Please enjoy this third installment of Anamnesis Journal’s symposium on Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature. Also, consider earlier reviews by Glenn Moots and Leah Bradshaw.
Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York, NY: Viking Adult, 2011), 832 pp.
Let us assume that Pinker has interpreted the data correctly in his mammoth text Better Angels of Our Nature, and agree that, on a global scale, you were less likely to be a victim of violence in the past one hundred years than at any point in human history. Pinker recognizes that rates of violence still depend on time and place, but the overall global trajectory for Pinker reveals a historical decline in violence—especially in the West since the end of World War II. Still, if you add up the totals Pinker provides from the “atrocitologist” Matthew White of the number of people killed in the twentieth century due to wars, genocides, state violence, militias, and man-made famines, you arrive at an absolute number of 203 million people (321)—a formidable tally. But if this figure is considered in relative terms—that is, as a proportion of world population—then the twentieth century is probably not the deadliest in history. This is because there were more human beings living on the planet during the past 100 years than in any previous time in history; the 203 million deaths constitutes a smaller percentage of global population than would have been the case with violent deaths in previous centuries, when the world population was smaller (see 193‒200). Nevertheless, Pinker acknowledges that “the 20th century certainly had more violent deaths than earlier ones” (193); in absolute terms, if not relative terms, it was the deadliest century ever. This fact should, at a bare minimum, make us ambivalent about what the modern world has wrought. But it is precisely ambivalence that is missing from Pinker’s account of modernity. For him, the story of the twentieth century remains one of continual progress, albeit with major bumps along the way. Even if we accept Pinker’s interpretation of the data, he fails to provide an adequate analysis of the unique ways violence manifested itself in the past century, and the relation between these new forms of violence and specific trends within modernity—including trends that Pinker celebrates as agents of good.
There are two main issues I will discuss regarding Pinker’s book.
First, Pinker claims that we are born with a more or less fixed human nature, which is the consequence of evolution, and that this nature contains inner dispositions toward violence (our “inner demons”) and non-violence (our “better angels”). Our better angels, he claims, can take flight if they are nurtured by beneficent historical forces. Two of the forces cited by Pinker are the “civilizing process” (a term he borrows from Norbert Elias) and “Enlightenment humanism,” both of which are part of the true foundation of modernity. However, Pinker does not provide an adequate account of how certain features of modernity can erode our ethical sensibilities in new and possibly unprecedented ways, compromising our sense of ethical obligation toward others. In particular, Pinker does not offer an extended account of the role of technology and bureaucracy in twentieth-century mass death; on the contrary, he argues that these factors are ultimately insignificant when the data is considered.
Secondly, Pinker condemns utopian ideologies, such as Nazism and Communism, as working against the spirit of true modernity; they are instances of the “counter-Enlightenment” (a term he borrows from Isaiah Berlin). He is particularly condemnatory of their propensity to demonize certain peoples: utopian ideologies contain an “eschatological narrative” of history (330), in which it is believed that demonic agents and tendencies are gradually eradicated by the historical forces of good. But Pinker’s account contains its own muted demonology and eschatological narrative, albeit from the standpoint of a liberal humanist. Though obviously less extreme than the murderous ideologies he rightly condemns, it is nevertheless an excess in his understanding.
From the start of the book, Pinker denies that there is anything categorically different about modern forms of warfare and mass death. The findings of modern archaeology, ethnography, and history reveal that the ancients could inflict mass death with relatively primitive weapons. Seeing the faces of others did not restrain men from killing, torturing, raping, and purging. Pinker’s general point is that man-made mass death, through war or genocide, is not a modern invention. He thus minimizes the significance of bureaucracy and technology in his account of modern mass murder. For example, when discussing the main features of modern warfare he does not provide an extended discussion of the role of bureaucracy and technology (231ff.). The same is true of twentieth-century genocide. Pinker writes: “The technological and bureaucratic trappings of the Holocaust are a sideshow in the reckoning of its human costs and are unnecessary to the perpetration of mass murder, as the bloody machetes of the Rwandan genocide remind us” (643).
