanding of the study of language.
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 Nina
 195 reviews 1 follower
 Read
 July 6, 2021
 This was an intense book. I liked it, but I like that I'm done with it, too. It was kind of everything I wanted it to be, but maybe I don't know what I want. Honestly, though, it was a really good book. But there were some parts where I was a little glazed over because he was so in the weeds of phonology, "words," "rules," etc.
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Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language
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 Rationality

 Steven Pinker

 3.85
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 A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021



 In Rationality , Pinker rejects the cynical cliché that humans are simply an irrational species - cavemen out of time fatally cursed with biases, fallacies and illusions. After all, we discovered the laws of nature, lengthened and enriched our lives and set the benchmarks for rationality itself. Instead, he explains, we think in ways that suit the low-tech contexts in which we spend most of our lives, but fail to take advantage of the powerful tools of reasoning we have built up over millennia: logic, critical thinking, probability, causal inference, and decision-making under uncertainty. These tools are not a standard part of our educational curricula, and have never been presented clearly and entertainingly in a single book - until now.

 Rationality matters. It leads to better choices in our lives and in the public sphere, and is the ultimate driver of social justice and moral progress. Brimming with insight and humour, Rationality will enlighten, inspire and empower.

 'A terrific book, much-needed for our time' Peter Singer
 Genres Nonfiction Psychology Science Philosophy Sociology Politics Self Help
 ...more

 432 pages, Hardcover

 First published September 28, 2021

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 About the author

 Steven Pinker

 63 books 9,942 followers
 Steven Arthur Pinker is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science. Pinker is known for his wide-ranging explorations of human nature and its relevance to language, history, morality, politics, and everyday life. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as the New York Times, Time, and The New Republic, and is the author of numerous books, including The Language Instinct , How the Mind Works , Words and Rules , The Blank Slate , The Stuff of Thought , The Better Angels of Our Nature , The Sense of Style , and most recently, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress .

 He was born in Canada and graduated from Montreal's Dawson College in 1973. He received a bachelor's degree in experimental psychology from McGill University in 1976, and then went on to earn his doctorate in the same discipline at Harvard in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, then became an assistant professor at Harvard and then Stanford University. From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. (Except for a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1995-6.) As of 2008, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard.

 Pinker was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in 2004 and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in 2005. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv, McGill, and the University of Tromsø, Norway. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003. In January 2005, Pinker defended Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, whose comments about the gender gap in mathematics and science angered much of the faculty. On May 13th 2006, Pinker received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.

 In 2007, he was invited on The Colbert Report and asked under pressure to sum up how the brain works in five words – Pinker answered "Brain cells fire in patterns."

 Pinker was born into the English-speaking Jewish community of Montreal. He has said, "I was never religious in the theological sense... I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew." As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969. His father, a trained lawyer, first worked as a traveling salesman, while his mother was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has two younger siblings. His brother is a policy analyst for the Canadian government. His sister, Susan Pinker, is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and the author of The Sexual Paradox and The Village Effect .

 Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too divorced. He is married to the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, the author of 10 books and winner of the National Medal of the Humanities. He has no children.

 His next book will take off from his research on "common knowledge" (knowing that everyone knows something). Its tentative title is: Don't Go There: Common Knowledge and the Science of Civility, Hypocrisy, Outrage, and Taboo .

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 Yun
 547 reviews 27.1k followers
 December 3, 2021
 I'd like to think I'm a rational being, but I also know that I'm prone to sporadic fits of irrationality, just like everyone else out there. So I when I came across this book, I knew I had to read it. I was hoping it would give me insight into myself, and also help me understand why it seems like a large portion of our population have lately given in to the irrational devils of our nature.

 And this book did offer insight. In particular, the first and second to last chapters were riveting, approaching the discussion from psychological and sociological perspectives. The examples on how people end up making less than optimal choices are intriguing, and this book offers the most intuitive explanation of the Monty Hall problem I've ever come across. And the concluding discussion on personal knowledge being divided into two different zones, real and mythological, is absolutely fascinating as well as illuminating.

 But that isn't the majority of this book. Rather, the focus of this book is how to use probability and statistics to understand numerical implications of different choices, including how to calculate their actual probabilities. I have nothing against the topics, but that isn't what I thought I signed up to read when I opened this book.

 Because the topics covered are so technical, the majority of this book reads like a textbook. It doesn't help that they are often presented in a heavily pedantic style, with lots of terms and formulas, as well as philosophical musings. In fact, there is enough content in here to cover multiple university classes (I know because I had the joy of taking these exact ones back in college), so you can imagine trying to fit them into 300 pages makes the whole thing dense and dry.

 When a book is so technical, it gets into a bit of a dilemma with its target audience. If you already know most of the topics covered, then you should have no trouble following along, but in that case, why are you reading this book? On the other hand, if you haven't seen the topics before and this is your first introduction, I think you'll have a lot of trouble understanding and retaining the information, especially as the later chapters build on concepts from the earlier ones.

 Don't get me wrong, this is an interesting book, but I think it requires the reader to go in with the right expectations. The misleading title will have you think it's a psychological deep dive into rationality, but it isn't that. This is really a book on probability and statistics, and how to use them to make sense of our world. With that mindset, this book could offer a lot to the right audience.

 My heartfelt thanks for the copy that was provided for my honest and unbiased review.
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 BlackOxford
 1,095 reviews 69k followers
 December 6, 2021
 More Faerie Tales From Mary Poppins

 “What is a man,
 If his chief good and market of his time
 Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.
 Sure he that made us with such large discourse,
 Looking before and after, gave us not
 That capability and godlike reason
 To fust in us unus’d.
 —Hamlet”


 This epigraph from Shakespeare, which Pinker uses to preface his latest book, summarises his fundamental misunderstanding of the issue he addresses. For Pinker, Shakespeare seems to be saying ‘if you got it flaunt it.’ ‘It’ being “such large discourse,” that is to say, language, which is indeed “godlike” and itself amounts to “reason.” Indeed we are a species able, no compelled, to use language in order to survive. The luxuries of sleeping and eating depend upon our effective use of it. However Shakespeare’s irony as a writer forced to make his way in life through language is obvious. But not to Pinker. Rationality is not scarce; it exists in an over-abundance. It may yet kill us all if we keep treating it as the divine solution to our ills.

 Let me start by agreeing with Pinker: no human being is irrational, not even the most psychotic or criminal mind is without rationality. We all have what to us are good reasons for doing whatever we do. Or we are at least capable of formulating such reasons after the fact with conviction and assurance. The fact that others may not accept either our premises or our deductions does not make us irrational; it makes us wrong.

 But Pinker doesn’t follow his own logic. This makes him contradictory, a good sign that what he’s peddling should be wrong for all of us. He thinks that he knows what he calls “the benchmarks of rationality” that should be the goal of education and the standards by which we judge what we hear and read, and presumably what we say and write. The benchmarks he has in mind are largely statistical and don’t address the core issue of rationality at all.

 Whenever anyone starts an argument with ‘there are only two options to consider,’ be on the lookout for the garden path to reasoned stupidity. Pinker’s dichotomy of choice is that there are, “two modes of believing: the reality mindset and the mythology mindset.” No prizes for guessing which one Pinker is going to promote. But what he actually does is subtly shift the subject with this linguistic tactic from rationality to reality. And since reality must be superior to myth, it will define the rational.

 The problem of course is that Pinker has no idea what he means by reality. Or, better said, the ambiguity of reality is just what he needs in order to hide his contradictions - from himself as well as his readers. Without the touchstone of reality his subsequent argument is vacuous. What he is actually appealing to is some quasi-religious need in himself for stability or fixedness in how the uncontrollable beast of Language can be tamed, or at least contained within safe boundaries. He makes this need clear and wants us all to share in his anxiety: “In an era in which rationality seems both more threatened and more essential than ever, Rationality is, above all, an affirmation of rationality.”

 Indeed, just as faith is an affirmation of faith. Pinker wants us to restore our faith in language and its ability to track with this thing called reality. Some words, he wants us to know, are closer to reality than other words. These latter are the words we should use to judge other words. How do we spot such words? Here is another proposition with which I agree wholeheartedly: “… none of us, thinking alone, is rational enough to consistently come to sound conclusions: rationality emerges from a community of reasoners who spot each other’s fallacies.”

 So there is the central contradiction which Pinker tries to navigate around throughout his argument. Reality, he contends, is outside of language and defines rationality. But no, he also contends, rationality is what other language users determine to be rational. One has to ask of course: who are these other language users? What makes their opinions privileged? How are disagreement between groups to be resolved? In short, which group is to be considered dominant in the matter of language accuracy?

 Pinker knows that what constitutes rationality depends on the circumstances. For him rationality is “… a kit of cognitive tools that can attain particular goals in particular worlds.” Yet another point on which we agree. The bushmen of the Kalahari employ a rationality that would not assist survival on the streets of Manhattan. What we take for scientific method and logic today is not what was accepted a century ago, nor will it be that which is accepted a century hence. The evolution of rationality itself is a fact that Pinker doesn’t deny. And yet he insists there is such a thing that is established in an unchanging Platonic realm of ideas.

 Pinker makes a distinction between “the rational pursuit of goals… [and] an objective understanding of the world.” In this he engages in yet another self-contradiction. What he means by ‘objective’ apparently is the result of investigation by a totally disinterested observer. But if such an observer has no interest in a situation or condition, what prompted him or her to investigate in the first place? It is a basic principle of science that no effort is made without a reason, a question, a puzzle, a doubt. To engage in such an effort would be not just unreasonable but impossible. Yet Pinker thinks there is such a person, probably nesting comfortably among the other Platonic figures in a philosophical heaven of stability and without language.

 Pinker spends a great deal of time on cute logical paradoxes. These are largely irrelevant to the core problem of rationality, which is the reasons for doing things not the errors we might make in acting on those reasons. Our choice of reasons, even if the reasons are only articulated after our actions in order to literally rationalise them, is an event that by definition cannot be reasonable. But that choice is what then determines the constitution of that which we casually call a fact. Once again: there are no objective facts; such things are self-contradictory. The only real issue of rationality is reasons.

 For example: The expressed reason for the Holocaust was the need to rid the world of a harmful ideology of mutual responsibility that was invented and preserved by Jews. The official reason for the European invasion of the Americas was the promulgation of the true faith necessary for salvation. The reason for the existence of the CIA is the protection of American interests abroad at any political or cost to the rest of the world. Hegel demonstrated the rationality of these reasons dialectically; just as Kant with utmost rationality put paid to the idea that facts could undermine the reasons we promote.

 Pinker has absolutely nothing to say about these sorts of reasons, except that they might be rejected if they had been discussed and debated openly. And perhaps not even then since it depends on who is doing the discussing. The matter is entirely political. Like it or not, morality, like facts, is a political matter. Pinker’s call for critical thinking is nothing more than a suggestion towards scepticism about established mores and rationality. So once again he contradicts himself. The crowd can be wrong after all. They may have missed a fallacy but they’re sticking with it. For them no fallacy exists; they just started with different reasons.

 The bottom line is that while there are words that are better than other words for getting on in the world, we don’t know what they are from moment to moment. The words we use today may prove to be the cause of tomorrow’s destruction; but we have no way of assessing this either. Pinker is right to suggest that all we have is each other in the search for the right words. But we have no idea how to organise that search much less know when it is successful. We are at the mercy of this thing we presume to control - language. And Pinker, as he does in everything he writes, refuses to get that this is our predicament. What he provides is not Shakespearean insight but a diverting musical comedy. A gentle Mary Poppins, perhaps, come down from above to assure us children that the universe is benign and that Trump is a temporary aberration. How comforting.☂️

 Postscript 30/09/21: for more on the same topic, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
 Postscript 23/10/21: An example of the very irrational state of scientific rationality: https://apple.news/AA27bMZ17QuCqAo51e...
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 Clif Hostetler
 1,145 reviews 854 followers
 October 3, 2021
 This book starts out with a review and discussion of logic, probability, and randomness. Proceeding from that foundation it explores ways in which people can be predictably led astray by following their intuition. The book then continues with a discussion of game theory and behavioral economics. Toward the end the book addresses the issues promised by the book’s subtitle; why rationality seems so scarce and why it’s important.

 The book suggests that one reason humans are so poor at estimating exponential growth is because it wasn’t part of the natural environment during human evolution (i.e. in nature exponential growth is capped by limited resourses). Mention of exponential growth attracts my attention because economist seem to believe that it's possible to go on forever.

 Concepts explored in the heart of the book includes beliefs/evidence, risk/reward, and alarm/response. One reason economics is such an inexact science is because people can’t be counted on to make rational choices. There seems to be no end to ways in which human nature seems to lead us astray. Sometimes it’s a matter of what comes to mind first, so that’s the event guessed to be most likely to occur. Other times we forget how common—or uncommon—an event is when confronted with a clue pointing in a certain direction which then leads to incorrect guesses at probabilities.

 Pinker provides a long discussion about the scarcity of rationality and why it matters, but I found the explanation given by The Enigma of Reason by Mercier and Sperber to be more succinct and convincing. Pinker acknowledges their work, but continues to explore other explanations.

 Pinker insists that humans can always learn, and if you look close everyone possesses the powers of reason. After all, they have enough rationality to keep food on the table.

 Below is an excerpt that is an example of “base-rate neglect” which involves giving too little weight to the original probability of an event in the face of new information. This excerpt also shows how wording of the problems can make a difference in recognition of the solution. I guess one reason I've included it here is because I didn't get the correct answer in the first instance.
 Suppose that the prevalence of breast cancer in the population of women is 1 percent. Suppose that the sensitivity of a breast cancer test (its true-positive rate) is 90 percent. Suppose that its false-positive rate is 9 percent. A woman tests positive. What is the chance that she has the disease?

 The most popular answer from a sample of doctors given these numbers ranged from 80 to 90 percent. Bayes's rule allows you to calculate the correct answer: 9 percent. That's right, the professionals whom we entrust with our live flub the basic task of interpreting a medical test, and not by a little bit. They think there's almost a 90 percent chance she has cancer, whereas in reality there's a 90 percent chance she doesn't. (p150)
 If this same question is worded differently it becomes easier to intuitively arrive at the correct answer.
 Forget the generic "a woman"; think about a sample of a thousand women. Out of every 1,000 women, 10 have breast cancer (that's the prevalence, or base rate). Of these 10 women who have breast cancer, 9 will test positive (that's the test's sensitivity). Of the 990 women without breast cancer, about 89 will nevertheless test positive (that's the false-positive rate). A woman tests positive. What is the chance that she actually has breast cancer?" It's not that hard: 98 of the women test positive in all, 9 of them have cancer; 9 divided by 98 is around 9 percent—there's our answer. When the problem is framed in this way, 87 percent of doctors get it right (compared with about 15 percent for the original wording), as do a majority of 10-year-olds. (p169)
 So what's the lesson here? Is it important that people be able to answer questions like this correctly?
 By tapping preexisting intuitions and translating information into mind-friendly formats, it's possible to hone people's statistical reasoning. Hone we must. Risk literacy is essential for doctors, judges, policymakers, and others who hold our lives in their hands. And since we all live in a world in which God plays dice, fluency in Bayesian reasoning and other forms of statistical competence is a public good that should be a priority in education. The principles of cognitive psychology suggest that it's better to work with the rationality people have and enhance it further than to write off the majority of our species as chronically crippled by fallacies and biases. (p171)
 Here's a quote that verifies my own observation of today's political divide.
 We are not...living in a "post truth" society. The problem is that we are living in a myside society. The sides are the left and the right, and both sides believe in the truth but have incommen-surable ideas of what the truth is. The bias has invaded more and more of our deliberations. The spectacle of face masks during a respiratory pandemic turning into political symbols is just the most recent symptom of the polarization. (p295-p296)
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 Ryan Boissonneault
 201 reviews 2,160 followers
 September 30, 2021
 Rationality can be defined as “the ability to use knowledge to attain goals.” You don’t get credit for rationality if you attain a goal simply by chance; rather, your beliefs must be true, rather than false, and justified, rather than random. Whether the goal is theoretical (proving the truth of an idea) or practical (achieving some tangible outcome), to be rational simply means using knowledge (justified true belief) to attain the stated goal.

 Reason also has the unique characteristic of being non-negotiable, in that if you argue against its use—by employing reasons—you’ve already lost the argument. Since reason is non-negotiable and necessary for any intelligent and socially beneficial behavior, we all ought to take the time to learn how to use it better, especially since we did not evolve to handle the types of abstract mathematical, logical, and statistical problems we face in the modern world. We have to explicitly learn how to solve these higher-order problems; the skills to do so unequivocally do not come naturally.

