The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

Ask anyone whether the world is more violent today than it was a hundred years ago, and the answer is almost always yes. Steven Pinker goes against that feeling: looking at long-term numbers, the chance of any person dying a violent death, whether in war, crime, or state punishment, has fallen consistently over the centuries.

That doesn't mean violence is over. It means that, measuring violent deaths as a share of each era's population, someone living in almost any major city today, including in the United States, faces a lower risk of dying violently than a medieval peasant or a 17th-century European soldier.

The confusion comes from comparing by feeling, not by numbers: the news shows today's violence live, with faces and names, while the violence of the past becomes a cold statistic in a history book. Comparing rate with rate, century with century, is what supports the author's thesis.

To support this thesis, Pinker combines different sources: archaeological sites with skeletons marked by blows or arrows, records from medieval European courts, homicide rates across the centuries, and modern war data compiled by conflict researchers.

The central trick is to compare violent deaths as a share of the population of the time, not as an absolute number. World War II killed tens of millions, but by the author's estimate it doesn't even top the ranking proportionally; events like the Mongol conquests may have killed a larger slice of the humanity alive at the time.

The author himself treats a good part of these numbers as estimates, especially those for prehistoric societies, because the record is scarce. It's best to read this chapter as an argument about a trend, not as an exact count.

One of the book's six trends is the pacification process: the shift from societies with no central government, where each family took revenge on its own, to societies with a state strong enough to impose law and punish anyone who uses violence on their own.

The idea comes from the philosopher Thomas Hobbes and his concept of the Leviathan: a central power that makes everyone fear the state's punishment more than they value settling a fight by force. Personal revenge becomes a crime; the conflict that used to become a war between families becomes a lawsuit.

You can feel this in everyday life: an ugly fight between neighbors over noise or a fence that crossed the property line today tends to end up with the police or in small claims court, however slow the system may be, instead of turning into a feud between families lasting generations.