It is unquestionably true that mass death was not created in the modern world and that you do not need high-tech weapons to murder vast numbers. Furthermore, seeing the face of “the other” provides no guarantee that you will not kill the other. However, whether premoderns could kill with the same efficiency as moderns is a matter of contention. Even Pinker argues that wars in modern Europe over the past two centuries became much more lethal, although much less frequent, than wars in previous centuries. He blames this lethality on the creation of larger and more effective armies, as well as the rise of totalizing ideologies, such a fascism and communism. But, again, he does not provide an extended discussion of how technology and bureaucracy allowed ideologically driven humans to kill, in absolute terms, unprecedented numbers of people in extremely compressed periods of time.
The rise of the modern bureaucratic state is related to a trend in history that Norbert Elias called the “civilizing process.” It is illuminating to compare Pinker’s account of the civilizing process (59‒128) with the more ambivalent interpretation provided by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman
. Elias argued that there was a revolution in human behavior in Europe during the Middle Ages. Increasing pressure was put on people to restrain their violent, sexual, and scatological impulses; greater emphasis was put on etiquette, manners, discipline, and control. This would eventually lead to the highly civilized and highly rational culture of modernity. Bauman, following sociologists such as Elias and Max Weber, claims that a defining characteristic of modern culture is its ability to organize and carry out operations through the systematic division of labor. Such a culture needs workers who are obedient, who will follow procedures as expected, and who will not act on impulse, emotion, or personal initiative—in other words, human beings who have been shaped by the civilizing process. All of this is to create an ordered and predictable world. In his essay “Dictatorship over Needs,” Bauman reveals that this administerial culture is also a product of the imagined “utopia of Enlightenment” which, as Bauman puts it, envisions a “society built and administered according to the precepts of reason,” which means “the substitution of order for chaos. Design for spontaneity. Plan for anarchy. In other words: control. Control over nature and control over natural propensities of men and women.” (Peter Beilharz, ed.,
The Bauman Reader [Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001], 261). Such a vision of society can take any number of forms, including totalitarian incarnations.
As Bauman and many others have taught us, one of the disturbing lessons of twentieth-century totalitarianism—particularly in its Nazi and Stalinist forms—is that mass murder can be organized and carried out by ostensibly civilized humans, many working dutifully within bureaucracies, carrying out seemingly benign office work or technical tasks that contribute to the murder of millions. Most were not frontline executioners or camp officials, but office clerks and middle managers. Even the
Einsatzgruppen who were directly involved in the killing during the Holocaust were ordered to conduct themselves in a “civilized” manner. As the directives from Himmler to the
Einsatzgruppen indicate, the executioners were expected to restrain their passions—in other words, to practice what Pinker calls the “better angel” of self-control. Records reveal that many within the ranks of the
Einsatzgruppen were not able to follow Himmler’s orders in this regard, succumbing to either sadism or emotional breakdown. But a large portion of the executioners carried out their tasks with cool, workmanlike, efficiency. (See Richard Rhodes,
Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust [New York: Viking, 2002], 164‒69).
In
Modernity and the Holocaust,Bauman argues that modern mass murder does not depend on passionate hatred; in order for it to be carried out year after year, you need a system of civilized workers. Bauman claims that the civilizing process was unquestionably successful in taking violence out of most people’s daily lives, but the violence was redeployed since now only the state can use violence legitimately. Violence, in this manner, is pushed to the margins of most people’s experiences, but many in the peaceful center are still responsible for the functioning of that violence through bureaucratic activity, while remaining phenomenologically distant from the actual victims of the violence. In this manner, administrative culture erodes our sense of moral responsibility and replaces it with a stronger sense of technical responsibility—of doing a “good job.” As Bauman argues, a bureaucracy is able to do this through a division of labor, which accomplishes two tasks: (1) it creates a distance between most workers and the final outcome of their activity; and (2) it fragments responsibility, by giving each person a specific task, with no single person responsible for everything. Workers, in such a setting, are less likely to experience pangs of conscience because they are not directly exposed to the harm they are causing, and they do not feel responsible because they are part of a larger machine. Most disturbingly, these are not just features of totalitarianism; they are integral to the functioning of all modern societies that aspire toward “efficiency” and “effectiveness.” Most bureaucracies are not genocidal, but they all aim to be efficient without necessarily considering the human cost (see
Modernity and the Holocaust [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989], 98‒111).