 The problem is, most books on rationality or critical thinking narrowly focus on biases and fallacies and simply list all the ways humans make stupid decisions. But as Pinker points out, humanity’s greatest achievements (discovering the age of the universe, mapping the human genome, etc.) cannot be explained by noting all the ways in which we confuse ourselves. There’s a better way to learn the rules of rationality; namely, by covering the wider variety of cognitive tools we’ve developed over the millennia to enhance our natural rational powers.

 Pinker covers critical thinking and logic, statistics and probability, Bayesian reasoning, risk and reward, game theory, and more, collecting in one volume the diverse range of cognitive tools we’ve developed over the course of our history to think better. And unlike other bad faith actors who pretend that being “rational” guarantees the truth of their beliefs, Pinker (as a cognitive psychologist) actually understands the subject matter well enough to note the nuances, exceptions, and complexities that make rationality an inexact science. This excerpt from the book is worth quoting in full:

 “Now, arguments for truth, objectivity, and reason may stick in the craw, because they seem dangerously arrogant: ‘Who the hell are you to claim to have the absolute truth?’ But that’s not what the case for rationality is about. The psychologist David Myers has said that the essence of monotheistic belief is: (1) There is a God and (2) it’s not me (and it’s also not you). The secular equivalent is: (1) There is objective truth and (2) I don’t know it (and neither do you). The same epistemic humility applies to the rationality that leads to the truth. Perfect rationality and objective truth are aspirations that no mortal can ever claim to have attained. But the conviction that they are out there licenses us to develop rules we can all abide by that allow us to approach the truth collectively in ways that are impossible for any of us individually.”

 The rules of rationality—critical thinking, logic, probability, empirical reasoning—are employed to circumvent our biases, avoid common fallacies, and get ever closer to the elusive objective truth (without ever getting there for certain). Pinker adeptly reviews these tools, comments on real-world examples of fallacious thinking, and even presents new research and thinking that shows that some commonly perceived fallacies are not actually fallacies at all (e.g., the “hot hand” fallacy in basketball). The reader will have to be patient in some sections as the material is not always easy to follow, but the payoff (better critical thinking skills) will be well worth the effort.

 Of course, learning the rules of rationality is not necessarily sufficient. There’s a strong case to be made for the idea that we evolved, not to be rational and to engage in the disinterested pursuit of truth, but to use reason to simply win arguments in favor of our preferred beliefs. Because of the uncertainty of knowledge, it’s all too easy to use motivated reasoning to “confirm” beliefs we wish to be true and to ignore all contradictory evidence. For this reason, intellectual integrity and humility are far harder to teach than even the rules of rationality itself. But if you do have them, you’ll benefit greatly from this book.
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 Morgan Blackledge
 696 reviews 2,264 followers
 November 21, 2021
 Steven Pinker is a firebrand.

 And that in itself is a kind of a mystery to me.

 Only because I find his basic arguments to be (for lack of a better word) reasonable.

 His message is (essentially):

 The current state of affairs is obviously concerning.

 But if you look at the human condition over the long term, a lot of things are improving.

 According to Pinker.

 Science, technology, rule of law and liberal democracy have liberated billions of humans from poverty, miserable servitude, disease and political terror.

 Even though we had Donald Trump, and even though the planet is obviously dying.

 Let’s not panic.

 Let’s stay focused, stay the course and (to the very best of our abilities) let’s let evidence and reason dictate our policies.

 He’s a very controversial figure to both far left and extreme right of American politics.

 The progressive left hate him because he criticizes some of their more anti-intellectual tactics.

 Such as politically correct speech suppression, and Romantic mistrust of scientific methods and findings (when they counter progressive liberal talking points).

 The extreme right hate him (a little less, but still) because he’s (essentially) an outspoken liberal intellectual.

 Some locate him as center right.

 Some locate him as center left.

 Regardless of his politics (a subject I find uninteresting and distracting from his arguments).

 A lot of criticism focuses on his use of data.

 Ok.

 That’s legit.

 Everyone knows statistical data is easily massaged.

 But much of the same criticism seems to be politically motivated.

 And snore….

 As clearly abhorrent, toxic and (add whatever expletive you wish) ridiculous as the Trump era post truth tactics are.

 Pinker thinks it is a mistake to allow them to poison the well of liberal thought and policy.

 For instance.

 Pinker criticizes progressive liberal bias in university culture.

 Although my politics (for what it’s worth) lean progressive liberal. I’m absolutely inclined to agree.

 Trust and participation in university education is (by my account) a near unalloyed good.

 Keeping university culture open to a broad spectrum of thought keeps the engine of progress chugging.

 My mother (a philosophy professor) used to say, “remove the agitator from the washing machine and see how clean the clothes get”.

 Seeking to stifle open debate in university is like a left wing version of the POS reverend Jerry Falwell‘s moral majority caucus from the 1980’s.

 In case you’re too young to remember how awful that bullshit was, Google it!

 Zealous adherence to “woke” new speak, cancel culture bullying, and cringe worthy nakedly transparent, “progressive” virtue signaling are toxic to the type of spirited open debate and evidence based methodology that makes university culture worthy of trust.

 My mom aslo used to say “never fight with a pig because you both get muddy and the pig will love it”.

 The intuitive response to Trump era populist neofascist agitprop is to adopt an equal and opposite intellectual counterpose.

 But if we do, we’re sinking to an unspeakable low.

 Pinker’s argument (as far as I can tell) is:

 Rather than join in the pizza gate style, post truth, epistemological nightmare.

 Better to stay the course, welcome reasonable debate, adhere to reliable methods, adjust policy based on hard evidence and continue to move, step by (at times excruciatingly slow) step, in the direction liberal humanistic values.

 I can’t reasonably disagree.

 Lastly.

 Many criticize Pinker’s admittedly corny humor.

 This is as much a matter of taste as anything.

 But I’m gonna come out in favor of it.

 I find Pinker‘s clever and witty ‘dad’ jokes to be laugh out loud funny.

 They make his otherwise dense writing massively entertaining and fun.

 Like, I wish my dad was that fucking funny.

 Anyway.

 Given that Pinker is clearly a flawed human.

 And just for fun, name a human that isn’t.

 I’m a fan boy.

 And I fucking loved this book.

 Sorry about it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 FIVE STARS ⭐️
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 Alexander
 68 reviews 62 followers
 October 26, 2021
 Are all maps equally useful?

 Suppose that you are lost in the Himalayas but only have a map of the Pyrenees. Is this map helpful? Sure, it is viable as fuel for fire but not as a map to navigate the territory. Maps correspond to the territory as our beliefs correspond to reality. Are all beliefs about reality equally accurate? Are all beliefs about how to achieve a goal equally conducive?

 You cannot make an accurate map of a city by sitting at home with your eyes shut and drawing lines upon paper according to your impulses. The lack of an ultimate map of the territory does not imply that no map is better than another or that the territory doesn’t exist. Similarly, the absence of an ultimate belief system does not mean that all beliefs are equally valid or that reality does not exist! A false belief feels the same from the inside as a true belief until you run an experiment.

 How does Pinker define Rationality? He certainly does not define it as "objective facts." He is an imperfect mortal, but he is not so naive. The modern-day definition of Rationality fully embraces the inherent subjectivity of the human experience. It fully embraces the intrinsically probabilistic nature of human knowledge. It fully embraces the enormous advances that have been achieved in modern cognitive science, which assert that all organisms create models of their worlds (refer to Active Inference by K J Friston et al.).

 There is currently no single, ultimate theory of Rationality, and Pinker does not pretend one exists. A complete theory of Rationality requires that we have a complete theory of cognition; not only human cognition but all possible minds. That being said, we do have some conjectures about what Rationality tools work effectively and why. Pinker dedicates 7 chapters of his book to exploring these tools. These tools are not prescriptive. They are simply tools. It is up to you whether you decide to use them or ignore them.

 Pinker defines Rationality as follows: to use knowledge to achieve goals. Another commonly accepted and similar definition is:

 Epistemic rationality: to systematically improve the probabilities of your beliefs about reality.
 Instrumental rationality: to systematically improve at achieving your goals.


 If you think “rationality” is “bad” then you are almost certainly defining it as something other than the above. Rationality does not prescribe goals. Therefore, it is not in principle good or bad. Rationality is beyond good and evil.

 If someone wants to reject this definition and claim that it's "contradictory" or "impossible", then they have the daunting burden of explaining to the rest of us exactly how and why it's impossible to improve our models of the world and exactly how and why we cannot improve at achieving goals.

 I like to think of rationality as “The Art of Mapmaking.” It’s the art of achieving better map-territory convergence. The art of making our mental models more resembling of reality and of making our roadmaps for achieving goals more conducive.

 Rationality does not claim to know "objective truth". Instead, it provides us with a set of tools that promise to improve our chances of making better predictions of future experiences. Objective reality is not a place we can ever reach (as far as we know) but rather a direction. This quote from The Constitution of Knowledge captures this beautifully:

 "Truth, as Karl Popper said, is a regulative principle. Like north, it is a direction, an orientation, not a destination. When we join the reality-based community—when we sign up for the years of training, the exacting research, the criticism and lost arguments—we resolve to conduct ourselves as if reality were out there and objectivity were possible, even while acknowledging that reality is elusive and perfect objectivity is impossible."


 You will find some reviewers here making claims along the lines of "There are no objective facts; such things are self-contradictory" as criticism of this book. This makes me question their underlying agenda. Such claims make three transgressions. First, a strawman argument for Rationality has never claimed to know objective facts. Second, this sentence is itself a contradiction for if it's true, it must be false. Third, such claims denigrate without providing alternatives, i.e. they are cynical.

 If you think that contradictions are somehow ok because Hegel said "Everything is inherently contradictory, and in the sense that this law in contrast to the others expresses rather the truth and the essential nature of things" in a remark in the Doctrine of Essence then you probably need to expand your horizons and move beyond Hegel. Bertrand Russell's attack on Platonists in his epic polemic A History of Western Philosophy applies aptly to Hegel and Hegelians:

 "It is noteworthy that modern Platonists, almost without exception, are ignorant of mathematics, despite the immense importance that Plato attached to arithmetic and geometry, and the immense influence that they had on his philosophy... a man must not write on Plato unless he has spent so much of his youth on Greek as to have had no time for the things that Plato thought important."


 Some critics of rationality like to use this quote from The Enigma of Reason :

 "Whereas reason is commonly viewed as a superior means to think better on one’s own, we argue that it is mainly used in our interactions with others. We produce reasons in order to justify our thoughts and actions to others and to produce arguments to convince others to think and act as we suggest."


 This perspective is centred around comparing people's beliefs with each other but disregards an external reality, which is the ultimate judge of the accuracy of beliefs. It present truth as just a weapon in a power struggle. This kind of thinking is futile because it gets stuck in an infinite loop of comparing maps and ignoring the territory.

 Whenever someone attacks reason, their goal is to replace it with themselves as the authority on truth, a thinly veiled attempt to convince others to think and act as they suggest. This kind of attempt is pathetic because it only works until it comes into contact with the stress-testing of reality. Dogmatists deliberately operate to distort our reality for political gain. Once you detach people from reality and reason, ask a soviet propagandist, you open them to demagoguery, to deceit, they become cynical, they become disorientated, they become demoralised. All these things make it easier to control a political environment.

 Lasting persuasion is a byproduct of good explanations, which are precise predictions of future experiences. Galileo certainly was not a persuasive lad but most of us today take for granted that the Earth moves around the Sun. This letter from Galileo to Kepler in 1610 conveys both his frustration at the obstinacy of the crowds and failure to persuade:

 "My dear Kepler, I wish we could laugh at the extraordinary stupidity of the mob. What say you about the foremost philosophers of this University, who with the obstinacy of a stuffed snake, and despite my attempts and invitations a thousand times they have refused to look at the planets, or the moon, or my telescope?"


 Why do we find Galileo's theory about the world more convincing than it's preceding or competing theories? It is because this theory in contrast to the others offers a more precise map of reality, not because Galilio was a good rhetorician.

 Similarly, we find the physics of Einstein more convincing than the physics of Newton, not because Einstein was a better rhetorician than Newton but because the physics of Einstein achieves better map-territory convergence compared to that of Newton. The physics of Einstein offers more precise assertions about reality. When calculating the Earth-Moon transfer orbit with each type of physics, we find that Einstein's relativity produces predictions that are more accurate by ~1.3cm.

 Another quote from A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell beautifully and succinctly captures the problems with anti-rational philosophy:

 One of the bad effects of an anti-intellectual philosophy, such as that of Bergson [and Hegel], is that it thrives upon the errors and confusions of the intellect. Hence it is led to prefer bad thinking to good, to declare every momentary difficulty insoluble, and to regard every foolish mistake as revealing the bankruptcy of intellect and the triumph of intuitions.


 I am highly critical of arbitrary distinctions between intellect/rationality and intuition/emotion. Such distinctions are abused in certain philosophies to futile ends. Intuitions/emotions are not magic, they have a well (but not perfectly) understood physiological basis (refer to Handbook of Emotions by L F Barrett et al.). Distinctions between system 1 (gut-feeling) and system 2 (analytical) are handy in some specific contexts, such as when talking about cognitive biases, highlighting how our brains compromise accuracy for speed. However, all of these are aspects of the same thing, namely our experience of the world. Dividing our experience up into these categories and then claiming that knowledge created by our intuitions is superior to that created otherwise is unsubstantiated.

 While we are talking about intuitions and emotions, it is important to point out that the stereotype of the rationalist as devoid of emotions is also unsubstantiated. It is perfectly rational to be respectful of other people's emotions, for you are less likely to succeed at achieving your goals if you are unkind.

 What I liked about this book:

 This book is more succinct and mainstream than Rationality: From AI to Zombies . Rationality: A-Z goes into more depth, which is unsurprising given that it's about four times longer. Pinker's book is more suitable for most people as an introduction to rationality.

 I quite liked that Pinker doesn't portray humans are irretrievably irrational savages, something many books on cognitive biases do. Pinker provides examples showing that despite our numerous cognitive biases, we are very rational animals, just not in all contexts. In situations that our survival depended on, we are remarkably rational.

 The San people of the Kalahari Desert, despite their mythological beliefs, are stunningly rational. Louis Liebenberg documented how the San people use Bayesian reasoning for hunting, applying it to footprints and animal droppings to build an accurate picture of an arid desert on which they have subsisted for many thousands of years.

 The chapters on probabilistic reasoning and causal inference provided the most intuitive high-level explanations of those concepts that I’ve come across!

 What I disliked about this book:

 This book is too mainstream and flavourless for my liking. It explains the concepts well, it is witty and the examples used are well selected and well presented, but it lacked the forcefulness and opinionatedness that Rationality: From AI to Zombies had.

 This book is titled Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters but the "Why It Matters" part of the book is rushed and I found Pinker's justification not quite profound or particularly convincing. I found Rationality: A-Z to be much more convincing.

 Pinker references this series of Tweets by Tim Farley regarding the harm of irrationality:

 > What’s the harm in conspiracy theories? FBI identifies “conspiracy-driven domestic extremists” as a new domestic terror threat.
 > What’s the harm in getting health advice from an #herbalist? A 13-year-old died after being told not to take insulin. Now the herbalist is headed to jail.
 > What’s the harm in a #faithhealing church? Ginnifer fought for her life for 4 hours. Travis Mitchell, her father, “laid on hands” and the family took turns praying as she struggled to breathe and changed colors. “I knew she was dead when she didn’t cry out anymore,” Mitchell said.
 > What’s the harm in believing in supernatural beings? Sumatran villagers killed an endangered tiger because they thought it was a shape-shifting “siluman.”
 > What’s the harm in seeing a #psychic? Maryland “psychic” convicted of scamming clients out of $340K.


 Pinker also references this study Individual differences in adult decision-making competence by Wändi Bruine de Bruin, et al. which found that after controlling a few factors, such as intelligence and socioeconomic status, competence in reasoning and decision making was correlated with positive life outcomes. However, this doesn't prove causation and still counts as weak evidence.

 Please don't be influenced by the mob that is trying to cancel Pinker for being an optimistic and honest man. Read Pinker's books and decide for yourself.

 Overall, a good book on rationality. Four stars because this book doesn’t offer a better explanation than previously available (and I dislike the cover). It merely summarises other peoples’ ideas in a clear, witty and succinct way.
 categorised-general decision-making
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 Maria Espadinha
 1,059 reviews 442 followers
 March 4, 2022
 ﻿﻿Não te Percas da Razão


 “Começar a raciocinar é como entrar numa escada rolante que sobe até se perder de vista. Depois de termos dado o primeiro passo, a distância a ser percorrida é independente da nossa vontade e não podemos saber de antemão onde iremos parar.”

 Porque somos racionais fomos à Lua, aumentámos a esperança de vida, descobrimos o Big Bang, etc, etc, etc,...
 São múltiplas e variadas as conquistas da racionalidade!

