The 2050 trends create daunting obstacles to our sustainable development. They also present wondrous opportunities. Steven Pinker’s bestseller, The Better Angles of our Nature, provides one of those needed boosts of optimism that inspires us to focus on the opportunities rather than the obstacles. It helps us see how far we have come: violence is declining, peace is rising. We can’t have sustainable development, at least not development of a future in which I want to live, without learning and implementing the lessons of peace.
Pinker’s book helps us see trends of peace masked by images of violence, like a forest is hidden by trees. Our view of peace is obstructed by a 24-hour news cycle fueled by advertising quotas that require crime-porn, the immediacy of twitter and the blog-o-sphere, and the unprecedented global interconnectedness that allows us to see into communities and witness violence inaccessible just a decade ago. So our perceptions tell us there is more and more violence. But, in this case, we should not believe what we see because we do not see the whole picture.
Pinker reviews, with tons of data and powerful prose, the decline of violence, murder, and war. Starting with pre-agriculture hunter-gatherer societies, he takes us on an impressive tour of human history: the birth of agricultural and urbanization, Homeric Greece, Judea-Christian history, the Roman Empire, Medieval Europe, feudalism, Westphalian states, and modern times.
More impressively, he helps us think through trends and causes that might explain why violence is declining: The emergence of technologies, mainly agricultural, that meet basic needs, providing relief from famine and fickle weather and the need to invade other’s territory and steal their food. The gradual and fitful rise of hierarchical governance structures by fusing tribal leaders, warlords, kingdoms, states, and nations into a Hobbesian Leviathan that creates a more powerful third-party that can adjudicate conflict between damaged egos and punish rebels who take matters in their own hands. The rise of reason and rights that celebrate process and fairness and demonize slavery, torture, genocide, sadistic punishment (like crucifixion), child exploitation, racism, sexism, and oppression of others of all types. He acknowledges that motivations for violence remain part of the human condition—revenge, sadism, fear, dominance, and ideology—but argues that the fans that fuel and trigger these urges are slowing, or at least not increasing as fast as the fans that fuel the better angels of our nature promoting peace over violence—empathy, self-control, morality, and reason.
Most impressively, Pinker re-frames perhaps the most divisive question currently limiting sustainable development debate and progress: Are humans born bad and prone to violence, and thus do we need more governance to limit the damage we would naturally inflict on one another? Or, are humans born good, and thus do we need to restrain the corrupting influences of civilization by limiting governance? Contemporary politics are mired in this dualism, which restricts the scope of our inquiry to these false options.
Pinker entirely re-frames that false dichotomy, asking us to focus on peace, not violence. How and why is peace increasing? What are we doing to increase peace? How can we do more of it? That type of thinking leads to a much more powerful set of questions, and to a sustainable development trajectory I want to be on. Don’t you?