None of this is really news; it has been discussed time and time again, in different ways, by different commentators. But it is noteworthy that it barely gets a mention in Pinker’s long book.
Modern technology and bureaucracy have given modern societies the unprecedented ability to “remove the face” from our direct phenomenological experience. This is potentially disastrous because, as Immanuel Levinas argues, direct encounter with the face is the foundation of our sense of ethical obligation toward others. Now, as stated before, exposure to the face is not sufficient by itself to stop people from killing; nevertheless, the face is a necessary condition for ethical consciousness. If the face is distant, then my ethical sensibilities are not as attuned as they otherwise might be, and I may be more willing to harm someone who is removed from me. It is the very nature of modern bureaucracy and modern technology that makes this distancing and moral invisibility possible.
Pinker is not critical enough of those features of modernity that erase the face. He is sadly mistaken when he writes that the “technological and bureaucratic trappings of the Holocaust are a sideshow” (643), especially if one considers this statement in relation to the work of historians such as Raul Hilberg and Christopher Browning who explore the bureaucratic “functionalist” nature of the Holocaust. The greater weight of the evidence reveals that these bureaucratic “trappings” were central to the ultimate destructiveness of the Final Solution and, in some ways, were just as significant as Nazi ideology and racism. It is certainly true that not all of the atrocities committed over the past century fit the totalitarian, or Nazi, model. However, it is a simple fact that technology and bureaucracy have played a key role in some of the gravest atrocities of the past century and have contributed to the unique characteristics of mass killing in the twentieth century. Indeed, they are part of what gives modern mass death its peculiarly “modern” character. As Bauman writes, Stalinism and Nazism “did not betray the spirit of modernity. They did not deviously depart from the main track of the civilizing process . . . . They showed what the rationalizing, designing, controlling dreams and efforts of modern civilization are able to accomplish if not mitigated, curbed or counteracted” (
Modernity and Holocaust, 93). The fact that the “civilizing process” did not stop totalitarian atrocities from happening, and indeed was a central quality in their very functioning, should give us pause. This ambivalence within the civilizing process is not adequately recognized by Pinker, and in fact is dismissed.
It is not that Pinker thinks all violence is barbaric, bestial, and animalistic. In his brief comment on Hannah Arendt’s expression “the banality of evil,” Pinker acknowledges that there are many motives behind violence. Most people, he argues, who hurt others are not being sadistic or purely evil; they just want to fit in, please their superiors, and get benefits for themselves (496‒97). However, when Arendt coined the term “banality of evil,” she was not just using it to suggest that ordinary men and women can become complicit in extraordinary evil. She was, first and foremost, identifying what she perceived as Eichmann’s moral
thoughtlessness at his trial—a thoughtlessness that extends beyond Eichmann to all those lower-level operatives involved in the functioning of the Final Solution. As Arendt states in her 1971 lecture “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” the banality of evil refers to “the phenomenon of evil deeds, committed on a gigantic scale, which could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness, pathology, or ideological conviction in the doer, whose only personal distinction was perhaps extraordinary shallowness. . . . it was not stupidity, but a curious, quite authentic inability to think” (
Social Research 38, no. 3 [1971]: 417). Arendt may not have provided an accurate description of Eichmann himself: recent evidence suggests that he was much more rabidly anti-Semitic and ideologically motivated than Arendt claimed. Still, her account of the banality of evil remains insightful, insofar as it describes the actions of countless people less extraordinary and powerful than Eichmann—the phenomenon of those unable or unwilling to see the full consequences of their actions due to thoughtlessness, and, thus, not taking full moral responsibility. The sophisticated and civilized features of modern life are often terribly effective at eroding our sense of moral agency. Indeed, the civilizing process often tricks us into thinking we are more moral than we actually are because we are not acting with bloodthirsty passion. It is precisely this potential of the civilizing process to create moral thoughtlessness that goes unrecognized in
Better Angels.