 Porém, para alguns, Hillary Clinton geria um esquema de sexo infantil numa pizzaria, os rastos dos aviões são drogas que alteram a mente e ainda há quem creia em casas assombradas sem, contudo, crer em fantasmas (Por Zeus! Que dupla incoerência!!)

 Na melhor das hipóteses dir-se-ia que de racional e louco todos temos um pouco. Contudo, o caso parece mais grave…

 Bem, a boa notícia é que a racionalidade tem um trilho que o autor deste livro fez questão em descortinar. Se o seguirmos… não nos perderemos…
 O Universo é uma eterna ostra para os que fazem questão em manter a razão por perto!
 A Racionalidade é uma Caçadora de Pérolas!!!
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 David Rubenstein
 822 reviews 2,664 followers
 March 9, 2022
 I have read all of Steven Pinker's books, and enjoyed this one as well. Before reading this one, though, I thought that it might be somewhat boring. After all, how interesting could this subject be?

 Boy, was I wrong! Pinker has written a truly engaging book. Every page is fascinating. In addition, this is the most humorous book that Pinker has written. For example, this quote from comedian George Carlin:

 “Tell people there’s an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure.”

 Or, this quote from the book:

 “Mao Zedong forced Chinese farmers to crowd their seedlings together to enhance their socialist solidarity, and a recent American leader suggested that Covid-19could be treated with injections of bleach.”

 Naturally, there is a lot of discussion about the difference between correlation and causation, summed up nicely in this little cartoon by XKCD:


 I particularly found the last chapters to be interesting. Why do so many people have such bizarre beliefs? Pinker's answer is that there is believing and "believing". People can hold "beliefs" that they don't hold as factually true. If people really held their fantastical theories to be true, they would behave quite differently, and more seriously.

 This is a fantastic book that puts together in one place, all the ways in which people's rationality goes awry. There is a big emphasis on Bayesian reasoning--and rightly so. Most people don't know what Bayes' theorem is, but when they think things out rationally, they apply it. If you don't apply it--even implicitly and unconsciously--your thinking may likely become irrational.
 economics nonfiction psychology
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 Nilesh Jasani
 1,057 reviews 191 followers
 October 8, 2021
 Rationality spends most of the book length covering elementary concepts from a collection of subjects. Even when it comes to pulling them together for something original in conclusions, the book fails equally abjectly.

 For some strange reasons, the author recounts the topics well covered in hundreds of books from the fields of probability theory, statistics, game theory, logic, behavioral sciences, and the likes. These discussions are staggeringly unoriginal in their conclusions and the details - say in the examples or illustrations used, descriptions, or explanations of the formulas. These chapters form almost 90% of the book; they are without a single aha moment for those even somewhat familiar.

 When one finally reaches the most anticipated part - something even the author pens in as many words to start the section - the disappointment compounds with the banality of the postamble. Rather than spending any more time about the book's content, the reviewer is jotting down his thoughts sparked by the book - not necessarily original but undoubtedly personal.

 Nothing is entirely rational, or everything is, because of the massive range of issues that impact any rational analysis. A deployment of rational concepts and tools for human brains - even those straightforward ones in math and logic - requires immense training. Behavioral finance is replete with examples of how our intuitions crumble in various reasonably objective settings. At the same time, other psychological fields prove our mental inadequacies in dealing with situations that require intricate interplays.

 In real life, many factors that go into rational-conclusion-throwing-cauldron are highly subjective. What one decides as a rational course of action is dependent on the highly subjective utility functions, ethics, and personal histories. Circumstances and experiences play additional random roles in what the person doing the analysis prioritizes as the primary goal at a specific time point while relegating the other discordant types.

 All of the above does not count the role played by norms and expectations. The book shows well through discussions on taboos, the societies and communities around us erect artificial bounds on rational tools, methods, analysis, and conclusions available to us.

 One of the key conclusions the book fails to draw despite coming close is the circularities involved in rational thinking because of the concepts like Bayesian priors. Priors are those critical irrationals - call them axioms, beliefs, superstitions, assumptions, or whatever else – at the root of most real-life rational analysis. Like in Newton Method in calculus, and actually far worse, the results of a supposedly rational exercise are utterly dependent on the initial assumptions for which there is often no obvious agreement.

 Say my faith in what I hear from my ancestors makes me believe that there is almost a hundred percent probability of the existence of black swans, even if extremely rare. Let's say that while I meet a hundred who consider me a looney, I also meet a believer who claims that he spotted a black swan in the dark of the night recently. The others may consider this person delusional, but given my priors, I would not only give higher credence to such one-off data points but use them to increase my overall conviction levels.

 One can replace Black Swan with a ghost or a unicorn or a particular type of god or even geocentric views at the times of Galileo to see how what is deemed irrational by one may not be irrational at all in the contexts of the highly subjective priors one starts with. And all this is not factoring in limits of rationality most cleverly exposed in game theory situations but more realistically observed in people with differing goals. In practical life, it often pays - "rationally" - to be irrational.

 What is rational is not a zero-one game, but it is not even a scale where at one end you have things as true as 2 and 2 equals four, with the opposite having the claims of the same as five. Rationality is a multi-dimensional landscape shaped by the above and more - like rules, laws, generally accepted objective facts, etc.

 Any conclusions veering towards the paucity of absolutes for a field searching for the truths would leave almost everyone unhappy, including the most liberals. Clearly, many with specific input parameters would rationally decide to be intolerant of anyone who does not subscribe to their views. Even a few in any mix would create those game theory situations where it is rationally better for all to become intolerant of dissenting groups.

 With such extreme analysis, rationality turns out to be not just axiomatic (and almost irrational or faith-based) but also nihilistic. Or in other words, it does not pay to overthink rationality!
 non-fiction
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 Ietrio
 6,727 reviews 25 followers
 October 7, 2021
 Sweet irony! A call to rationality from a white old male who is dominated by his irrational fears: Muslims, Covid, anything that might threaten his dominant status. And, like the Christian preachers he despises, whomever doesn't care about his important issues, they are irrational, a white way to say Haram.
 junk
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 Maria Espadinha
 1,059 reviews 442 followers
 March 2, 2022
 What is a man,
 If his chief good and market of his time
 Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more…

 https://youtu.be/N7RYRs9nuXI
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 Andrés Astudillo
 396 reviews
 September 7, 2022
 Objective of the book: 5
 Certain arguments: 3

 So, to sum up:

 -Trump is a stupid asshole
 - We are a rational species that can trigger stupidity at whole other levels
 This part is ok. I mean, this book explains some of the reasons why we can be really, really stupid. There are not just fallacies in logic (ad hominem, ad verecundiam, conjunction, genetic, sunk-cost, straw man and a hundred more), but there are also psychological biases (confirmation, cognitive, and many, many more) that really fuck up our method of reasoning. Many chapters of the book are all about this. Explanations of fallacies and biases, how to detect them, and what they have done to societies.

 - Pinker does not only loves graphs, but statistics as well
 I SUCK at statistics, I really do. There are many chapters concerning Venn diagrams, conjunctions, and aritmethical logic. These parts really wanted me to end the book sooner, and most of these charts are added to let you know just how stupid you are. Yes. You will probably end up giving the wrong answers. I would never like to be the person to read him the result of his blood or urine exams.

 - Right-wing politics do not cope with science (I really have a problem with this)
 Why?
 Well, out of the magician's hat, he said this. But, as far as Im concerned, movements like the LGBTIQ and the other 50 genders, actually DENY biology, molecular biology, anthropology, forensic anthropology and evolutionary psychology. Don't even get me started on movements like ANTIFA and BLM, that take history and flushes it out of the toilet. Historical analysis and moral psychology are actually "science". So, that's my problem.

 - War sucks
 Yes, it does. But to mention it in the last chapter, without mentioning the fact that war itself is deeply human, part of our nature, may not be deeply informative. I was lucky enough to read "War" from David Livingstone Smith to totally or partially comprehend it.

 - He used a couple of times the word "mansplaining", which according to evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad is something really, really subjective and stupid.

 - Pinker loves David Hume

 Overall, the objective of the book is clear, the pandemic really shattered societies and let us clearly perceive how stupid societies have become. We are indeed primates that understand the universe, and as primates (order: Primates) we are mammals with a social media profile and a smartphone. So, OF COURSE we are right on the track to comment, share and like stupidity. Now, it is the rule. The stupider you are, the more influencer you become, thus famous. That's why Gad Saad and many others are fighting against parasitic ideologies, and this is the part where the contributions of the author's take place: mechanisms to identify fails in logic (fallacies) and biases.

 We are doomed to eternal idioticy if we do not exercise our right to execute free speech and shut up stupidity.
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 Emiliya Bozhilova
 1,533 reviews 273 followers
 July 1, 2022
 След ”Мисленето” на Канеман (и Тверски), която беше доста интуитивна, макар и леко поудължена повече от необходимото, тази първа среща с Пинкър не ме изпълни с просветляващите ефекти на назованите от Канеман и Тверски наши мисловни Система 1 (бърза и често погрешна) и Система 2 (бавна, дълбочинна, но крайно изтощаваща).

 Пинкър директно реферира към Канеман, и направо го резюмира и преповтаря на доста места. Следват някои интересни теории, подкрепени с логически и статистически модели, които в един идеален свят и в един идеален ум ще усилят умението за трезва и истинна преценка. Най-интересни ми бяха правилната интерпретация и свързаните изчисления на вероятностите и случайностите, както и бейсианският подход към оценката на дадена хипотеза като правдоподобна - в пряка зависимост от нейната надеждност и от наличието на солидни и представителни данни в нейна подкрепа. Едно интуитивно или контраинтуитивно изчисление, дори не винаги да доведе до правилен резултат, най-малкото приучва на търпение и хладнокръвие. А ако приложеният алгоритъм е правилният, можем да най-сетне да зърнем коя страна на зара на айнщайновия бог се е завъртяла към нас.

 Недостатъците при Пинкър са няколко:
 1. Той също се подхлъзва предимно да описва видовете ирационалности и често срещани “бъгове”.
 2. Терминология, която не винаги е много ясна, макар латинските корени на думите да са достатъчно насочващи. Може и преводачът да има пръст тук, някои определено звучаха много странно - например “евиденциална интерпретация”. Да, ясно, базирано на доказателства, но не може ли на български или поне в бележка под линия?
 3. В някои моменти има ненужни повторения и лични отклонения, в други пък липсват достатъчно пояснения. И, странно за човек с хуманитарен профил - липсваха ми формулите на места. Един тлъст параграф от пет реда не винаги може да ги замести. Направо си беше учебникарско. Не в лошия смисъл - това трябва да се изучава от учениците.

 Пинкър се старае да е достъпен и забавен, както и доста политкоректен. (Извинява се, че не включил в изследване интерсексуалните деца. Какво, да му се не види, е това?!)

 Като цяло, рационалността е вечна битка с предразсъдъци, заблуди, склонност към търсене на потвърждение, невежество и интелектуален мързел. Но Пинкър е оптимист - рационалността все пак е в гените ни, проявява се най-бързо в мигове на опасност, и се изисква не чак толкова голямо усилие, за да се прилага и в по-неекстремно ежедневие.
 non-fiction psychology science
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 John Devlin
 Author 22 books 92 followers
 November 14, 2023
 Pinker’s book on the diminishing quality of violence in the world seemed somewhat counterintuitive but he backed up his assertions well and even if one didn’t agree with his conclusions one had to appreciate his provocative supposition.

 This book is far more bland:probabilities, Gaussian curves, Bayesian projections…

 Where Pinker fails is in his own biases…
 “Even when the ancient bane of pestilence rose up anew in the twenty-first century, we identified the cause within days, sequenced its genome within weeks, and administered vaccines within a year, keeping its death toll to a fraction of those of historic pandemics.” The vaccines were a mild therapeutic that had a limited window of viability…

 “In 2020 the brutal murder of George Floyd, an unarmed African American man, by a white police officer”
 Derek Chauvin is innocent…as new/old Medical examiner report illustrated: there was no neck bruising or windpipe damage to Floyd, but there was a lethal dose of fentanyl that surpassed even the average deadly dose for junkies…

 “their self-interest to reduce their emission of greenhouse gases, since a warmer planet would bring floods, hurricanes, wildfires, and other disasters that would make their lives worse.” Hurricanes have declined in the last century when supposed anthropogenic warming has supposedly increased…Pinker wrong again…


 “and a recent American leader suggested that Covid-19 could be treated with injections of bleach.”

 Even politifact has weighed in against Pinker’s falsehood
 “after Bryan’s presentation, Trump floated the idea of using disinfectants to treat COVID-19 patients. He did not say Americans should ingest chemicals to prevent or treat the virus.
 Here’s the full context:
 "A question that probably some of you are thinking of if you’re totally into that world, which I find to be very interesting. So, supposedly we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it. And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. (To Bryan) And I think you said you’re going to test that, too. Sounds interesting, right?"
 "And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that, so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me. So, we’ll see, but the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute. That’s pretty powerful."



 “administered less than a year after the plague emerged. Yet in that same year, the Covid-19 pandemic set off a carnival of cockamamie conspiracy theories: that the disease was a bioweapon engineered in a Chinese lab,”

 …not a bio weapon but definitely a virus engineered in the lab at Wuhan…


 “He predicted in February 2020 that Covid-19 would disappear “like a miracle,” and endorsed quack cures like malaria drugs, bleach injections, and light probes. He disdained basic public health measures like masks
 and distancing,”
 …ivermectin seems to have some efficacy, the bleach and light are lies as seen above and masks and distancing have numerous long term studies that show these countermeasures were useless at best and harmful to many…


 “He repeatedly publicized QAnon, the millions-strong conspiracy cult that credits him with combating a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles embedded in the American “deep state.”

 Never did Trump support Qanon, and if there was no deep state what do you call the 51 Intel experts who falsely claimed Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian spywork?

 A second unpromising lead is to blame today’s irrationality on the current scapegoat for everything, social media.

 As jon Haidt has convincingly written…plot the emergence of instagram and forward facing cameras a decade ago and watch it parallel the four fold increase in girls anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation…


 “Though millions of people endorsed the rumor that Hillary Clinton ran a child sex trafficking ring out of the basement of the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington”
 No, even the small percent who claimed they supported Qanon disavowed this story…as pinker points out…people are often ignorant of ideas they think they know…

 “The brazen lies and conspiracies of Trumpian post-truth can be seen as an attempt to claim political discourse for
 and climate change threaten the well-being of billions.”

 The IPCC, gold standard agency for intl climate change claims a two degree increase by 2100…I fail to see how yesterdays temp of 20c will somehow lead to the death of billions of the temp was 22c…longer growing seasons mean more food…oh and the fact that folks die of cold at about 8x heat argues for more heat plz…

 “Trump was banned from Twitter for violating its policy against inciting violence;” bc of the twitter files we now know that control of this social platform was engineered by govt pressure..

 The press— who’s the purveyors of disinformation?

 https://sharylattkisson.com/2023/10/5...



 “Educational institutions, from elementary schools to universities” education is a joke…Oregon just discarded any metrics for HS graduation bc it might negatively impact minorities…Baltimore has 40% HS that have zero students proficient in math, while the top 5 schools have a 12% proficiency rate..

 “another is a network of international organizations, particularly the United Nations, which knits countries into a community, mobilizes peacekeeping forces”

 The UN should be disbanded..giant bureaucracy that the U.S. pays for…and just the last weeks refusal to denounce Hamas is a nice capstone on its treachery…
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 Петър Стойков
 Author 2 books 299 followers
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 October 29, 2023
 Само искам да изрева срещу превода на книгата, благодарение на който не я прочетох. Да, преводът е просто ужасен. И това не е (изцяло) по вина на преводача, който, убеден съм, знае добре английски, а по-скоро по вина на редактора и издателя, които си позволяват да пускат на пазара книга, която не е написана на български.

 Да, за да превеждаш ОТ който и да е език, трябва най-вече да знаеш езика, НА който превеждаш, особено пък ако той ти е роден. И за съжаление много от хората, които минават за преводачи, особено на научна и научно-популярна литература, очевидно не знаят български ... или просто не си правят труда да го използват, защото им е трудно.

 Пример за това са словореда, идиомите и особено "българизирането" на английски думи, които правят един текст на български изключително тромав и тегав за четене.

 Относно словореда няма какво толкова да се каже, освен че е резултат на прост мързел и превеждане дума по дума. Различните езици подреждат различните смислови части на изречението в различен ред. И когато чета изречение на български, тъпо е да мога да позная от какъв език е преведено то, само по подредбата на думите.

 Идиомите пък още повече. В челото ме удари следното изречение в началото на книгата: " От друга страна, в мното случаи, зад човешката лудост се крие метод. ". Какво по-дяволите трябва да означава това, за човек незапознат със значението на английския идиом method in madness ?!? Нима е толкова трудно да се каже, че "за всичко това си има причина?"

