The Intellectual Light Web: Better Angels of Our Nature

If there's that intellectual dark web out there running amok, it stands to reason there's the light side as well, and its standard-bearer may well be Steven Pinker. In Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, he forfends against nostalgia for the unified culture of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, or even his beloved Enlightenment, held together as these were by swords more than by plowshares, to argue instead that we live in, if not the best of all possible worlds, the best time there's ever actually been for human flourishing.

With his trademark witty, spirited, and empirically grounded prose, Pinker pries into the reasons for the absolutely remarkable and yet vastly under-reported per capita decline in violence over time. I see no sense in arguing with him, but neither can I muster much enthusiasm for the ultimate so-what he comes to: there's less violence (yay!), but part of what that means is that there's really nothing worth fighting for (meh...).

If he fits Nietzsche's bill for the Last Man, meekly sciencing away at endogenous and exogenous theories for the wonders of the cosmos; if he furnishes gleefully irreverent, all-encompassing objectivity of the sort that sent Kierkegaard scribbling interminable barbs against the Hegelians, Pinker seems perfectly content with that. In the framework of the Prisoner's Dilemma, to which he has frequent recourse towards the end of this big book (shades of Underground Man's "reasoning according to a little table"), he sketches out a loose algorithm for morality convincing in its straightforwardness, supported as it is by the highly rigorous hundreds of pages of historical statistical analysis and psychologically astute neuroscience which lead up to it. Spoilers: less violence comes about thanks to the overwhelming power of liberal authority possessed by an international order of enlightened, free-trading, free-thinking, femininity-embracing Leviathans, that is, governments like ours, which hold an effective monopoly on violence and choose (by and large) not to use it, since peace is so much more profitable to everybody.

For Pinker, with a far sturdier foundation of biological understanding than those insightful diagnosers of cultural crisis, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, et al., there is no problem because there is no telos, no end beyond the immanent one of ever greater discoveries and synthesis with the tools of open-minded, imaginatively compassionate communication and scientific inquiry. I detect little of the partisan commitment to Chomskyan linguistics which stood behind his earlier books (but then I retain essentially nothing from my reading of those books at this remove other than a vague sense of their delightful sensibleness and dazzling brilliance). Instead of optimism for the future, Pinker insists, he is realistic about the potential, however unlikely, for the historic peace to be shattered by an unprecedented cataclysm. While understanding the suffering that still crushes so many, he expresses clear-eyed gratitude for the prosperity he and, presumably, his readers enjoy, if only we can bring ourselves to recognize it. Like Michael Eric Dyson said to Peterson in their Munk debate, "Smile! Don't take yourself too seriously." A quick search confirms that Pinker, too, has participated in the prestigious series. His resolution: "Humankind's best days lie ahead..."