Pinker would probably respond that bureaucracy and technology are neutral entities, and that the more fundamental issue is ideology—one of our five “inner demons” (556‒69). The administrations of totalitarian regimes, he claims, were sparked by small cores of ideological zealots looking to create utopias: a racially pure utopia in the case of the Nazis and a classless society in the case of Communists. Once these extremists seized power, they used the mechanisms of the state to enforce obedience and set in motion the genocidal operations designed to purge all those deemed impure. In the end, Pinker blames the majority of deaths in the twentieth century on the intentionality, enthusiasm, charisma, and luck of a few tyrants. He claims that “tens of millions of deaths ultimately depended on the decisions of just three individuals”: Hitler, Stalin, and Mao (343). As Pinker writes on his website: “No Hitler, no Holocaust; no Stalin, no Purge; no Mao, no Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution” (
http://stevenpinker.com/pages/frequ...r-angels-our-nature-why-violence-has-declined). This statement, however, is a gross simplification. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were acting within milieus that were receptive to their influence; many of the horrors that occurred in their regimes could not have happened without the resources and culture of modernity. One could respond to Pinker: No civilizing process, no Holocaust! No Enlightenment, no Hiroshima! These statements are also too simplistic, but Pinker does not face the nugget of truth they contain: that the forces of modernity
themselves,not the forces of premodernity or the so-called counter-Enlightenment, were central to the unprecedented absolute death tolls of the twentieth century. In fact, these same forces gave us the potential to destroy all human life on the planet through nuclear weapons.
Pinker’s effort, following Isaiah Berlin, to draw a clear-cut distinction between Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment is not always tenable. The forces of counter-Enlightenment are characterized by Pinker as irrational, romantic, utopian, and violent, reacting against the rational and liberal spirit of the Enlightenment. But as John Gray points out in his review of
Better Angels in the journal
Prospect, Pinker’s borderline between “Enlightenment” and “counter-Enlightenment” is too blurry and porous. Gray writes: “Pinker prefers to ignore the fact that many Enlightenment thinkers have been doctrinally anti-liberal, while quite a few have favoured the large-scale use of political violence” (“Delusions of Peace,”
Prospect, [September 21, 2011],). As a result, Pinker is unable to recognize the affinities between his own “Enlightened” thought and those movements he denounces as “counter-Enlightenment.”
For example, Pinker criticizes the “eschatological narrative” of modern ideologies, which interpret history as a binary struggle between the forces of good and evil (330). Utopian ideologies, which are categorized as counter-Enlightenment movements by Pinker, commit the sin of “essentializing” human beings—fitting people into general groups and claiming that all individuals in that group share the same essential characteristics (320‒28). Some groups are thereby deemed to be impure, or demonic, on the basis of their ethnicity, race, religion, intellect, sexual orientation, or political affiliation. Pinker, as a liberal humanist, is opposed to such forms of essentializing. However, Pinker’s own analysis in
Better Angels contains an explicit demonology and a quasi-eschatological narrative of its own. By Pinker’s “demonology,” I am not just referring to the “inner demons” he identifies within the neurological composition of the human brain. I am primarily referring to his demonization of the past and what lies outside his Enlightened, atheist, liberal worldview. He begins the book by speaking of the past as a “foreign country” (1ff.), as a place that is dangerous, frightening, and undesirable—a place we would not want to travel to, and we certainly would not want visitors from this country to invade our modernity. The past is, for the most part, characterized throughout the book as a cesspool of violence, cruelty, filth, ignorance, superstition, irrationality, and early death (see 693). Whereas the horrors of the twentieth century were, statistically, anomalous blips on a trajectory toward less violence, horror was a constant threat and reality for almost all people before the modern age. At the same time, humans in the foreign past were largely ignorant in comparison to us. He even goes so far as to proclaim that our ancestors were “morally retarded” (658), and, after citing outright racist statements by recent famous ancestors such as Winston Churchill, Woodrow Wilson, and the Roosevelts, he asserts with confidence that we are much more morally sophisticated today.