 Положението с българизирането на английски думи, вместо да се помисли 5 секунди за вече съществуващи и напълно подходящи български такива пък отдавна е трагично. Всеки "aкадемик" от хуманитарните дисциплини, който поназнайва малко английски и иска да се изкара много умен, "заема" думи от английски, за да изглеждат писанията му пълни с термини. Така вместо "мисловен" или "умствен" получаваме "когнитивен" (и не ми казвайте, че "е от латински", щото тия хора латински не са помирисвали).

 По метода на "не ми се занимава да търся българските думи" пък преводачът построява монументалния езиков апотеоз, който е изразът "каузалната текстура на средата". Causal означава причинно-следствен, а texture в случая е структура или просто същност. Но къде ти да стигне човек по-далеч от първия резултат на google translate, ако ще и да му плащат за това.

 Като чета по-стари книги, се удивлявам на цветистия български език, който преводачите използват. За да сме честни, трябва да кажа, че и книгите на английски отпреди няколко десетилетия използват по-цветист език от сега, определено го има опростяването (да не кажа опростачване) на езика.

 Все още има български преводачи, които могат да пишат - щото за да си добър преводач трябва да си и поне сносен писател (това особено ясно се вижда в поезията - няма как да превеждаш поезия, без да си добър поет). Тия преводачи обаче почти изключително превеждат художествена литература, докато научно-популярната се дава на разни момченца с гугал транслейт.

 Както и да е, исках просто да мърморя за превода, не за книгата. Не съм я чел, но Пинкър е съвсем приятно четим на английски (както всъщност е и младият Докинс, също окепазен при превода .
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 Alan Johnson
 Author 5 books 235 followers
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 December 21, 2022
 I agree with many things in this book. However, I disagree with some of Pinker's basic principles and a few of his specific statements. For example, Pinker follows Hume and other moderns in arguing that reason/rationality applies to means, not ends. Ends are, according to Hume and Pinker, postulated by our emotions, our desires, our feelings. If so, then Hitler was rational to the extent that his war machine was rationally designed to achieve his end of world conquest and tyranny. He was irrational when he made emotional decisions about his war machine that were not conducive to his ends. Pinker acknowledges an exception when our ends are in conflict with each other. Then, somehow, we must use reason to adjudicate among our conflicting ends. He does not discuss how reason is involved when a person's conflicting ends are all unethical. (See Rationality , 45–56, 70, 175, and 329, Kindle edition.)

 At the end of the book, however, Pinker apparently advocates, if only implicitly, the importance of reason as part of the conception of good ends.

 In contrast to the modern consensus, Plato showed how Socrates used rational dialectic to identify proper ends ( Republic , especially Book I). Similarly, Aristotle held that correct reasoning should be applied both to the ascertainment of ends and to the formulation of means ( Nicomachean Ethics 6.1.1138b18–35, 6.2.1139a21–27, 6.5.1140b5–7, 6.13.1144b1–1145a11; see also Daniel C. Russell, Practical Intelligence and the Virtues [Oxford: Clarendon, 2009], part 1). I agree with Plato, Aristotle, and Russell on this issue.

 Pinker also argues that rationality requires, among other things, “mastery of cognitive tools like formal logic and mathematical probability” ( Rationality , 324). He thereby implicitly consigns the majority of the human species to irrationality. In contrast, I think it is possible for people even without such mathematical and quasi-mathematical (symbolic notation) training to be rational about both ends and means. This is what I understand to be the thought behind the movement for informal logic and critical thinking. The discipline of “formal logic” involves abstract (symbolic) philosophical, mathematical, computational, or linguistic propositions that ignore questions about correct reasoning in ordinary human decisions and actions, whereas “informal logic” and “critical thinking” address the actual content of human thought and communication.

 I elaborate my own views on these matters in my book Reason and Human Ethics .

 (edited December 21, 2022)
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 k.
 185 reviews 2 followers
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 August 29, 2021
 Wouldn’t have read it if i hadn’t received it for free, and it wasn’t pre publication.
 If i disagree with this book its because of its aesthetic, or lack thereof. Ugly book.
 It also violates my taboo against reality mathematics, and in particular morality mathematics.
 I does provide a workout though, and throws into focus the failing of my mind. I failed the nearly all of the logic problems.
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 Jessica - How Jessica Reads
 2,079 reviews 226 followers
 August 25, 2021
 Honestly, some of this was a little over my head, ha. But I liked a lot of what he had to say, and I kept saving quotable bits.

 "Three quarters of Americans believe in at least one phenomenon that defies the laws of science, including psychic healing (55 percent), extrasensory perception (41 percent), haunted houses (37 percent), and ghosts (32 percent)— which also means that some people believe in houses haunted by ghosts without believing in ghosts."

 "And a special place in Journalist Hell is reserved for the scribes who in 2021, during the rollout of
 Covid vaccines known to have a 95 percent efficacy rate, wrote stories on the vaccinated people who came down with the disease— by definition not news (since it was always certain there would be some) and guaranteed to scare thousands from this lifesaving treatment."

 Full review coming for Shelf Awareness.
 2021 2021-nonfiction misc-nonfiction
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 Fares
 152 reviews
 December 18, 2021
 Brilliant! Very well structured, which is not easy for a book on rationality. Very well researched, great resources cited. Very highly recommended!
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 Kathryn Bashaar
 Author 2 books 95 followers
 October 16, 2021
 This book can be tough going. Pinker condenses into just a few hundred pages what would surely be a full 3-credit Logic course at a university. It gets a little hard to follow. But there's a payoff.

 I think of myself as very rational. But I fell for the fallacious answer to several of the questions that Pinker poses. Here's an example. On the game show Let's Make a Deal, let's say you chose Door #1. If the host reveals that the big prize is NOT behind Door #3, should you change your choice to Door #2? I'd have said no, the chance that the big prize is behind Door #2 versus Door #1 are now 50-50. You probably think the same. Long story short, we are wrong. I still don't quite understand why. Some of the other logical fallacies are easier to understand, but, altogether, it is a tough book. My brain was working so hard that one night I had trouble falling asleep after reading.

 But the cumulative effect is to help the reader to be a more critical thinker. For example, I've always heard that correlation is not the same as causation, but I will now be much more alert to correlation fallacies.

 In one chapter, I think Pinker did his readers a disservice. He claims that 90% of breast cancer diagnoses are false positives. First, he uses the assumption that only 1% of women will get breast cancer, which I believe is wildly incorrect. Second, he explains his reasoning abstractly, without reference to the specific breast cancer example. So it was really hard to follow, and hard for me to determine how much impact his use of the 1% figure had on his conclusion that 90% of diagnoses are false positives. Also, he doesn't define what he considers a "diagnosis." Is it a suspicious mammogram? A biopsy result? A pathology test after surgery? And what is the difference between a "diagnosis", and his claim that only 1% are true positives? As a breast cancer survivor, it seemed sloppy to me.

 Overall, though, I felt that the book was worth reading. I especially appreciated the last few chapters. In Chapter 10, he talks about why people seem so irrational at times. Short version, emotion overrides rational thinking. The obvious rational conclusion might not be to your liking (motivated reasoning) or might not confirm what you and your friends believe (myside bias). Or it might contradict a mythology (e.g., religion) that is central to your understanding of the universe. In the case of conspiracy theories, people are susceptible because it happens to be true that sometimes there really ARE conspiracies. And honestly it's sometimes just easier to believe whatever grabs your attention, compared to thinking it through.

 In Chapter 11, Pinker makes an impassioned and well-argued case for how rationality has improved lives.

 And, bottom line, rationality is the only tool we have to convince each other when we disagree. The alternative is force of some kind. If we hope to keep our democracy, we must respect rationality.

 Like my reviews? Check out my blog at http://www.kathrynbashaar.com/blog/
 Author of The Saints Mistress https://camcatbooks.com/Books/T/The-S...









 Overall, though, this book was worth the hard thinking.
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 Sid Nuncius
 1,128 reviews 116 followers
 October 31, 2021
 The message of this book is important and timely and I am wholly in agreement with its arguments and analyses. However, I did find it a bit of a slog.

 Pinker argues clearly and passionately that rationality and reason are vital and that their current abandonment by a worrying number of people is dangerous. He looks at the role of rationality and the essential part it plays in maintaining a civilised society and also attempts to analyse why some people reject it in favour of irrationality, conspiracy theories, evidence-free fantasies and so on. This includes some good analysis of why scientific data can be messy and a clear explanation o why that doesn’t mean that it can simply be ignored.

 All of this is commendable but I had some reservations. Firstly, although Pinker has a reputation for brilliant, readable writing, I found the prose quite hard going in places. It is dense, unalleviated by much in the way of light relief and burdened by his tendency to use obscure words where ordinary ones will do just as well – “patrimony,” for example where “inheritance” would make at least as much sense and make for a far easier read.

 Secondly, I wasn’t really sure that Pinker was saying much that was new. The book, he explains, grew out of a course he taught and that makes it, for me, a restatement of pretty well rehearsed arguments and ideas. Important, certainly, and a useful restatement of arguments but not all that stimulating.

 And thirdly, I kept getting a strong feeling that he is preaching to the converted. This is a book aimed at and surely read by those who, like me, already believe strongly in rationality. It may strengthen our stance, but will it change what really needs to be changed?

 I don’t want to be too harsh; this is a good, important book. However, for me Robin Ince’s recent, very enjoyable and equally important book The Importance Of Being Interested said much the same thing in a far more readable and witty way, which may do a better job of reaching the people it needs to.
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 Richard Thompson
 2,231 reviews 115 followers
 October 16, 2021
 There's nothing new here for anyone who has a basic knowledge of logic, statistics, game theory and behavioral economics. Still, it's a good recap of basic concepts, and Mr. Pinker does a good job of describing current academic thinking about our departures from rationality and why things that seem like departures may really only be issues of context and point of view that are not necessarily irrational at all. I generally agree with everything that is in this book, so why did I come away from it feeling that Mr. Pinker and I have a fundamental divergence of our points of view and wondering whether this may be the last Steven Pinker book that I will read?

 I think perhaps that it is because I am deeply drawn to the irrational and spiritual. I am not religious or superstitious. I try to be as objective as possible in my evaluation of news and society and in my job. And yet I also feel that there is a fundamental human need for something that is trans-rational. Sometimes when things don't make sense that is the whole point of them, and they can only be understood by accepting their irrationality. Like a Zen koan. Or the Trinity. And things that defy rational analysis can have great beauty. However, Mr. Pinker seems to be mired in the Enlightenment. I have great admiration for Enlightenment thinking. David Hume, who is quoted several times with approval by Mr. Pinker, was very smart and was right far more often than he was wrong, plus he could write philosophy in a way that was much more readable than any of the great German philosophers. And the French Enlightenment also produced some very good ideas. But most of the world has gotten past all that. We need to leaven our rationality with compassion, and we need to re-enchant the world. Mr. Pinker for all of his smarts and good intentions seems to miss this point. He and I are on different tracks.
 psychology
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 Anandpreet Singh
 13 reviews
 September 28, 2021
 Down the rabbit hole I went again. We live in a world where we highly prioritize being rational. But why? And how can we define someone as rational? What is Irrational? By doing this aren't we dividing the world in black and white instead of seeing it as grey?

 "We should not be surprised that what people take away from science education is a syncretic mishmash, where gravity and electromagnetism coexist with psi, qi, karma, and crystal healing."

 There's been a huge rise in behavioral economics in the last two decades, although it points out the Irrational things we do, the reason why we do it wasn't that satisfactory and was mostly based on experiments. Steven Pinker approach here is from a cognitive psychologist perspective and the explanations he gives are really interesting to read. There are entire chapters dedicated to simple topics such as probability, causality, statistics, correlation etc, which gives an in-depth study of these basic topics. Stuff of thought really.

 This book is very well structured, read it in the given order and it'll all make sense in the end. My favourite chapter from this book has to be chapter number 10, what's wrong with people? This chapter is like a conclusion of all the things that he told in previous chapters and with real life examples. The last chapter why rationality matters, felt more like a part of enlightenment now (another great book by him) instead of this one.

 To all people who are planning to read this book, I'll highly recommend to read some books on behavioural economics and psychology before picking this one. This book is densely packed with knowledge, going without prior knowledge on behavioural economics and psychology will make this book very hard to understand and this is the only criticism I've for this book.

 If behavioural economics and psychology interests you, this is the most up-to-date book to read.
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 Hugh
 843 reviews 43 followers
 October 17, 2021
 I haven't read any of Pinker's other books. Don't think I'll be seeking them out after this one.

 If arguing on the internet is your jam then this is a book for you. Most of the book is Pinker explaining what cognitive biases are and how we should be thinking about probabilities and data, and it oscillates between an overly complex Wikipedia article and a dull lecture.

 He sprinkles in some poorly reasoned (or not reasoned) analysis of:

 Why deplatforming people is bad

 A bad faith connection between the death of George Floyd and the existence of Critical Race Theory

 How young people don't save for retirement because of an inability to delay gratification

 Why higher insurance rates for minorities us simply due to statistical analysis

 And a couple of oblique Jordan Peterson references.

 Perhaps the target audience for this is Reddit trolls, in which case, go for it, I guess. But the best stuff here is better written elsewhere (Thinking Fast and Slow, for one).

 I skipped a chunk of math in the second half so maybe there was some redemption there, but overall I didn't find anything of value here. It ends with an appeal to reason, but if you've read this far, it's preaching to the choir.
 nonfiction
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 Mehtap exotiquetv
 443 reviews 264 followers
 August 26, 2023
 Steven Pinker hat ein besonderes Talent, wie man kognitive Verzerrungen nimmt und diese im Alltag anwendet, um menschlich rational zu sein.
 Rationalität und Vernunft wird teilweise von bestimmten Bevölkerungsgruppen pauschal dementiert, wenn diese eben nicht in ihr Weltbild passen. Doch wenn wir uns alle über diese Verzerrungen bewusst wären, dann würde es kaum Räume für Verschwörungstheorien und menschlich verachtende Ideologien geben.
 Dieses Buch deckt alle gängigen psychologischen Fallen ab und macht Mut für vernünftiges Denken.
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 Steve
 1,043 reviews 58 followers
 November 7, 2021
 3.5 stars I guess. I really loved Pinker’s earlier books about linguistics and psychology. There’s certainly some good stuff in this book, but I don’t think he covered the topic all that well. There were reminders of his good sense of humor and his good writing, but not so much. I’m happy that he uses interesting words, but he may have gone a little overboard in using obscure terminology.
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 Anna
 35 reviews
 December 9, 2021
 Good and modern recap of the basics
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 Brice Karickhoff
 564 reviews 36 followers
 December 17, 2022
 Settled on three stars for this one but I must say: it is the most engaged I have ever been with a three star book. Pinker basically spends 300 pages explaining all the ways we are irrational as a species, mostly through the lens of behavioral economics. At times I didn’t appreciate the way he explained certain topics that I spent weeks of graduate school reading papers on, but all in all, he covers a ton of ground with what I thought was a pretty high level of accuracy (for what I know) and entertainment value.

 Pinker then pivots to the last question of his books subtitle: “why it matters”… why should we be rational? Or as he should have put it: “why it **ultimately** matters”. I do agree that we are largely irrational as a society and an increased emphasis on rationality is deeply needed. However, I think Pinker took this to an extreme that I am uncomfortable with, and he did so from the omniscient and irrefutable pedestal of One of the Rational Ones among us, which struck me as pretentious.

 To take one example of how he explained we might apply rationality, he described how the sunk cost fallacy might tempt us into staying too long in an unhappy marriage, to which I reply: what if values other than rationality should inform how we handle matters such as marriage. Sure, a member of the “rationality community” might respond “other values can be contained within rationality”, meaning: if you believe that, then the rational thing to do is to stay in the marriage. Well aside from the fact that such a argument could be made of any other value (ie. Love could be your chief value and if rationality is merited, love will lead you to act rationally), there is the fact that such an argument wouldn’t actually WORK when embraced by a true trial such as marital strife. Imagine being in marriage counseling and saying: I’m not happy, but I’ve determined that the rational thing to do is to stay with you so I will.

 Ultimately this was a good book. The first seven chapters are a great course in logic, rationality, behavioral economics and even utility theory. I just left the book with a bad taste in my mouth because (as I knew going in), Pinker and I don’t see eye to eye on basic human nature. Sorry if that makes me ~irrational~ (though I think I could provide a ~rational~ argument that it does not)

 2022
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 Sammy Alexia
 12 reviews 3 followers
 January 14, 2024
 This book was amazing. It was a gift and not sure I would have bought it for myself. But it made me think so much, and opened my eyes to the ways we humans make decisions. I probably don't have the words sum up the thesis myself... what I took from it was that humans can be highly rational thinkers but we also make lots and lots of irrational decisions for various reasons. I love the little problems and psychological tests that the author goes through, they are very illuminating.
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 David D. Knapp, Ph.D.
 518 reviews 8 followers
 October 27, 2021
 This is the third book by Pinker that I've started, with "Enlightenment Now" and "The Better Angels of Our Nature" being the other two. But it is the first one I've finished...and it wasn't easy.

