The Better Angels of Our Nature

You probably feel that the world has never been more violent. Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature opens by confronting that intuition—and turning it inside out. Across millennia, centuries, and decades, Pinker argues that violence has declined dramatically: fewer homicides, fewer wars, fewer genocides, less cruelty, and growing intolerance for brutality. His bold claim is that we now live in the most peaceable era in human existence.

From Headlines to Data

Pinker’s first task is methodological: separating reality from vivid impression. The human brain estimates danger by memory and media exposure—the availability heuristic. Newspapers obey the adage “if it bleeds, it leads,” flooding your mind with spectacular killings while ignoring the quieter evidence of everyday peace. When you shift from anecdotes to per-capita rates—archaeological remains, coroners’ records, cross-national datasets—the pattern is unmistakable: violent death was far more common in the past than it is today.

For instance, the proportion of prehistoric deaths caused by violence hovers near 15%, while modern nation-states average less than 1%. England’s homicide rate fell fifty-fold from the Middle Ages to modern London. Wars among the great powers dropped to zero after 1945, and large-scale genocides, though horrendous in the twentieth century, have declined sharply since.

What “Decline” Means

Pinker doesn’t promise utopia. He documents parallel decreases across multiple categories—private vengeance, judicial cruelty, state executions, slavery, gendered violence, and warfare. His project is empirical rather than idealistic: civilization has softened rather than sanctified people. The driving question becomes not whether violence is “natural” but how institutions and ideas have redirected human nature toward cooperation.

Explaining the Decline

The rest of the book arranges explanations into six historical trends—the Pacification, Civilizing, Humanitarian, Long Peace, New Peace, and Rights Revolutions—underpinned by five “inner demons” and five “better angels.” Violence declines when external institutions and internal motives align against aggression. Key external forces include the rise of states (the Leviathan), commerce, feminization, empathy, and the escalator of reason—a slow cultural ascent toward rational universalism. Each reduces the incentives to harm others, either by deterrence or moral expansion.

The Darwin–Hobbes Foundation

To understand human violence, Pinker connects Darwin’s evolutionary logic and Hobbes’s social insight. Violence emerges not from a simple hydraulic urge but from strategic calculations shaped by survival, competition, fear, and status. Hobbes’s triad—competition, diffidence, and glory—maps incentives; Darwin explains the underlying function. Violence becomes rational when institutions fail to protect you from exploitation; peace becomes rational when states, markets, or norms alter the payoff structure.

Why This Matters

If you accept Pinker’s central claim, progress ceases to be naive optimism—it becomes measurable improvement in moral and institutional sophistication. Courts, police, diplomacy, and markets aren’t mere bureaucratic apparatuses; they’re the scaffolding of safety. The implications reach far beyond academic interest: how you interpret media, politics, and morality changes when you see decline instead of apocalypse. For example, rising outrage about isolated violent acts reflects moral progress—your disgust signals a heightened sensitivity, not a bloodier world.

A Moral Reorientation

Pinker’s message is both reassuring and demanding. Violence isn’t extinct, but its regression forces responsibility: maintaining peace requires vigilant institutions and rational empathy. The long historical descent of violence—from prehistoric raids to humanitarian norms—teaches a counterintuitive lesson: civilization is not a corrupting force but the mechanism that has made humanity safer. Understanding that trajectory reshapes your view of progress, politics, and your own moral instincts.

At the heart of the book lies a structural transformation: institutions turned anarchy into order. Pinker calls the first stages the Pacification and Civilizing Processes, and both hinge on one crucial innovation—the Leviathan, a credible authority with a monopoly on force. When states replaced tribal self-help, violence stopped being rational.

From Bands to States

Archaeology paints a brutal picture of pre-state life: skeletons pierce by arrows, ritual killings, trophy-taking. Among nonstate societies, roughly one in seven deaths came by violence—a risk hundreds of times higher than in modern nations. The emergence of states changed incentives: predation lost its payoff because the sovereign punished raiders and adjudicated disputes. Hobbes’s warning—life in anarchy is “nasty, brutish, and short”—finds empirical confirmation in these numbers.

