John Gray nails it;
Pinker, as a libertarian with hard Pop Evolutionary Psychology leanings
(Gray himself doesn't call Pinker out on that), kind of boxed himself
in a corner in "Blank Slate" a decade ago. And, so, "The Better Angels
of our Nature" starts out behind the curve.
If people's minds are largely a fixed template, it's hard to
explain evolution to non-violence, or lesser violence, isn't it? Of
course, Gray does note what I've noted: In the U.S., violence-making has
been institutionalized due to the repressive policies of the War on
Drugs. And, more interestingly, and more hypocritically, Pinker doesn't
object, to the degree he looks at U.S. incarceration rates at all.
He also, as I've noted elsewhere, ignores World War I, WWII, the
Holocaust (even using a 1930s European Jewish writer as his starting
point) and more.
Timothy Snyder discusses other problems with and failings of the book.
To consider violence as strategic, not just hydraulic, a result of
societal pressures, means that H. sapiens has great capacity for cynical
behavior, among other things. And, it ignores other loads of social science research.
One other brief observation on my part: While Pinker may be right
that some people have a Rousellian, or "Gods Must Be Crazy," naivete
toward the past, at the same time, he has a Pop Ev Psych "bloody red in
tooth and claw" counter-naivete. Fact is that pre-agricultural humans
were scavenger-gatherers long before they were hunter-gatherers, among
other things that Pop Ev Psychers like to ignore. That issue alone has
relevance to the issue of human violence and individual and social
psychological malleability.
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