 Pinker's work is frustrating to me. On one hand, he writes about topics about which I care deeply (rationality, critical thinking, overcoming biases and fallacies...). So, I WANT to read his books.

 However, he writes about these topics in a dense, academic style that I graphically refer to as "academic masturbation" (egotistical and intellectual language and overall style designed to illustrate one's intelligence with the ultimate goal of self-pleasure, rather than for the enjoyment of the reader). We know you're an expert in these topics, Dr. Pinker, so you don't have to prove it by writing about them in a practically impenetrable fashion.

 Seriously, I have taken numerous Ph.D.-level courses in these topics. I have taught these topics both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. And, yet, I struggled mightily to get through Pinker's coverage of them in this book.

 Consequently, he has limited the impact of his potentially powerful writing by exclusively targeting other intellectual readers who probably also engage in "academic masturbation" when they write. How about "dumbing it down a little" - for lack of a better phrase - so that readers who really need to contemplate and learn about these topics can follow your thoughts on them? (For example, I think Jay Heinrichs has done a marvelous job of this very thing in the various editions of his "Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion.")

 Anyway...

 I'm not sure I'll try to fight my way through any other works by Pinker - unless he miraculously changes his approach to writing (which is highly unlikely). And that's a shame. Because I truly believe I could learn a lot from this brilliant man...if only he wouldn't keep trying to constantly remind me how brilliant he is.

 2021
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Rationality
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56224080-rationality
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17656542-language-cognition-and-human-nature
Language, Cognition, and Human Nature: Selected Article…
2013-01-01
Author
<div><div><div><p></p></div><div><div><p></p></div><div><ul></ul></div><div><p></p></div><hr/><hr/><div><p><h3>About the author</h3></p><div><p></p></div><hr/></div></div><div><p><h2>Ratings Reviews</h2></p><article></article><hr/><div><p><h3>Friends Following </h3></p></div><p><h3>Community Reviews</h3></p><div><p></p><div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/53165-warwick"></a></section><section></section></div><section><section></section><div><p></p></div><section><ul> </ul></section><hr/></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/20506822-lee"></a></section><section></section></div><section><section></section><div><p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr/></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/71490449-nick-lange"></a></section><section></section></div><section><section></section><section><div><p></p></div><div><p>This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.</p></div></section><section><ul></ul></section><hr/></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/888584-kasiabadura"></a></section><section></section></div><section><section></section><div><p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr/></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/4177031-troy-blackford"></a></section><section></section></div><section><section></section><div><p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr/></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6030920-kali"></a></section><section></section></div><section><section><p><b>Read</b></p></section><div><p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr/></section></article></div><div><article><section><section></section><div><p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr/></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/163900554-yunus-edgu"></a></section><section></section></div><section><section></section><div><p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section></section></article></div></div><p></p><hr/></div></div></div></div>||||I|||| * Home
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 Language, Cognition, and Human Nature: Selected Articles

 Steven Pinker

 3.83
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 Language, Cognition, and Human Nature collects together for the first time much of Steven Pinker's most influential scholarly work on language and cognition. Pinker's seminal research explores the workings of language and its connections to cognition, perception, social relationships, child development, human evolution, and theories of human nature.

 This eclectic collection spans Pinker's thirty-year career, exploring his favorite themes in greater depth and scientific detail. It includes thirteen of Pinker's classic articles, ranging over topics such as language development in children, mental imagery, the recognition of shapes, the computational architecture of the mind, the meaning and uses of verbs, the evolution of language and cognition, the nature-nurture debate, and the logic of innuendo and euphemism. Each outlines a major theory or takes up an argument with another prominent scholar, such as Stephen Jay Gould, Noam Chomsky, or Richard Dawkins. Featuring a new introduction by Pinker that discusses his books and scholarly work, this collection reflects essential contributions to cognitive science by one of our leading thinkers and public intellectuals.
 Genres Psychology Linguistics Nonfiction Language Science Philosophy Writing

 392 pages, Hardcover

 First published January 1, 2013

 Book details & editions

 About the author

 Steven Pinker

 63 books 9,942 followers
 Steven Arthur Pinker is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science. Pinker is known for his wide-ranging explorations of human nature and its relevance to language, history, morality, politics, and everyday life. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as the New York Times, Time, and The New Republic, and is the author of numerous books, including The Language Instinct , How the Mind Works , Words and Rules , The Blank Slate , The Stuff of Thought , The Better Angels of Our Nature , The Sense of Style , and most recently, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress .

 He was born in Canada and graduated from Montreal's Dawson College in 1973. He received a bachelor's degree in experimental psychology from McGill University in 1976, and then went on to earn his doctorate in the same discipline at Harvard in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, then became an assistant professor at Harvard and then Stanford University. From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. (Except for a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1995-6.) As of 2008, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard.

 Pinker was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in 2004 and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in 2005. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv, McGill, and the University of Tromsø, Norway. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003. In January 2005, Pinker defended Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, whose comments about the gender gap in mathematics and science angered much of the faculty. On May 13th 2006, Pinker received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.

 In 2007, he was invited on The Colbert Report and asked under pressure to sum up how the brain works in five words – Pinker answered "Brain cells fire in patterns."

 Pinker was born into the English-speaking Jewish community of Montreal. He has said, "I was never religious in the theological sense... I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew." As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969. His father, a trained lawyer, first worked as a traveling salesman, while his mother was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has two younger siblings. His brother is a policy analyst for the Canadian government. His sister, Susan Pinker, is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and the author of The Sexual Paradox and The Village Effect .

 Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too divorced. He is married to the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, the author of 10 books and winner of the National Medal of the Humanities. He has no children.

 His next book will take off from his research on "common knowledge" (knowing that everyone knows something). Its tentative title is: Don't Go There: Common Knowledge and the Science of Civility, Hypocrisy, Outrage, and Taboo .

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 3.83
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 Warwick
 880 reviews 14.8k followers
 September 4, 2013
 This is a first for me – to see a popular science writer bringing out a book of what you might call their "selected academic papers". I suppose it speaks to Steven Pinker's (justified) popularity, but even so it's difficult to know exactly who the intended audience is: the stuff in here seems far too advanced for those who merely take a passing interest in linguistic theory or cognitive science, but on the other hand working academics or students in the field presumably already have access to most of these studies via university libraries, academic websites, etc. I suppose there's something to be said for having it all pulled together in a nice bound copy?

 Among linguists, Pinker has become just slightly…well, "divisive" and "controversial" are much too strong words, but let's just say that his success with the public has meant that some of his ideas are taken as fact now, when many would say they're still under debate. Notably his championing of Noam Chomsky's Universal Grammar theory, which definitely is still controversial and divisive. On the other hand, it's also unfair to characterise Pinker as a Chomsky cheerleader – perhaps his most important academic paper (certainly his most-cited) was a 1990 study coauthored with Paul Bloom which went dead against Chomsky's non-Darwinist ideas on language evolution.

 Actually, this last paper was almost taboo-busting – the idea of how language evolved is so thorny, and so beset by competing arguments, that the Linguistic Society of Paris famously banned any mention of it back in 1866. I love the paper for its epigraph – a comment contrasting the birth of language with the supposed first spoken words of the infant Thomas Babbington Macaulay:

 …once when he was taken out, his hostess accidentally spilled hot tea on him. The little lad first bawled his head off, but when he had calmed he said in answer to his hostess' concern, ‘Thank you Madam, the agony is sensibly abated.’


 It was an important paper, and it led to a bit of a renaissance of language evolution studies in the 1990s. On the other hand, this collection is also at times a way for Pinker to promote papers that he feels have received too little attention: ‘As far as I know,’ he says of one study, ‘this article has attracted zero citations (except by me)’.

 Of course much of his work is not to do with linguistics at all, or at least not directly – he has had a long involvement with cognitive science generally, though the studies in here that mark this involvement are mostly over my head. For the general reader, perhaps the most interesting part of the book is the thoughtful introduction, in which Pinker considers the value in maintaining an interest in both academic studies and also popular writing.

 The demand for clarity [in works aimed at the general public] can expose bad ideas that are obscured by murky academese, and the demand for concrete detail in recounting experiments ("Ernie and Bert puppets" not "stimuli") can uncover flaws in design that would otherwise be overlooked.


 Well, quite. Which brings us back to the question of who this book is aimed at exactly. Despite the witty introduction and the perceptive chapter-by-chapter commentaries, I suspect it has rather little general appeal – though that's not to detract from the fact that it's a very rich collection of often brilliant work.
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 Lee
 26 reviews 19 followers
 April 19, 2014
 Even though I had already read half the articles, it was still worth getting this collection.

 Warning: This is a collection of peer-reviewed academic journal articles, not a book written for a general audience, so some parts might be a bit dry and tedious if you're not used to reading that sort of thing. I'm a long-time fan of Pinker, a student of psychology, and now a wanna-be linguist. So I loved it, but the group of people for whom this book would be worth getting is probably extremely small. If you're interested in Pinker (and not a psychologist or linguist), I'd recommend one of his many excellent books written for a general audience instead, like The Blank Slate.
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 Nick Lange
 5 reviews
 September 20, 2017
 This collection of academic papers by one of my favorite psychologists was mind-blowing. Very advanced concept matter in here, thus not the best choice for the reader searching for a leisure book. However, unlike some of the books I have read in the past (Malcolm Gladwell rings a bell), the author doesn't advertise this read as a leisure book for the popular audience. It was sometimes challenging to understand the ideas presented, as I have only meandered into the deep realm of psychology on my own time and this is written for the purpose of expert study by an expert himself. However the ideas explored could be really interesting to anyone who enjoys Steven Pinker's more foundational or "entry level" books for the lack of a better term; the behind the scenes research that was used later in his larger publications was interesting to study here in a scholarly format. If you are brave enough, prepare yourself for a hard read but overall a great learning experience from this diamond in the rough of a book.
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 Kasiabadura
 29 reviews 11 followers
 September 27, 2019
 I struggled through the book. Some of the articles I had to reread a couple of times to understand. A more seasoned reader of Pinker would probably appreciate it more than I did.
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 Joey
 85 reviews 2 followers
 June 24, 2021
 Pinker and his damn 5 stars
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 Troy Blackford
 Author 22 books 2,496 followers
 November 15, 2015
 This book of scholarly papers by my favorite psychologist was INTENSE. Extremely erudite stuff here, not for a popular audience. But unlike some books I've read recently (a-HEM, 'Anxious' by Dr. LaDoux) this work does not market itself as popular reading. It was very difficult to understand some of it, as I'm merely starting out on my psychology degree and this is written by and for experts, but the topics covered were of intense interest to anyone who enjoys Pinker's bibliography of more approachable works, and the science behind his more famous tomes was certainly worthy of a read. Know what you're getting into, but this is an under-appreciated gem.
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 Kali
 524 reviews 39 followers
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 June 16, 2014
 this book is just way too long and daunting for me to tackle and complete. it consists of selected journal articles from stephen pinker's scientific career, and as interesting as it seems and sounds, i've been reading or attempting to read it for quite a while and making little progress as i always turn to easier options. i love stephen pinker's ideas, but i have a hard time getting through his actual work.
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 Marianna
 11 reviews 1 follower
 March 26, 2015
 Excellent: concise, easy to read, covering many subjects, the perfect source book. I find myself using this often. Typical Pinker!
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 Yunus Edgu
 9 reviews
 August 22, 2023
 Paul Bloom ile yazdığı "Natural Language and Natural Selection" + Fodor'a cevap niyetine yazdığı "So, How Does the Mind Work?" başlıklı makaleler berrak bir zihnin mahsulleri.
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About the author           Ratings Reviews       Friends Following     Community Reviews                                                                           This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.                                                                          Read
Language, Cognition, and Human Nature: Selected Article…
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Visual Cognition (Computational Models of Cognition and…
2024-01-01
Steven Pinker
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 Visual Cognition

 Steven Pinker ( Editor)

 3.74
 23 ratings 0 reviews
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 These essays tackle some of the central issues in visual cognition, presenting experimental techniques from cognitive psychology, new ways of modeling cognitive processes on computers from artificial intelligence, and new ways of studying brain organization from neuropsychology, to address such questions as: How do we recognize objects in front of us? How do we reason about objects when they are absent and only in memory? How do we conceptualize the three dimensions of space? Do different people do these things in different ways? And where are these abilities located in the brain? While this research, which appeared as a special issue of the journal Cognition, is at the cutting edge of cognitive science, it does not assume a highly technical background on the part of readers. The book begins with a tutorial introduction by the editor, making it suitable for specialists and nonspecialists alike.
 Genres Psychology Nonfiction Design Neuroscience Brain Linguistics

 280 pages, Paperback

 Published January 9, 1986

 Book details & editions

 About the author

 Steven Pinker

 63 books 9,942 followers
 Steven Arthur Pinker is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science. Pinker is known for his wide-ranging explorations of human nature and its relevance to language, history, morality, politics, and everyday life. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as the New York Times, Time, and The New Republic, and is the author of numerous books, including The Language Instinct , How the Mind Works , Words and Rules , The Blank Slate , The Stuff of Thought , The Better Angels of Our Nature , The Sense of Style , and most recently, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress .

 He was born in Canada and graduated from Montreal's Dawson College in 1973. He received a bachelor's degree in experimental psychology from McGill University in 1976, and then went on to earn his doctorate in the same discipline at Harvard in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, then became an assistant professor at Harvard and then Stanford University. From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. (Except for a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1995-6.) As of 2008, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard.

 Pinker was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in 2004 and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in 2005. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv, McGill, and the University of Tromsø, Norway. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003. In January 2005, Pinker defended Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, whose comments about the gender gap in mathematics and science angered much of the faculty. On May 13th 2006, Pinker received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.

 In 2007, he was invited on The Colbert Report and asked under pressure to sum up how the brain works in five words – Pinker answered "Brain cells fire in patterns."

 Pinker was born into the English-speaking Jewish community of Montreal. He has said, "I was never religious in the theological sense... I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew." As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969. His father, a trained lawyer, first worked as a traveling salesman, while his mother was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has two younger siblings. His brother is a policy analyst for the Canadian government. His sister, Susan Pinker, is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and the author of The Sexual Paradox and The Village Effect .

 Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too divorced. He is married to the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, the author of 10 books and winner of the National Medal of the Humanities. He has no children.

 His next book will take off from his research on "common knowledge" (knowing that everyone knows something). Its tentative title is: Don't Go There: Common Knowledge and the Science of Civility, Hypocrisy, Outrage, and Taboo .

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 Visual Cognition
 Steven Pinker ( Editor)
 3.74
 23 ratings 0 reviews
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 These essays tackle some of the central issues in visual cognition, presenting experimental techniques from cognitive psychology, new ways of modeling cognitive processes on computers from artificial intelligence, and new ways of studying brain organization from neuropsychology, to address such questions as: How do we recognize objects in front of us? How do we reason about objects when they are absent and only in memory? How do we conceptualize the three dimensions of space? Do different people do these things in different ways? And where are these abilities located in the brain? While this research, which appeared as a special issue of the journal Cognition, is at the cutting edge of cognitive science, it does not assume a highly technical background on the part of readers. The book begins with a tutorial introduction by the editor, making it suitable for specialists and nonspecialists alike.
 Genres Psychology Nonfiction Design Neuroscience Brain Linguistics
 280 pages, Paperback
 Published January 9, 1986
 Book details & editions
 About the author
 Steven Pinker
 63 books 9,942 followers
 Steven Arthur Pinker is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science. Pinker is known for his wide-ranging explorations of human nature and its relevance to language, history, morality, politics, and everyday life. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as the New York Times, Time, and The New Republic, and is the author of numerous books, including The Language Instinct , How the Mind Works , Words and Rules , The Blank Slate , The Stuff of Thought , The Better Angels of Our Nature , The Sense of Style , and most recently, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress .
 He was born in Canada and graduated from Montreal's Dawson College in 1973. He received a bachelor's degree in experimental psychology from McGill University in 1976, and then went on to earn his doctorate in the same discipline at Harvard in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, then became an assistant professor at Harvard and then Stanford University. From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. (Except for a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1995-6.) As of 2008, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard.
 Pinker was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in 2004 and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in 2005. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv, McGill, and the University of Tromsø, Norway. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003. In January 2005, Pinker defended Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, whose comments about the gender gap in mathematics and science angered much of the faculty. On May 13th 2006, Pinker received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.
 In 2007, he was invited on The Colbert Report and asked under pressure to sum up how the brain works in five words – Pinker answered "Brain cells fire in patterns."
 Pinker was born into the English-speaking Jewish community of Montreal. He has said, "I was never religious in the theological sense... I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew." As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969. His father, a trained lawyer, first worked as a traveling salesman, while his mother was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has two younger siblings. His brother is a policy analyst for the Canadian government. His sister, Susan Pinker, is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and the author of The Sexual Paradox and The Village Effect .
 Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too divorced. He is married to the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, the author of 10 books and winner of the National Medal of the Humanities. He has no children.
 His next book will take off from his research on "common knowledge" (knowing that everyone knows something). Its tentative title is: Don't Go There: Common Knowledge and the Science of Civility, Hypocrisy, Outrage, and Taboo .
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Visual Cognition (Computational Models of Cognition and…
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2599110-visual-cognition
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 The Mind-Body Problem

 Rebecca Goldstein

 3.82
 1,184 ratings 136 reviews
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 When Renee Feuer goes to college, one of the first lessons she tries to learn is how to liberate herself from the restrictions of her orthodox Jewish background. As she discovers the pleasures of the body, Renee also learns about the excitements of the mind.

