The Better Angels of Our Nature — Why Violence Has Declined

The Data Argument and Why Our Intuition Is Wrong

The central provocation of The Better Angels of Our Nature is one of the most counterintuitive claims in modern nonfiction: we are living in the least violent period in human history. Not merely compared to the twentieth century’s world wars, but compared to every prior era we can measure — medieval Europe, ancient empires, prehistoric tribal societies, the classical world. Murder rates, rates of death in warfare scaled to population, the prevalence of judicial torture, the legal status of slavery, the treatment of children and animals: by every metric Pinker can find, the trend line runs down.

The book opens by confronting the reader with what that history actually looked like. Medieval executions were public entertainment. Torture was not an aberration but a standard instrument of justice. Slavery was a universal institution across every civilization. Interpersonal violence rates in pre-state societies make modern inner-city homicide rates look negligible by comparison. The archaeological record from prehistoric Europe and the Americas suggests that raiding, massacre, and mutilation were routine features of human life before centralized states existed to suppress them.

So why do we believe the opposite? Pinker’s answer is cognitive: the availability heuristic. We judge the probability of events by how easily examples come to mind. Because modern media delivers atrocity in real time, we perceive our age as uniquely dangerous. But we are not comparing current events to the actual baseline of human history — we are comparing them to an imagined peaceful past that never existed.

The Six Pacifying Forces

Pinker’s explanation for the decline is organized around six distinct forces, and this is where the book moves from diagnosis to mechanism. Together they constitute an argument about which institutions and cognitive changes actually drive civilization toward less violence.

The Leviathan — states with a monopoly on legitimate violence — is the most foundational. Pre-state societies were dramatically more violent not because humans are inherently peaceful but because without a credible third-party enforcer, the rational move in many disputes is preemptive attack. The rise of functioning states did not eliminate violence; it redirected and suppressed it in ways that produced a measurable long-term decline.

Commerce is the second force, and one of the book’s most Enlightenment-liberal arguments: when trade makes other people valuable to you alive rather than dead, the incentives for predation shift. The expansion of trade networks historically correlates with reductions in intergroup violence. The third force — feminization, the increasing influence of women’s preferences in social norms and political decisions — is more speculative but grounded in the consistent finding that women in positions of social influence lower the tolerance for aggressive risk-taking and interpersonal brutality.

Cosmopolitanism and the escalator of reason are closely linked: literacy, travel, fiction, and exposure to people unlike yourself expand what Pinker calls the circle of empathy. The Flynn Effect — the documented rise in abstract reasoning scores across the twentieth century — suggests that populations are literally getting better at the kind of perspective-taking and consequentialist reasoning that makes dehumanization harder. The expanding circle of empathy is the capstone: the gradual extension of moral concern outward from tribe to nation to species, still incomplete but unmistakably underway.

Of the six, the Leviathan and commerce have the strongest empirical support. The others are more contested — but together they form a coherent account of why the decline is not accidental.

The Critics and the Post-2011 Evidence

The book was published in 2011, and the decade that followed gave its critics substantial ammunition. The Syrian civil war, the rise of authoritarian governments across Europe and Latin America, the genocide in Yemen, the resurgence of right-wing political violence in Western democracies — none of this is consistent with a triumphalist narrative about the end of violence.

The most technically serious criticisms come from conflict researchers like Nassim Taleb, who argues that Pinker’s statistics mishandle the power-law distribution of violent events: rare catastrophic wars distort the data in ways that make a short period of relative peace look structurally meaningful when it may simply be a lucky interval in a fat-tailed distribution. Pinker and Taleb exchanged detailed rebuttals over several years, and neither fully capitulated. The methodological dispute remains live.

A second line of criticism targets the definition of violence itself. Pinker focuses primarily on direct physical violence — homicide, battle deaths, torture. Critics argue this excludes the structural violence of poverty, displacement, and environmental destruction, and that the “decline” is partly an artifact of what gets counted. There is something to this: if you expand the definition, the picture is considerably less tidy.

The honest reading is that the thesis is robust at its core — the long historical arc Pinker documents is real — but that the triumphant framing underestimated the fragility of the institutions producing the decline. The Leviathan can fail. Commerce can be captured. The escalator of reason runs in reverse during periods of institutional stress. The argument is better understood as a description of what has worked rather than a guarantee about what will continue to work.

Why Gates Called It the Most Important Book He Ever Read

Bill Gates has been recommending The Better Angels of Our Nature for over a decade. He gave copies to graduates, wrote multiple public essays about it, and has described it as the book that most changed his worldview. The endorsement is worth taking seriously — not because Gates is always right, but because the book’s argument maps directly onto the kind of thinking that drives serious philanthropic work.

The Gates Foundation’s strategy is built on the premise that progress is real, measurable, and extendable — that child mortality, disease burden, and extreme poverty can be reduced through targeted, evidence-based intervention. That worldview requires believing that the past was worse than the present and that human institutions can make things better. The Better Angels of Our Nature is, at its core, the most detailed intellectual defense of that premise ever written. It gives the data-driven optimist an empirical foundation rather than a temperamental one.

For the right reader, that is what makes the book irreplaceable. It is not a comforting book — the historical material in the early chapters is genuinely disturbing, and the argument does not promise that progress is inevitable. But it makes the case that progress is real, which is different from optimism. The reader who comes out the other side has a more defensible picture of where humanity has been and a more honest framework for evaluating where it is going.

Our rating: 4.5/5 — A paradigm-shifting work of data-driven humanism that permanently alters how you read history, interpret the news, and think about the institutions that hold violence at bay.

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