The Better Angels of Our Nature summary

As we’ve seen, violence tends to be a risky strategy for getting what you want, because even if an organism wins, there’s a high risk of injury, which could diminish its chances of passing on its genes.

It makes sense then that most social species would try to avoid unnecessary battle. Many of them accomplish this by establishing dominance hierarchies. These are hierarchies whose order is based on who would win if a confrontation were to occur, and their main benefit is that fights, and the injuries that result from them, can be completely avoided.

The desire for revenge – something most of us have felt – appears to be a major and almost ubiquitous motivator of violence.

In this context, revenge doesn’t refer just to immediate retaliation, but also to people’s tendency to hold grudges and seek retaliation over the long term.

The next driver of human violence we’ll look at is not only bizarre but also monstrous: sadism – deliberately inflicting pain on someone just because the sight of the suffering it causes is experienced as enjoyable.

Nowadays sadism is fortunately very rare in its pure form, and we’re rather more likely to encounter sadism coupled with other motivators for violence, such as revenge.

Let’s now take a look at the final motivator for violence: ideology – a shared belief that some greater good is so utopian that achieving it warrants limitless violence.

In this sense, ideological violence is similar to predation: it is instrumental to our getting what we want. The difference is that the motive for ideological violence transcends the motives of the individuals of a group: Ideology strives to create a better world.

The first better angel of our nature that decreases our tendency toward violence is empathy: having an altruistic concern for the well-being of others.

But why did we evolve into empathic beings?

Everyone knows the depiction of temptation and conscience as an angel and a demon on a person’s shoulders, where the person tries to resist being tempted by the demon’s words.

In fact, this analogy to actual human behavior may be more apt than you might first think: studies suggest that our impulses and our resistance to them do come from entirely different parts of the brain.

Humanity’s sense of morality plays an interesting dual role in violent behavior:

Over the years, certain people like homosexuals and heretics have been killed in the name of what’s considered right and wrong. But on the other hand, our moral sense has also led to a reduction in violence, through, for example, our striving for racial equality.

You might think that reason isn’t inherently good on its own. After all, it can be directed toward, for example, determining how to best use violence to acquire what one wants.

But in fact reason only develops in creatures who, due to natural selection, value their own life and welfare. To that end, they are more likely to use reason to pursue a world of peace, not one of violence.

Some 5,000 years ago, people began to transition from small, nomadic hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural societies with formal governments. This pacification process brought with it a reduction in violence.

Why?

The second major historical shift that reduced violence was the civilizing process. Beginning in fifteenth-century Western Europe and continuing right up to the present day, this process has been driven by two forces.

The first is the increase in the size and strength of European states during the period.

The third major decline in violence began in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, before spreading elsewhere. It was caused by the emergence of a humanitarian philosophy whereby people who’d previously been treated cruelly or persecuted were beginning to be treated humanely.

The effects of this humanitarian revolution were seen broadly in a number of areas.

Spanning the period from the end of the Second World War to the present day, the long peace was another historical shift away from violence.

During this period, violent warfare decreased greatly. From 1945 to 1955, the number of deaths around the world that resulted from military conflict was approximately 17 in every 100,000 people. Yet in the past decade, this number has reached a low point of one per 100,000 people.

The fifth major historical shift to reduce violence occurred in the post-Cold War period, from 1991 up to the present day.

During this period we’ve seen broad reductions in violence, as even small-scale conflict and warfare decreased.

The final historical shift which decreased violence is the era of the Rights Revolutions, which emerged out of the 1950s and 1960s civil rights movements and has lasted until today. This era brought a decrease in violence against numerous minorities and marginalized groups.

This decrease can be seen as a continuation of the Humanitarian Revolution, which saw individual humans becoming of central importance, regardless of race, sex or other bodily attributes.