 She enrolls as a philosophy graduate student, then marries Noam Himmel, the world-renowned mathematician. But Renee discovers that being married to a genius is a less elevating experience than expected.

 The story of her quest for a solution to the mind-body problem involves the prickly contemporary dilemmas of sex and love, of doubt and belief.
 Genres Fiction Philosophy Novels Literature Literary Fiction Jewish Womens
 ...more

 288 pages, Paperback

 First published January 1, 1983

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 About the author

 Rebecca Goldstein

 24 books 393 followers
 Rebecca Newberger Goldstein grew up in White Plains, New York, and graduated summa cum laude from Barnard College, receiving the Montague Prize for Excellence in Philosophy, and immediately went on to graduate work at Princeton University, receiving her Ph.D. in philosophy. While in graduate school she was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship and a Whiting Foundation Fellowship.

 After earning her Ph.D. she returned to her alma mater, where she taught courses in philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, the rationalists, the empiricists, and the ancient Greeks. It was some time during her tenure at Barnard that, quite to her own surprise, she used a summer vacation to write her first novel, The Mind-Body Problem . As she described it,

 "To me the process is still mysterious. I had just come through a very emotional time, having not only become a mother but having also lost my father, whom I adored. In the course of grieving for my father and glorying in my daughter, I found that the very formal, very precise questions I had been trained to analyze weren’t gripping me the way they once had. Suddenly, I was asking the most `unprofessional’ sorts of questions (I would have snickered at them as a graduate student), such as how does all this philosophy I’ve studied help me to deal with the brute contingencies of life? How does it relate to life as it’s really lived? I wanted to confront such questions in my writing, and I wanted to confront them in a way that would insert `real life’ intimately into the intellectual struggle. In short I wanted to write a philosophically motivated novel."

 The Mind-Body Problem was published by Random House and went on to become a critical and popular success.

 More novels followed: The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind ; The Dark Sister , which received the Whiting Writer’s Award, Mazel , which received the 1995 National Jewish Book Award and the 1995 Edward Lewis Wallant Award; and Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics . Her book of short stories, Strange Attractors , received a National Jewish Book Honor Award. Her 2005 book Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel , was featured in articles in The New Yorker and The New York Times , received numerous favorable reviews, and was named one of the best books of the year by Discover magazine, the Chicago Tribune , and the New York Sun . Goldstein’s most recent published book is, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew who Gave Us Modernity , published in May 2006, and winner of the 2006 Koret International Jewish Book Award in Jewish Thought. Her new novel, Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction , will be published by Pantheon Books.

 In 1996 Goldstein became a MacArthur Fellow, receiving the prize which is popularly known as the “Genius Award.” In awarding her the prize, the MacArthur Foundation described her work in the following words:

 "Rebecca Goldstein is a writer whose novels and short stories dramatize the concerns of philosophy without sacrificing the demands of imaginative storytelling. Her books tell a compelling story as they describe with wit, compassion and originality the interaction of mind and heart. In her fiction her characters confront problems of faith: religious faith and faith in an ability to comprehend the mysteries of the physical world as complementary to moral and emotional states of being. Goldstein’s writings emerge as brilliant arguments for the belief that fiction in our time may be the best vehicle for involving readers in questions of morality and existence."

 Goldstein is married to linguist and author Steven Pinker. She lives in Boston and in Truro, Massachusetts.

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 3.82
 1,184 ratings 136 reviews
 5 stars
 325 (27%)
 4 stars
 457 (38%)
 3 stars
 292 (24%)
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 Manny
 Author 34 books 14.9k followers
 October 28, 2018
 All on its own, this book has forced me to reconsider the merits of the chicklit genre, as hilariously dislikable heroine Renee Feuer seduces and marries the intellectual prince, gets bored, sleeps around and badmouths everyone while alternating boasts about her firm tits and peachy ass with extended quotations from L'Être et le Néant and weird bits of Talmudic trivia. It's the best subversive rewriting of Cinderella ever; I couldn't put it down and finished it in a day. Please God, let me sit next to Rebecca Goldstein next time I'm invited to a highbrow dinner party.
 ________________

 On further reflection, it seems to me that there may be a more sophisticated way to interpret this book. Be warned that the following contains major spoilers:

 The title is The Mind-Body Problem, and the heroine is writing a dissertation about the mind-body problem, so let's at least consider the hypothesis that the book is, indeed, a take on the mind-body problem. Now the thing that makes this a problem for many people is that minds and bodies seem to be quite different things. Minds are pure, unchanging essences. Bodies are gross, contingent accidents. Minds are much nobler than bodies, and the truly worthwhile things in life have to do with minds. In particular, when it comes to romantic relationships, it's inappropriate and wrong to be fixated on your loved one's body. You should value them for their mind.

 But is this so obvious? In the book, Renee can be read as a wittily designed counterexample. (Ah, those counterexamples!) She's a girl with extreme daddy issues, who's only really interested in older men, and only in their minds: she often tells us that youth and beauty just don't do it for her. And she's as gross and inappropriate as the male chauvinist pig who's only interested in women's cup sizes. She seduces and marries Noam because she wants a trophy husband who's got a huge brain, and she's so fixated on it that other aspects of him hardly register at all.

 Noam has also been set up to illustrate the incoherence of the conventional views about minds and bodies. He lives almost entirely in his head, and the mental is what's important to him. But mathematicians burn out early, and at the end it's graphically revealed that minds aren't pure, unchanging essences after all. Noam's mathematical gift has left him, just as Renee's youthful body has started to age. And it's even harder for him to find a beauty parlor that will at least temporarily arrest the process. The philosophical point is that dualism doesn't make sense: minds and bodies are much more similar than we first imagine.

 Well, I think that's the mental take on the book, and it's consistent that the physical take is better. Renee is funnier as a sexy bitch than as a philosophical counterexample, and that's as it should be.
 linguistics-and-philosophy older-men-younger-women too-sexy-for-maiden-aunts
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 Kressel Housman
 976 reviews 240 followers
 December 26, 2019
 I'd call this book anti-frum, except that the protagonist, a grown woman off the derech, has such an empty life, it's just as much an indictment of the secular world as it is the world she left behind. The title comes from the classic problem of philosophy: are humans just the sum of their biological processes or does the mind have a metaphysical existence? The protagonist, a graduate student in Philosophy, grapples with a derivative of the question in her own life and marriage: is it only about my body? Since the answer seems to be yes, she looks at her frum relatives with envy, understanding at least that they live with real meaning.

 I'm upping this book to 4 because it's well-written, well-characterized, and has stuck in my memory even though I read it years ago. It was formerly a 2 because I couldn't get past my prejudice against the protagonist and her (im)moral choices, but I'm older now and more inclined to be forgiving.
 fiction jewish philosophy
 23 likes
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 Sharon Hart-Green
 Author 3 books 408 followers
 January 1, 2020
 This a novel that I had wanted to read for years and never got to do so until now. Not being a fan of satire, I was not sure at first whether this was a book I would enjoy. However, Goldstein is much more than a satirist. Not only is her writing is sharp and witty, but there is profundity beneath the observations that makes the book worth savouring at many points along the way. I'm now itching to read more of her novels!
 14 likes
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 Gregory's Lament
 67 reviews 9 followers
 March 26, 2008
 What I like most about this book is really a matter of personal preference. It's the inside look into the characters--the socially awkward, yet celebrated intellegensia. This is probably becuase I'm a socially awkward, wanna-be intellectual. I imagine most goodreads members fit the same profile, so likely as not, you can take this as an endorsemnt.
 13 likes
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 Nelson Zagalo
 Author 9 books 373 followers
 February 26, 2021
 Rebecca Goldstein é uma académica da área da Filosofia, tendo começado a sua carreira no domínio da Física, acabaria por mudar-se para a Filosofia e seguir o ramo da Filosofia da Ciência. Isto é importante, porque este seu primeiro romance contém enormes traços autobiográficos. Um dos seu livros posteriores — "Incompletude: A Demonstração e o Paradoxo de Kurt Gödel" (2005) — dá conta da relação entre Godel e Einstein em Princeton, tendo-o lido antes, serviu-me aqui para compreender em muito maior detalhe o mundo e a cultura da autora. Mas, para primeira obra, o que verdadeiramente impressiona, não é o caráter conceptual, é a audácia. A capacidade de criar uma voz familiar que não se acanha, que se expõe sem constrangimentos.
 ...
 Continua, com links e excertos, no blog Virtual Illusion:
 https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...
 academy-novel literature philosophical
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 Ari
 694 reviews 24 followers
 November 10, 2015
 Finished Rebecca Goldstein's 'The Mind-Body Problem' today. It's really one of the best novels I've read; unabashedly Jewish, philosophical, and sexy. Truly, this is a meta-study of the mind-body problem in a way I'd somewhat pondered but never seen put into words. Highly recommended.

 One of the ideas the author brings is that of the 'mattering map'. At the most basic, it is as if we plot points on a grid of all the things that matter to us. As we mature, we notice clusters of points, some light grey (less points there), some very dark indeed (large numbers of things that matter in those regions). I was quite taken by this idea, because it made such sense to me. Also, things can shift over time, and the darkness becomes lighter and sometimes the light darker as our morals, attractions, values change. I know for me, a huge shift happened late this summer. While I'll leave the details out, I will say that it was quite monumental and really changed how I go about in the world, for the better. Some lessons take a completely heartwrenching jolt to learn, but once we do, we find ourselves intrinsically different. A point of my map where a lot of dots were clustered has less now and my guess is that as I go on discovering things about myself and others I'll notice that more points are clustered in places I wouldn't have expected.

 Toward the end of the book, the main character is pondering the map and her husband and says this, "I don't know if it's possible to get him to change his perspective, not to relocate on the mattering map, but to turn from it altogether. I've been trying hard to do so myself, to see the map for what it really is, a description of our subjectivity and nothing more. From what region does God look out on us? From none, of course. Not because people don't matter objectively, but because they do. They simply do. Any view that confers degrees of mattering, that distinguishes between those who matter and those who don't, has no objective validity. We all count in precisely the same way. That's the view from nowhere inside, the view from out yonder."

 Yes.
 9 likes
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 Holly
 1,056 reviews 266 followers
 August 13, 2016
 I remain fond of the novel, and I probably even enjoyed it a little more than I did when I read it twenty years ago. (Why? Not sure) I liked the Princeton milieu, the description of the Institute for Advanced Study, and I enjoyed Goldstein's expository asides. But Noam, the "genius" husband, is unattractive enough to defy belief (Renee is a victim of verbal abuse, actually), and I didn't understand the protagonist's obsession with her looks and her aging - she's 28 years old or something like that? The novel is the thing that hasn't aged particularly well.

 The gender politics are so 1983. They are not remote enough to evoke nostalgia for a more innocent and backward-past, and they don't show prescience for what the slight-more-enlightened future will hold. Renee is so subservient to Noam; Renee's ideas about marriage and career are pitiable; at the party of academic mathematicians in which a given that all the mathematicians are male and all the wives are in the kitchen (Goldstein doesn't even intend it as satirical commentary). I had to laugh (ruefully) when Goldstein has her protagonist and gender-neutered physicist-friend explain that they could never imagine a female physicist who is both successful in her career and physically attractive (to men). ( Lisa Randall?! )

 The scientific and philosophical debates are also old: Ava and Noam's argument over quantum mechanics seems quaint and Renee's research on the mind-body problem is passé. And are philosophy departments filled with "positivists" anymore? I don't think so. But that's all okay. I admire Goldstein for writing such an ambitious first novel of ideas.
 2013-reads re-read
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 Bob Lopez
 804 reviews 37 followers
 October 17, 2013
 "There are two kinds of smokers, heroic and unheroic. Unheroic smokers are worried about the health hazards of smoking, which is weakness one, and would like to quit but can't, which is is weakness two.

 "Heroic smokers don't worry...Fear for the body should never govern one's actions. Heroic smokers disdain death. They laugh at death with every inhaling breath."

 "So you disdain death?"

 "I disdain death."

 "What else do you do besides smoke to thumb your nose at the way of all flesh?"

 "I drive."
 4 likes
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 Andreea
 152 reviews 61 followers
 May 2, 2019
 I must admit that I hated the book when I first started to read it. It was an amazingly slow read but I think I can also blame the slowness of my reading on watching 7 seasons of Game of Thrones while doing it. So, yeah, I read a 290 page book in 1.5 months. And now I’m reading a 350 in less than a week. Anyway, enough with my ranting.

 The book was interesting. There were parts that I absolutely hated because I could not understand them (too much philosophy for my taste) and I found them as a constant and unending rant. But there were other parts that I liked. I liked when she talked about her family and I even laughed because her mother had these crazy ideas.

 In the end I found the book to be quite sad and I actually felt sorry for Renee even though in the beginning I didn’t like her at all.
 3 likes
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 Kristin Boldon
 1,175 reviews 36 followers
 November 27, 2019
 I read this first in my 20's, fresh off a broken engagement and about to enter grad school. I'm not sure there was a much better book for me at the time. Now, past 50, it still delights. This tale of a woman who perceives herself as beautiful for a brainy woman, brainy for a beautiful one, but objectively neither, still has enough intellectual and sexual juice to spin out romance and the search for identity as the messy and creative processes they are.
 2019 borrowed re-read
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 Annie
 92 reviews 7 followers
 May 28, 2021
 This book made me coin the term "aspirational crush," which is to like someone with the hope that you were more like them. The book describes the existential condition of the woman whose only aspiration is to be WITH someone who matters so precisely. Goldstein writes with the self-awareness that seems to come from hindsight, and while Renee is a character I pitied, I can also remember all the times I relate to her.

 This story could be read as a fable, warning against the danger of building a life to be absorbed by someone or something greater, of deriving all life's value from one trait, of shaky beliefs ready to be abandoned at the sight of anything newer or more exciting, of thinking that other people defines our worth. Yet it also makes living in danger so appealing!

 Renee's constant awareness of this "mattering map" (which is a cute concept to describe socially enforced values) makes her constantly other-aware. The saddest thing in this book may be that despite being preoccupied with the Mind-Body Problem, she never fully inhabits mind or body, only the her own imagination of what other people are. It takes a lot of courage to write something that exposes yourself like this! There are also some unexplored remarks about what makes us us - is it our past (so Renee's religious upbringing and slew of daddy issues), our present, or where we wish we could be? Renee constantly tries to outrun her past, yet eventually speculates that it may be the truest part of herself.