The Civilizing Process

Norbert Elias showed how evolving manners, markets, and courts diffused self-restraint through everyday life. Etiquette books, commerce, and centralized authority taught impulse control—don’t spit, stab, or retaliate—until restraint became automatic. Homicide rates across England and Europe collapsed over centuries, reflecting a shift from the warrior to the courtier mentality. Commerce made others more valuable alive; states ensured fairness; culture internalized civility.

Decivilization and Recivilization

Violence doesn’t fall in a straight line. The mid-twentieth-century crime surge—the “Decivilization of the 1960s”—followed cultural loosening, youth bulges, and weakened institutions. Its reversal in the 1990s came through policing, incarceration, and community activism, proving how sensitive peace is to culture and governance. Montreal’s 1969 police strike, causing instant anarchy, underscores the point: remove deterrence and chaos returns overnight.

Key lesson

The Leviathan doesn’t need to be brutal—it must be fair. Peace grows when enforcement is impartial, predictable, and proportionate. Tyranny can reverse the gains.

If you’re evaluating modern policy, Pinker’s institutional lens matters: interventions that stabilize authority, enforce contracts, and nurture markets are not mere technocracy—they’re the long-tested engines of peace.

The next great leap in moral evolution came not from swords but ideas. Pinker’s Humanitarian Revolution—the intellectual cascade of the Enlightenment—transformed the moral landscape: torture, slavery, and capital punishment shifted from spectacle to scandal. Reason and sympathy began to reshape law and conscience.

The Age of Cruelty

Before the 18th century, public torture was entertainment. The Inquisition’s racks and iron maidens symbolized authority. Beccaria’s 1764 On Crimes and Punishments challenged this orthodoxy, arguing that deterrence depends on certainty rather than cruelty. His treatise catalyzed reform: torture and executions declined; humane penalties replaced theatrical pain.

Empathy Through Print

Books and literacy expanded sympathy. Novels such as Richardson’s Clarissa and Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin trained readers to inhabit the interior lives of others. Satire from Swift and Voltaire mocked aristocratic honor and religious persecution. The printing press multiplied these perspectives: mass reading became moral education. The Republic of Letters—salons, coffeehouses, pamphlets—spread cosmopolitan empathy faster than sermons or decrees.

From Humanism to Counterreaction

Enlightenment humanism merged science, democracy, and commerce into a peace-producing package. Kant’s 1795 “Perpetual Peace” prescribed republics, federations, and free trade—the blueprint later embodied in democracies and intergovernmental organizations. Yet Romantic nationalism (Herder, Burke, and later fascism and Marxism) fought back, turning emotion and identity into new engines of war. The 20th century’s genocides proved reason’s necessity, not its failure.

Practical moral shift

The decline of cruelty didn’t just ban torture—it embedded universal rights. Today’s distaste for suffering, whether of people, women, or animals, traces to this intellectual turn toward humanity and reason.

In Pinker’s view, literacy, cosmopolitanism, and rational argument built emotional and institutional antibodies against barbarity. Those forces continue to expand the moral circle.

If the Enlightenment civilized everyday life, the 20th century delivered an unprecedented international transformation: the Long Peace among great powers and the New Peace among civil wars. After 1945, major states stopped fighting each other—an anomaly that became a norm.

Why Great-Power Wars Vanished

Data from the Correlates of War Project show a steady decline in great-power conflict: none among Western democracies since 1945, none between nuclear states since Hiroshima. Democratic governance, trade interdependence, and intergovernmental organizations underpin this change—the Kantian triangle in action. Levi’s findings confirm it: democracies, economically linked and institutionally embedded, almost never fight one another.

Nuclear deterrence, though frightening, played a paradoxically stabilizing role, complemented by economic globalization and international norms that sacralized borders. The United Nations, NATO, and the European Union institutionalized the expectation of diplomacy over conquest.