Pinker does not demonize everything from the past. He celebrates the rise of the state, the “pacification process,” the rise of commerce, and the civilizing process, all of which occurred before the dawn of modernity. He does not even completely condemn religion, acknowledging that it is occasionally a force of peace in society (677‒78). But he celebrates these trends in history because they prefigure our enlightened modernity, and religion is only good insofar as it heralds Enlightened Humanism. There is an implicitly Biblical—and specifically Christian—motif in Pinker’s account of history: the pacification and civilizing processes of the ancient and medieval world are, one could say, “Old Testament” (a bit harsher, perhaps, but pointing in the right direction); Enlightenment Humanism and the Rights Revolutions that followed are “New Testament” (suggesting the fulfillment of history). Everything that stands opposed to these historical dynamics is demonized, including the wide range of modern movements he characterizes as “counter-Enlightenment.” There is a right side of history and a wrong side, and Pinker is quite confident that he is in the vanguard of the right side. This is not dissimilar to the hard-core Marxists Pinker condemns: just as the Communists contrasted true revolutionaries with counter-revolutionaries, so too Pinker contrasts true modernity (Enlightenment) from anti-modernity (counter-Enlightenment). Underneath Pinker’s mountain of data, statistics, neurology, psychology experiments, social studies, and game theory analyses, lies a basic historical dualism.
Pinker thinks the data reveals that history is a story of progress, interrupted by periods of irrationality and violence. What keeps his progressivism from sliding over into radical utopianism is his claim that we possess a fixed human nature that is not infinitely malleable; in other words, there are limits to what we can do with ourselves. Quite reasonably, he never envisions a perfect world where no violence exists and argues that the use of proportional violence will always be necessary. Still, the view of history he presents is one of infinite progress, in which our better angels gradually overpower our inner demons. Pinker himself describes his account as “a kind of Whig history that is supported by the facts” (692). He does not rule out the possibility that rates of violence may increase at some point in the future, but this would occur only if the historical forces of enlightened modernity were to lose power. In general, he thinks the prospects of a peaceful future are very good indeed, and exceedingly likely. What this amounts to is a subdued eschatological narrative: history is the battle between demons and angels, in which the line between the two is absolute and in which the angels are winning.
It would be foolish to condemn Pinker for wanting to promote and enhance the more reasonable streams of the Enlightenment. Pinker is persuasive in his claim that these forces played an essential role in “Long Peace,” “New Peace,” and “Rights Revolutions” over the past seventy years. And Pinker is certainly correct when he warns us against demonizing modernity and idealizing the past; we do not want to look to the premoderns to tell us how to treat women, acquire slaves, deal with prisoners, or amputate a limb. But it is equally wrong to simply demonize the past—to suggest that it has nothing to teach us other than mostly negative examples of what
not to do. Pinker’s own demonology and dualistic account of history is excessive—one that, in a certain sense, betrays the spirit of the Republic of Letters he celebrates (177‒85). The Republic of Letters for Pinker represents the cosmopolitan exchange of ideas and viewpoints. It recognizes pluralism and a willingness to engage this plurality critically as basic constituents of the human condition. This means, in part, learning to see the world through the eyes of others whose worldviews may be different, and possibly modifying your own perceptions on the basis of this engagement. Pinker’s tone in the book suggests that he is not really interested in engaging viewpoints and voices that lie outside his account of enlightened humanism—particularly voices from the past.
Several times throughout the book, Pinker refers to mythology and religious texts, but for the most part he uses these sources to show how they reflect the violent life of the ancients—a life that cannot provide us with any genuine insight today. However, these texts might still be able to teach us something about what it means to live with tragic fate: that each of us is fallible, that our powers are limited, and that our knowledge is partial. There is only so far the light of Enlightenment can extend; increasingly we must learn to live with the unknown and the unpredictable. It may be that some premodern texts have more to teach us in this regard. It may also be that this is what is most essential for us at this historical juncture. The recent historical trajectory of diminishing rates of violence has also been accompanied by increasing levels of economic, political, environmental, and technological complexity. The current global scene is marked by greater fluidity, uncertainty, and instability than has probably ever been the case for the world as a whole. How this will play itself out is far from clear. Living with increasing uncertainty—with the unknown—has become a key aspect of contemporary life. If the best qualities of the Enlightenment are to be kept alive, a more sober, ambivalent, and, indeed, tragic interpretation of modernity may be required to contend with the contingencies of history. Otherwise, we may succumb to new and unforeseen excesses.