 Goldstein is a master at quotables; I averaged an underline every other page.
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 Begum Sacak
 135 reviews 121 followers
 August 20, 2018
 After I finished The Mind-Body Problem, I realized how I had enjoyed every single sentence of it. The reason was that every single sentence was a meditation on philosophy, life, and emotions that are so complex, yet so elegantly put forward by the author. I can say the theme of the book is "mattering" (at least through that perspective the author tries to philosophize about everyday emotions and decisions we make), and the things we do as humans to matter. But mattering itself is a complex phenomenon. The main character, who is a graduate student in philosophy, tries to do so by marrying with someone who is a genius hoping that this marriage will also make her happier and will make her matter in people's eyes. Her hopes for mattering (I sensed) also go back to her childhood and her Jewish background as the readers are presented some memories related to the character's relationship with her mother and other family members (and also a hint of Jewish culture and beliefs are introduced through the characters). As her marriage becomes more and more routine, she searches for pleasure in others, as a part of her desire for mattering. This is a well-written book on the interplay between our minds and bodies with philosophical thoughts scattered all across the pages.
 favorites philosophy
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 Peg
 307 reviews 1 follower
 November 4, 2010
 Maybe I missed something (but i don't think so!) I found this (a book club recommendation) tedious, self-centered and self-referential, and - worst of all - overwhelmingly boring. Read the author's bio, imagine a protagonist, and you've got the book. Any time an author has to put half the book in parenthesis to explain a) philosophical concepts or b) aspects of Orthodox Jewish life, she's not writing a novel, for Pete's sake!
 2 likes
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 Joy
 190 reviews
 April 27, 2011
 Usually when a book is this bad, I'll just put it down after I lose interest. Which happened immediately. But I had so enjoyed 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, and this was so well reviewed (except by Katie, who was right), that I kept thinking something would happen to make me detest Renee less. Sadly, no. All I can say is that I guess people had a different expectation of feminist novels back in the day. Or just terrible taste.
 2 likes
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 Jeffra Hays
 Author 12 books 6 followers
 January 22, 2012
 Fiction that is autobiography (how much isn't?) can have the magic of story, or the plod of bio-plot. This author is superb at explaining what she knows, but this novel is filled with explaining, too many philosophical discussions between his & her geniuses, endless classroom lectures poorly disguised as dialog. Although some scenes were mildly amusing, most were worth skipping.
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 Kate
 392 reviews 55 followers
 December 1, 2008
 Half of it is a survey of the history of philsophy, but I related to the character so much, and I liked the writing so much, that I didn't mind all those references I didn't get and explanations I hadn't asked for.
 library-book-club
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 Mackenzie Veres
 89 reviews 3 followers
 April 17, 2024
 I am changed. I am never the same. My favorite book of all time truly. This book is my brain on paper. My hopes. My fears. My unconscious. My mind, my mind, my mind. Words truly are an inadequate vehicle of expression to tell you how much this book means to me its FRUSTRATING ME like ACTUALLY. I love this book and I’ll never be able to explain why enough. I never knew I suffered with the mind body problem till I read this book and truly fell in love with Renee who is so closely similar to me and her struggle with being perceived and needing the affirmation of others knowing she’s intelligent and sexy and multifaceted through relationships for her to prove she’s a certain way. Being young and 20 and knowing it all and knowing nothing and drowning yourself in sex and re-assurance and transactional relationships is all about what this book is about. The connection I have to all these problems is beyond words and this book was a comfort and positive omen that I’m not alone in my fears and desires. This book is Siddartha, meets The Little Prince, meets Being and Nothingness by Jean Paul Sartre in the best way possible. A beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, amazing book with so much brevity and conciseness in regards to such deep, all consuming problems and philosophies. Ugh I can’t emphasize enough how frustrated I am writing this review because I just need the world to know how much I love this book. If you are in college and struggling with identity, and matter, and your self assurance READ THIS. Too many good quotes I don’t know where to start but I’m gonna copy and paste a discussion post I did for this book for my class so you can get a taste if that helps.

 Throughout The Mind Body Problem, Renne struggles with being perceived, or more specifically "The Mind Body Problem." Due to this, she falls back on other's perceptions of her in an act of self actualization. In her own words on being perceived Renee proclaims, "What tied me to my body was not so much its desires as the desires it aroused in others-the more (both desire and others), the better. Through it (my matter, so to speak) I mattered to others, and thus mattered." (Pg. 87) This quote perfectly encapsulates Renee's internal struggle with her insecurities as an individual and how if one believes you are a certain way or possesses a certain quality, then you are in fact that way or possess that quality. With this quote in mind it's interesting how Renee desperately wants to be perceived a certain way by others but ends up merely only being perceived as a type of an idea of who she actually is. She's insecure in her marriage admitting, "And how long could Noam be hoodwinked" as well as the fact that in regards to Noam she had "captured the prize: the love of the genius. The trick was to keep it." (Pg. 146) This quote reveals the fact that Renee thinks she acquired Noam's affection and love through deceit and putting on some type of front. She feels disconnected from Noam feeling as though she "tricked" or "hoodwinked" him and he couldn't possibly love the person she actually is.
 Later on after having a conversation with Sarah, Renee's close friend, they delve into the "feminine mystique" while analyzing the story of Cinderella in relation to their own lives. (Pg. 146) Renee relates to Cinderella paralleling it to her own life and marrying Noam stating, "And of course I believed in it, too, and more importantly, believed I was living it. I had been forlorn among cruel insensitive step-relatives (the Princeton philosophers), abused and unappreciated; I had been saved by the unconquerable superhuman hero." (The superhuman hero being Noam taking interest in Renee after feeling like a small fish in a big pond at Princeton.)
 After this conversation she elaborates and reflects more on the mind-body problem and what it means to her and also in relation to her stance in the world after being married to Noam. Elaborating more on the issue she adds questions to the problem, "What is the world? What am I?"...For Goddsakes am I, who carries an entire world within me, a body?" Renee knows she experiences the world in a unique and unreplicable way that she's proud of, however she is frustrated with the fact that no one else can see that. She's not satisfied with the fact that only she is able to know this and doesn't feel like Noam, the closest person in her life sees this. From these frustrating quotes, Renee's young marriage embodies the mind-body problem because Renee feels known by Noam, but doesn't feel like he knows her in her entirety or sees the "entire world" within her.
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 Anubha
 85 reviews 7 followers
 June 6, 2021
 I liked this book for the sole reason that its protagonist Renee Feuer was in some aspects relatable to me. I can understand, only too keenly, that pressure to prove your intelligence, feeling like you are not enough, having self doubt, sensing a lack of direction.
 Although Renee is not meant to be a likable character, I ended up liking her and at times sympathizing with her.

 Sure, some ideas may appear dated like the male dominated elite Princeton intelligentsia, the pressure women feel to prove their worth by repressing their femininity, but again, is it that dated. Haven't we all faced work situations where we felt we were not taken seriously because of the way we looked or dressed.

 What I liked about this book was the acuity with which the author captured the loneliness of living with a genius. The emptiness of a marriage based solely on adoration of the mental faculties of a person. The interspersed philosophy was sometimes revelatory and sometimes a hindrance in the actual story. I am not completely against it but again, maybe a little less of it would not have hurt anyone.

 The sadness of an existence where you put your worth based on the validation of your existence by the others is point on. I loved the humor, the friendship of Renee and Ava and the mad conversations of Renee with her orthodox Jewish mother. It was all too relatable and enjoyable. Generally, I dislike heroines who are so full of themselves but somehow when Renee spoke about her beauty, her attractiveness, and how it elicited reactions from the other sex, I didn't find it annoying. The tone mercifully lacked the smug, self-satisfaction that I find so irksome. I liked the progressions of the philosophical mind-body problem with Renee's marital life.
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 Wendi Klaiber
 255 reviews 5 followers
 April 13, 2017
 This book was a part of my math book club with National Museum of Mathematics, and I have no idea why it was chosen. There is very little interesting mathematics, the math professors are portrayed as men with intelligence but with no personality, thoughtfulness, or consideration of others, and the main female character is an unlikable, weak woman who gathers value from relationships with men with acclaimed intelligence.

 Not my cup of tea at all.
 fiction
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 Jordana Siegel
 220 reviews 2 followers
 November 4, 2023
 a book I will continue to thinking about and one that at times was hard to read. exposed my lack of philosophy knowledge and brought up many existential questions about life. all questions framed by a jewish young academic woman who had left orthodoxy and was navigating her worth through the mattering maps of mind (intelligence) and body, and all of their complexities, hence the title.

 thank you julia for the recommendation! would never have found this book otherwise :)
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 Sadie Dorf
 141 reviews 2 followers
 December 10, 2023
 If anyone has books in a similar style as this - please recommend! I’ve recommended this to three friends after it was recommended to me!

 This book satisfies everything I look for in a great read.
 2023-reads
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 Tilly Pohlmann
 32 reviews
 February 19, 2024
 One of the best things I’ve read in ages! Incredibly sharp & funny.
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 Casey Beidel
 53 reviews 9 followers
 December 19, 2023
 soooo Princeton, so pretentious, & often very funny. really excellent structure intertwining philosophy and narrative. Clear that Goldstein is a genius and excellent writer. 4 stars because there were just a few too many technical philosophical terms for me to enjoy/comprehend as a layperson. of particular interest to me were the sections on purchasing real estate and her relationship with Dan. makes me want to write a book about gay Ivy League experiences through the lens of sociological theory (must use my degree for something…)
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 Ostap Bender
 954 reviews 12 followers
 October 11, 2021
 A smart, funny book about a young Jewish woman who is studying philosophy and who marries an older man, a math prodigy who is a bit ‘slow’ socially. The question asked at the outset of the book is “what is it like to live with a genius”? The book sets off to describe just that (and it turns out he’s a bit of a jerk), along the way giving insights into the life of the intelligentsia at Princeton, Jewish culture, and a woman’s view of sex and sexual attractiveness.

 There are interesting musings on the “mind-body problem” but occasionally philoso-babble gets in the way; I found more interest in a couple of other areas of duality: (1) the woman’s desire to embrace her culture and her father’s faith, while at the same time being a skeptic and rejecting orthodoxy, and (2) her worship for her husband the genius, while at the same time not being satisfied in a marriage that quickly dries up.

 The writing is honest, is in a “voice” that’s a pleasure to read, and delivers on intellectual, physical, and emotional levels.

 Quotes:
 On marriage:
 “Eliot gives us a picture of the inside of a marriage but without divulging any sexual details. Her Victorian readers were meant to infer the hidden reality from such facts as Dorothea’s pathetic pallor and the desolate loneliness of that wedding trip. But I am no George Eliot (my misfortune) and you are probably not content to infer (your misfortune). And so I must take you back with me, from the piazza to the apartment, into Signora Trotti’s oversize antique bed.
 I had had thoughts, early on, of educating Noam in the bedroom, of teaching him the detours and the backways off the main straight road. But he was an unwilling student, when not altogether truant. It was not even possible to speak with him on the subject. He showed such distaste – not for the act itself, but for all reference to it.”

 On mid-life crises:
 “But the affair that followed brought little joy. I was but a part of Isaac’s miserable midlife crisis, the symptom known as the infatuation with the younger woman. He was forty-six years old and coming around to the realization that his life had led to this: to the cold, resentful wife; to the son and daughter pursuing their adolescent rebellion with the same uninspired conformity to the norm as their father was demonstrating in his response to his own life change; and, most painfully, to the unbrilliant career. The conclusion was waiting to be drawn, even if he shrank from its final acknowledgment. The promise of his youth would not be fulfilled, the spark had never caught, the moment for it was over. There would be no fire, and now even the feeble glow of hope was giving out.”

 On men:
 “I would have liked, at least, to be able to walk these foreign streets inconspicuously; the Roman men would not allow it. Their demonstrativeness surpassed anything I’d encountered (with the possible exception perhaps of the time I almost caused a riot walking down the Upper West Side’s Broadway in a pair of yellow shorts on an airless August afternoon). Here in Rome men would walk beside me for blocks, declaiming. One jumped out of his car and fell before me on his knees. I didn’t enjoy any of it.”

 “This resentment had historical associations. It had been suffered throughout my childhood, when, as the girl in the family, I was expected to help wait on The Men – a class which included that little twerp, my brother. ‘Hurry up, dish it out. You’ll keep The Men waiting.’ God forbid! The women – even guests – always got the last and the worst, the dried and the burnt. God forbid The Men shouldn’t be satisfied. Any shmuck with a shmuck was a power before us.”

 On mothers:
 “All mothers worry, Jewish mothers worry more. But my mother can find something to worry about in anything. No topic is innocent. In some way, indirect or Talmudically indirect, some danger to her family might be lurking. ‘It’s her way of loving. Try to understand,’ my father would tell me when I’d come complaining about something I’d been forbidden to join my friends in doing: going to the beach (the undertow); tennis (sunstroke); hiking in the woods (sex maniacs). Her worrying is, like all the best thinking, vigorous but subtle. Every possibility is followed through and analyzed. And she is knowledgeable, too, admirably informed on current events: local, state, national, international – for all could adversely affect her family. … If the phone rings at eight I know who is calling, to tell me to get rid of my house plants (a four-year-old has died from nibbling on a castor oil plant), not to answer the door (a man-and-son team has raped three women in northern New Jersey), not to make any plans to visit Seattle (a geologist has predicted that Mt. Rainier could go off sometime in the next twenty-five years).”

 On religion:
 “Can you imagine, then, what it was like to turn from the spirit of religion to the spirit of philosophy, or, as I liked to call it in those days, the spirit of rationality? … If truth is our end (and what else should be?) we must reason our way there. The leap of faith is not heroic but cowardly, has all the virtues, Russell said, of theft over hard labor.”

 On sex:
 “There’s been so much serious discussion devoted to the profound question of the vaginal vs. the clitoral orgasm. Why doesn’t anyone speak about the mental orgasm? It’s what’s going on in your head that can make the difference, not which and how many of your nerve endings are being rubbed. Judged on the quantitative scale, our lovemaking wasn’t memorable. It’s other details I remember…
 …
 And I remember too the intensity of my pleasure, which wasn’t at all physical, as he shuddered within me while inside my head sang the triumphant thought: I am making love to this man … to Noam Himmel … the genius.”

 “Haven’t you failed to consider that the object of sexual desire is not a sensation … but a person? If you overlook that, then all sex is a kind of masturbation, rather an awkward kind at that, when you do it with someone else. Only that’s all wrong. Masturbation isn’t even sex, not really. It’s the form of sex without the content; even when attaining the sensations (often more successfully than in the real thing), it’s still missing the point. Because the point lies, somehow or other, in the other person, in the reciprocal desiring. No, no, Noam, you are wrong. Sex is a personal relation, and that’s what makes it so deep and complex and interesting.”

 “(Who was it who said bad sex is better than no sex at all? What a blessed sexual existence he must have enjoyed.) Sex that’s gone dry and tasteless, that one call swallow only with effort, is one of the more unpalatable experiences life offers. Especially when one is remembering or imagining the cognac-soaked flambé possibilities.”

 On solitude:
 “How can any of us expect others to share our world, particular as each of ours is? Ours is alone, alone, alone, alone. Alone in one’s own world.”

 On values:
 “Never mind that the dull can’t help themselves, that they would, granted the sense to do so, have chosen to be otherwise. Their very existence is felt as a moral affront by those of us who dwell where the genius is hero. The color of our zone is only just discernably lighter than the true black of those who perceive people according to their acceptance of some moral or religious or political code.”

 On virtue:
 “It was a rare treat when my father spoke about himself. There were so many things I had always wanted to know about him. I wondered if he had struggled to arrive at his moral level or had been born there. I spent a lot of time puzzling over the question of which – the struggle or lack of it – would make him the better man. Many ethicists, following Kant, opt for the struggle: those who are naturally good aren’t really good. Yet the striving after moral perfection requires a concern for one’s self: one has to want one’s self to be good.”

 On women; I found these insights brutally honest and provocative:
 “What tied me to my body was not so much its desires as the desires it aroused in others – the more (both desire and others), the better. Through it (my matter, so to speak) I mattered to others, and thus mattered. Through it I had mattered to Noam, who himself mattered so much, at least from where I stood.”

 “I am only attracted to men who I believe to be more intelligent than I am. A detected mistake in logic considerably cools my desire. They can be shorter, they can be weaker, they can be poorer, they can be meaner, but they must be smarter. For the smart are the masters in my mattering region. And if you gain control over them, then through the transitivity of power you too are powerful.
 And how is it given to a woman to dominate but through sex? Through sex a woman gains control over a man’s body that he himself lacks; she can move him in ways he cannot move himself. And she invades and takes over his consciousness…”

 And lastly, on Jewish women:
 “He was worshipful, offering me again and again the highest praise of which the Jewish male is capable: You don’t look at all Jewish. Our brothers always expect us to thrill at the words, because of course in their scheme of things there’s nothing so desirable as a shiksa. I’ve never understood it. Jewish women seem to me so much juicier and more betampte (tasty). It’s like the difference between a Saltine cracker and a piece of Sacher cake.”
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 Delphine
 18 reviews 5 followers
 October 24, 2023
 This is a brilliant book and I don’t know why I’d never heard of it. It’s probably the truest description of womanhood I’ve ever read.
 1 like
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 Aaron Arnold
 451 reviews 140 followers
 April 22, 2014
 Even without having known much about the author before I started reading this, it was clear that it was both a first novel and based heavily on her own personal life. Goldstein is often quite funny at describing all the nuances of her "unequally yoked" relationship with a genius mathematician, and her chosen metaphor of the infamous Cartesian mind-body problem of the title is well-used and thematically satisfying in how it represents both her chosen philosophical field of study, and her chronic worries over whether men love her for her brain or her ass. Speaking as a guy, since this feels like one of those books that men and women tend to respond to in different ways, I thought she tended to ramble on about herself for a little bit too much of the book, as well as beat herself up to an often absurd degree, but when she started describing other characters, especially her husband, she had a very sharp eye for detail and was very perceptive about what made other people attractive to her. I didn't have much of a reaction to all the Jewish stuff, since it didn't seem to add much to the main "conflict" of the book, but I guess you can't really expect a relationship novel to avoid discussing the main character's background; that would be like expecting Mario Puzo to de-Italianize all his books. It's notable that she ended up staying with her husband in the book; that mirrors the chronology of Goldstein's real life, but check Wikipedia to see how that story ended.