The New Peace Beyond Empires

After decolonization, civil wars surged, especially in Africa and Asia. Yet battle deaths plummeted—from half a million annually in the 1940s to about thirty thousand by the 2000s. Peacekeeping missions, humanitarian aid, and the end of superpower proxy wars stemmed the bloodshed. Virginia Fortna’s research shows peacekeeping reduces recurrence risk by roughly 80%, proving soft Leviathan at the international level.

Statistical fact

Civil and interstate wars have both declined by over 90% in deaths since mid-century—a quantitative testament to global restraint.

When you hear that violence is spiraling, remember the scope of these transformations. The world still has conflicts, but per capita and absolute tolls have shrunk dramatically, revealing that collective memory lags behind real improvement.

Human nature contains the hardware for both conflict and cooperation. Pinker’s psychological chapters detail five “inner demons” that fuel violence—predation, dominance, revenge, sadism, and ideology—and four “better angels”—empathy, self-control, moral sense, and reason—that restrain it. Understanding both sides helps you see why institutions succeed or fail.

Predation and Dominance

Predatory violence is instrumental—cold, goal-directed harm. Psychopathy exemplifies it: about 1–3% of men are callous exploiters, evolutionarily stable only while others remain trusting. Dominance, by contrast, is status competition, often exaggerated by testosterone and reputation anxiety. Public insult multiplies risk: honor cultures and male youth bulges produce cycles of revenge.

Revenge and Sadism

Revenge evolved as deterrence: Tit-for-Tat strategies stabilize cooperation when punishment is credible and proportionate. But moralization gaps—each side seeing its own acts as justified—drive feuds. Sadism, the pleasure in cruelty, is rarer and learned; institutions that normalize torture can cultivate it. Empathy and disgust normally block sadism, but euphemism and gradual exposure can erode those brakes (note Nazi and Inquisitorial bureaucracies).

Ideology and Mass Violence

Group psychology turns private flaws into collective disaster. Conformity (Asch), obedience (Milgram), and dehumanization (Bandura) enable atrocities. Leaders matter: Hitler or Stalin magnified ordinary cognitive biases into genocidal machinery. Preventing ideology’s takeover requires transparency, pluralism, and dissent—vaccines for the madness of crowds.

Practical prevention

Stable institutions, fair courts, and education channel the inner demons, strengthening empathy and self-control—the evolutionary and cultural “better angels.”

The balance between instincts and institutions shapes civilization’s trajectory. Recognizing our psychological duality helps design systems that protect us from ourselves.

The final chapters explain how cognitive and emotional evolution forged moral progress. Empathy lets you feel others’ pain; reason lets you universalize that concern. Together, they form humanity’s “better angels.”

Empathy’s Reach and Limits

Neuroscience reveals both promise and peril: mirror neurons and oxytocin foster care but mainly for in-group kin. Fiction and perspective-taking stretch that circle—Batson’s experiments and novels like Oliver Twist expanded sympathy to the poor, marginalized, and enslaved. Yet empathy remains biased toward the vivid single victim rather than the statistical thousands, so institutions must codify its insights.

Reason as the Escalator

Reason complements emotion by inventing systems—law, democracy, and proportional justice—that turn compassion into durable norms. The Flynn Effect shows rising abstract reasoning; Rindermann’s studies link education and intelligence to democracy and rule of law. Better reasoning promotes longer-term thinking and reduces impulsive aggression—the cognitive side of Elias’s Civilizing Process.

Moral Progress as Cognitive Growth

As societies educate and globalize, integrative complexity increases: people juggle multiple perspectives, which discourages absolutism. Conversely, ideological simplification correlates with war rhetoric. Pinker’s data make reason not elitist but practical: smarter, more informed citizens support trade, rights, and institutional cooperation—the patterns that sustain peace.

Core takeaway

Empathy widens moral concern; reason stabilizes it. The partnership between imagination and intellect explains why humanity has learned—not merely felt—to be less violent.

You end the book with a paradoxical optimism: progress is fragile but real. Understanding empathy and reason as interactive engines of peace gives you tools to defend civilization from regression.