 Recommended if you enjoy reading an occasionally insightful, usually relatable book about a woman overanalyzing her marriage and affairs, with enough philosophy to keep your attention. Her renditions of philosophical debates at parties are spot-on.
 fiction read-in-2014
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 Lena
 Author 1 book 383 followers
 December 15, 2007
 Renee Feuer is a spirited but floundering Princeton graduate student when she first catches the eye of living math legend Noam Himmel. Their courtship is an intellectual one, spiced with heady discussions on philosophy and math with an occasional dash of physics thrown in. Once the blush of new romance wears off, however, Renee finds intellectual theory wanting as she struggles to come to terms with orthodox Jewish upbringing, her own sexuality, and the husband who is physically present but mentally absent as he works on his next great theory.

 In addition to being an unusually thoughtful, coming-of-age story, the book paints a fascinating insider portrait of the highs and lows of life in the insular world of academia. While there were a few moments where I found Renee a little too self-absorbed to be wholly sympathetic, her smart, witty voice keeps the narrative moving towards and ending that is surprisingly satisfying on both an intellectual and emotional level.
 fiction
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 Lisa
 165 reviews
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 September 14, 2023
 120 pages into 306 and I can't finish it.

 Goldstein has an annoying need to explain everything. She can’t not give parenthetical remarks defining some philosopher or philosophy or Yiddish word. She has no trust in the reader’s intelligence, no trust in the reader’s ability to understand undefined and possibly unknown things, or to look up information they’re interested in learning more about.

 She includes so many details, like things about the main character’s parents. These things’ presence strikes me more as, “look what I worked out!” instead of “this is important for the story.”

 did-not-finish
 1 like
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 Laura
 173 reviews 15 followers
 April 1, 2009
 Intellectual with a lot of fluff--I don't think I've ever read anything like it before. Presented some thought-provoking questions about identity. I really enjoyed this book and Goldstein's writing style; it probably doesn't hurt that the main character and I share the same ethnic background and religious history, so I got a real kick out of all the references I recognized and could relate to.
 don-t-judge-me jewish-ish tigard-library
 ...more
 1 like
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 Becky
 170 reviews 2 followers
 May 22, 2008
 I found this to be a bit creepy and weird, and I don't love the motif of woman as succubus. Or of finding your identity in someone else.

 Also, I'm a little tender about the whole "Barnard women are sluts" thing, but it was definitely an interesting read.
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The Mind-Body Problem
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/74787.The_Mind_Body_Problem
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/782374.The_Careful_Writer
The Careful Writer
1995-12-01
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<div><div><div><p></p></div><div><ul></ul></div><div><p></p></div><hr/><hr/><div><p><h3>About the author</h3></p><hr/></div></div><div><p><h2>Ratings Reviews</h2></p><article></article><hr/><div><p><h3>Friends Following </h3></p></div><p><h3>Community Reviews</h3></p><div><p></p><div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/2105211-jacqui"></a></section><section></section></div><section><section></section><div><p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr/></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/2122765-robert"></a></section><section></section></div><section><section></section><div><p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr/></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/11042192-michael"></a></section><section></section></div><section><section></section><div><p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr/></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/37436579-bookbec"></a></section><section></section></div><section><section></section><div><p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr/></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/25525237-jim-robles"></a></section><section></section></div><section><section></section><div><p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr/></section></article></div><div><article><section><section></section><div><p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr/></section></article></div></div><p></p><hr/></div></div></div>||||I|||| * Home
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 The Careful Writer

 Theodore M. Bernstein

 4.18
 149 ratings 10 reviews
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 The definitive writers’ handbook of alphabetized entries that provides answers to questions of use, meaning, grammar, punctuation, precision, logical structure, and color.

 The Careful Writer is a concise yet thorough handbook, covering in more than 2,000 alphabetized entries the problems that give (or should give) writers pause before they set words to paper. It is perhaps the liveliest and most entertaining reference work for writers of our time—delighting while it instructs and amusing even as it scolds and cajoles the reader into skillful, persuasive, and vivid writing. The Careful Writer , Mr. Bernstein’s major work on usage, is an indispensible desk reference, and a perennial source of continuing reading pleasure.
 Genres Writing Nonfiction Reference Language Education Dictionaries Journalism

 511 pages, Paperback

 Published December 1, 1995

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 Theodore M. Bernstein

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 4.18
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 Jacqui
 Author 63 books 207 followers
 July 15, 2012
 Theodore Bernstein's fifty-year-old, 512-page The Careful Writer: A Modern Guide to English Usage (the Free Press, 1963) and its more than 2000 problem-solving entries has some of the best tips you'll need if you're serious about becoming a writer. Bernstein, former consulting editor of the New York Times, wrote/co-wrote seven books on writing, but this one--in my estimation--is his best. The font styles are old; the archaic structure of its syntax at times made me chuckle; and the topic is as appealing as banana juice (though I understand our Army boys in Kuwait love it--they can't keep it stocked), but it has stood the test of time and writers should consider it a must-have for their reference library. Where else will you go with a question like, Is 'none' singular or plural? It doesn't hurt that Bernstein schools us-readers with a dry sense of humor, making the medicine more palatable.

 A little about Theodore Bernstein (November 17, 1904 – June 1979). He was an assistant managing editor of The New York Times and from 1925 to 1950 a professor at the Columbia University School of Journalism. When he died, Time Magazine wrote an obit bio on him that read like this:

 Back in the old days, a brilliant editor of The New York Times named Theodore M. Bernstein was also a professor at Columbia J School. After he died in 1979, Time Magazine noted, “Theodore M. Bernstein, 74…served as the paper‘s prose polisher and syntax surgeon for almost five decades, authoring seven popular texts on English usage and journalism…In a witty Times house organ called ‘Winners and Sinners’, the shirtsleeves vigilante caught solecists in the act.”

 Bernstein would have objected to their neologistic use of 'author' as a verb. Today, no one would even notice.

 Besides covering basic good grammar, Bernstein addresses the idiomatic words that are more difficult to classify and covers them with the same rigor as he does the traditional words.

 Here are some of his best tips:

 * accident vs. mishap: 'accident' is an undesigned occurrence. 'Mishap' is an unfortunate happening.
 * amid vs. amidst--Americans prefer 'amid'; Brits prefer 'amidst'
 * can vs. may: use 'can' for ability or power to do something, 'may' for permission to do it
 * elder vs. older: 'older' compares old things whereas 'elder' compares people
 * he has lots of slang-type of phrases--guild the lilly, likes of, pinch hitter (which he terms a 'weary cliche'), some of which have since 1963 become mainstream. American English is nothing if not adaptive.
 * hanker takes the preposition 'after' or 'for'
 * hara-kiri--the correct word for the more popular term, 'hari-kari' and not a correct substitute for the Japanese ritual suicide, seppuku
 * how come: out of place in good writing and not legitimized because Shakespeare used the term 'how chance'
 * incidental: takes preposition to or upon
 * libel vs. slander: 'slander' is oral defamation while 'libel' is defamation by any other means
 * like vs. as: Bernstein takes three pages--filled with humorous examples--to explain the use of these two words
 * madam vs. madame: one is a married woman; the other the keeper of a bawdy house
 * may vs. might: 'may' is present tense; 'might' is past tense--who knew that?
 * mixaphor--when a writer mixes his metaphors. I love this.
 * pupil vs. student: those who attend elementary schools are 'pupils'; those who attend higher institutions of learning are 'students' (again, who knew? In this case, probably more of a history lesson than followed)
 * sensual vs. sensuous: 'sensual' applies to gratification of the animal sense with overtones of lewdness; 'sensuous' applies to enjoyment produced by appeal to the senses.
 * though vs. although: mean the same with two exceptions: 1) only 'though' can be used in idioms like 'as though', and 2) only 'though' can be used adverbially in a final position

 If you are in a position where you must--really must--be accurate in your grammatical decisions, there is no better authoritative source than Bernstein. Others may have an educated opinion, but Bernstein is the trump card.
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 Robert
 67 reviews 3 followers
 March 18, 2009
 Toss out that useless Strunk and White and pick this up. It's not exactly the Chicago Manual of Style, but it helps with a lot of tricky choices about what is proper style. And it's amusing.
 reference
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 Michael
 243 reviews 1 follower
 June 24, 2018
 My book is hardbound, published by Atheneum in 1967.
 I have had this in my library of reference works for some time and finally decided to read it straight through. I am evaluating the need for many of my library books when such material is so readily available on line.
 Bernstein is a supple writer using humor to keep the proceedings too dry. He uses many apt quotations usually from newspapers to illustrate poorly chosen particular words or phrases that inhibit clarity. Newspapers, and today on line news sources are always being written under strict deadlines and are subject to condensed headlines and general writing. The author would have much to discuss regarding current fad words and relaxed writing standards.
 I am a life long serious reader but do not get involved much with technical grammar. But Bernstein's book is mainly concerned with usage and urges writers to always seek clarity. I found his examples and explanations useful.
 The book is in need of revision since so much news coverage has changed and become less formal since this book was published.
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 BookBec
 428 reviews
 December 5, 2018
 Parts have aged well, while others are dated. Bernstein hoped for "arcking" to catch on in place of "arcing," as one example. Nope. On the plus side, I did appreciate his notes on which prepositions belong with certain words. Overall, though, I find reading an A-Z writer's guide to be a horribly dry experience. After I noted some out-of-date advice in the first 50 pages or so, I had only enough interest to skim the rest of the book.
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 Jim Robles
 436 reviews 41 followers
 July 31, 2018
 I loved this. The language changes, and this is a great record of usage at the time.
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 Michael
 48 reviews 3 followers
 May 21, 2020
 It's not the most exciting book I've ever come across but it contains sorely needed rules about grammar and idiom that any writers worth their salt ought to adhere to.
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 Emilymcmc
 48 reviews 9 followers
 August 2, 2008
 The bible.
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 Marc
 32 reviews
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 April 4, 2015
 Page to page and back and through again.
 because-why-not college reference-books
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 Marla
 867 reviews 3 followers
 June 5, 2015
 college and after -- the best
 reference
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 John Gikas
 6 reviews
 February 19, 2019
 Very helpful source!
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The Careful Writer
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<p>Steven Pinker conducts research on a variety of topics in psychology and cognitive science, including common knowledge (things that everyone knows everyone knows), language acquisition, emotion, the moral sense, rationality, and trends in violence.</p>
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 <h2>Photography by Steve Pinker</h2>
 
 
 
 
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 <h2>Twitter Feed</h2>
 
 
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 Is AI an existential threat? Will we be turned into paperclips? IMO this confuses intelligence w megalomania; the idiotic pursuit of 1 goal w "intelligence"; &amp; high intelligence w omniscience &amp; omniscience: IQ as miraculous power. <a href="http://twitter.com/RichardHanania">@RichardHanania</a> <a href="https://t.co/h7Boq76UN1">t.co/h7Boq76UN1</a>
 
 
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 <a href="//twitter.com/sapinker">sapinker</a>
 Mussolini, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Khomeini, Castro, Ho, Gaddafi, Milosevic, Chavez...Why? Prefer top-down grand plans to messy democracy &amp; markets; disdain for plebes who prefer schlock to fine art; admiration for superman who heroically implements vision of the good society.
 
 
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 <a href="//twitter.com/sapinker">sapinker</a>
 Wolin is 1 of several intellectual historians (also Julian Benda, Tom Sowell, Paul Berman, Nevin Sesardic, Arthur Herman, Mark Lilla, Paul Hollander) who've documented tyrannophilia: name-brand intellectuals who've kissed up to ...
 
 
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 <a href="//twitter.com/sapinker">sapinker</a>
 Case in point: Humanities hero Martin Heidegger, the defiantly obscure philosopher who endorsed Hitler, Nazism, &amp; genocide, &amp; was contemptuous of Jews, modernity, &amp; liberal democracy. Still worshipped in universities that cancel Enlightenment thinkers for a problematic footnote.
 
 
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 <a href="//twitter.com/sapinker">sapinker</a>
 Enlightenment Now argued that Enlightenment humanism (using knowledge to improve human well-being, which is provably effective) is by no means banal but in fact despised by many intellectual &amp; cultural elites. <a href="https://t.co/NCC2TtkpLS">t.co/NCC2TtkpLS</a>
 
 
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 <a href="//twitter.com/sapinker">sapinker</a>
 How platforms die: An explanation for anyone annoyed by the increasingly useless hits turned up by Google and Amazon searches. <a href="https://t.co/MFWYpAP7Tv">t.co/MFWYpAP7Tv</a> via <a href="http://twitter.com/wired">@wired</a>
 
 
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 STEVEN PINKER

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 Experimental psychologist interested in all aspects of language, mind, and human nature.

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 The Sense of Style | Steven Pinker | Talks at Google - YouTube
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 * sapinker Is AI an existential threat? Will we be turned into paperclips? IMO this confuses intelligence w megalomania; the idiotic pursuit of 1 goal w "intelligence"; & high intelligence w omniscience & omniscience: IQ as miraculous power. @RichardHanania t.co/h7Boq76UN1
 3 hours ago
 * sapinker Mussolini, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Khomeini, Castro, Ho, Gaddafi, Milosevic, Chavez...Why? Prefer top-down grand plans to messy democracy & markets; disdain for plebes who prefer schlock to fine art; admiration for superman who heroically implements vision of the good society.
 10 hours ago
 * sapinker Wolin is 1 of several intellectual historians (also Julian Benda, Tom Sowell, Paul Berman, Nevin Sesardic, Arthur Herman, Mark Lilla, Paul Hollander) who've documented tyrannophilia: name-brand intellectuals who've kissed up to ...
 10 hours ago
 * sapinker Case in point: Humanities hero Martin Heidegger, the defiantly obscure philosopher who endorsed Hitler, Nazism, & genocide, & was contemptuous of Jews, modernity, & liberal democracy. Still worshipped in universities that cancel Enlightenment thinkers for a problematic footnote.
 10 hours ago
 * sapinker Enlightenment Now argued that Enlightenment humanism (using knowledge to improve human well-being, which is provably effective) is by no means banal but in fact despised by many intellectual & cultural elites. t.co/NCC2TtkpLS
 10 hours ago
 * sapinker How platforms die: An explanation for anyone annoyed by the increasingly useless hits turned up by Google and Amazon searches. t.co/MFWYpAP7Tv via @wired
 11 hours ago
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  Experimental psychologist interested in all aspects of language, mind, and human nature.
Steven Pinker conducts research on a variety of topics in psychology and cognitive science, including common knowledge (things that everyone knows everyone knows), language acquisition, emotion, the moral sense, rationality, and trends in violence.
 STEVEN PINKER RESEARCH 
 
 
 
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 Is AI an existential threat? Will we be turned into paperclips? IMO this confuses intelligence w megalomania; the idiotic pursuit of 1 goal w "intelligence"; &amp; high intelligence w omniscience &amp; omniscience: IQ as miraculous power. @RichardHanania t.co/h7Boq76UN1
 
 
 
 
  
 sapinker
 Mussolini, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Khomeini, Castro, Ho, Gaddafi, Milosevic, Chavez...Why? Prefer top-down grand plans to messy democracy &amp; markets; disdain for plebes who prefer schlock to fine art; admiration for superman who heroically implements vision of the good society.
 
 
 
 
  
 sapinker
 Wolin is 1 of several intellectual historians (also Julian Benda, Tom Sowell, Paul Berman, Nevin Sesardic, Arthur Herman, Mark Lilla, Paul Hollander) who've documented tyrannophilia: name-brand intellectuals who've kissed up to ...
 
 
 
 
  
 sapinker
 Case in point: Humanities hero Martin Heidegger, the defiantly obscure philosopher who endorsed Hitler, Nazism, &amp; genocide, &amp; was contemptuous of Jews, modernity, &amp; liberal democracy. Still worshipped in universities that cancel Enlightenment thinkers for a problematic footnote.
 
 
 
 
  
 sapinker
 Enlightenment Now argued that Enlightenment humanism (using knowledge to improve human well-being, which is provably effective) is by no means banal but in fact despised by many intellectual &amp; cultural elites. t.co/NCC2TtkpLS
 
 
 
 
  
 sapinker
 How platforms die: An explanation for anyone annoyed by the increasingly useless hits turned up by Google and Amazon searches. t.co/MFWYpAP7Tv via @wired
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Steven Pinker
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