Kevin: What if I told you the past wasn't just a foreign country, but a slaughterhouse? A place where your odds of being murdered were fifty, maybe even a hundred times higher than today. And what if the 24/7 news cycle, with its constant stream of tragedy and conflict, is giving us a completely distorted picture of reality? Michael: It’s a jarring thought. Because every headline, every notification on our phones, seems to scream the opposite. It feels like the world is perpetually on fire. Kevin: Exactly. And this is the radical, counter-intuitive claim at the heart of Steven Pinker's monumental book, The Better Angels of Our Nature. He argues, with a mountain of data, that we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species' existence. It’s a bold, and for many, an unbelievable idea. Michael: It's a talking point I've heard used to shut down a lot of important conversations. The classic, "Things used to be worse, so why are you complaining?" line. So, I'm curious if he can actually back it up without making it an argument for complacency. Kevin: That is the central tension of the whole book. Today we'll dive deep into this from three perspectives. First, we'll tackle Pinker's shocking core claim: that violence has plummeted over millennia. Then, we'll explore his theory of the 'Civilizing Process'—how states and manners supposedly tamed our inner demons. And finally, we'll get into the modern culture wars and ask a tricky question: have the great Rights Revolutions of the 20th century started to overshoot the mark?

Kevin: Let's start at the beginning, and I mean the real beginning. Pinker's first big trend is what he calls 'The Pacification Process.' He argues that the transition from a life of hunting and gathering to the first agricultural civilizations with governments marked the first major drop in human violence. Michael: This is the classic Hobbesian idea, right? That life in a "state of nature" is nasty, brutish, and short. But how can we possibly know that? We don't have crime statistics from 10,000 BC. Kevin: We don't, but we have bodies. And Pinker uses them to tell a story. He wants us to picture this: in 1991, two hikers in the Alps stumble upon a corpse melting out of a glacier. They assume it's a modern skiing accident. But when archaeologists arrive, they realize this man has been frozen for over 5,000 years. Michael: This is Ötzi the Iceman. I remember this. Kevin: That's him. And at first, he's a scientific celebrity, a window into the Neolithic world. But as they study him more closely, the story gets darker. They find an arrowhead lodged deep in his back, severed from the shaft. He has a deep cut on his hand, a defensive wound. He has head trauma. This wasn't a man who succumbed to the elements; this was a man who was murdered, likely ambushed and shot in the back as he fled for his life. Michael: So he’s not just an artifact; he's a cold case. Kevin: A 5,000-year-old cold case. And Pinker argues Ötzi isn't an anomaly. He points to other prehistoric remains, like Kennewick Man, found with a spear point embedded in his pelvis, or mass graves where a huge percentage of skeletons show signs of violent death—skulls bashed in, arms with parry fractures from fending off blows. The data, as sparse as it is, suggests that the rate of violent death in these pre-state societies was terrifyingly high. Some estimates put it at around 15% of all deaths, which is astronomical compared to even the most violent state societies in history. Michael: Okay, but I have to push back on the certainty here. How much can we really know from a few dozen skeletons scattered across millennia and continents? We're talking about tens of thousands of years. Isn't there a huge risk of selection bias? Maybe we only find the bodies of those who died violently because they weren't given proper burials. It feels like we're building a massive narrative—that the state 'pacified' us—on a very small, and very old, foundation. Kevin: That's a fair critique, and Pinker acknowledges the data is incomplete. But he argues that whether you look at archaeological remains or ethnographic studies of more recent hunter-gatherer societies, the pattern is consistent: life without a central authority, a "Leviathan" to hold a monopoly on violence, is incredibly dangerous. The point isn't that these people were inherently more evil, but that the logic of anarchy—the constant fear of raids, the need for pre-emptive attacks, and the cycle of revenge—makes violence a tragically rational choice. Michael: So the state, even a brutal, tyrannical early state, was a better deal because it replaced chaotic, unpredictable violence with a centralized, predictable form of control. You might be oppressed, but you were less likely to be randomly murdered by your neighbor. Kevin: That's the argument. It's the first major step on what Pinker calls the escalator away from violence. A brutal step, but a step nonetheless.

Kevin: And that leads directly to Pinker's second, and maybe most famous, argument: The Civilizing Process. If the state pacified us from the outside, this is the story of how we tamed ourselves from the inside. Michael: This is where it gets psychological. We're moving from external forces to internal ones. Kevin: Precisely. Pinker identifies two engines driving this change, starting in the late Middle Ages. The first is the continued consolidation of the state. Feudal lords and knights, who were essentially glorified warlords, were gradually brought under the control of central kings. The state's monopoly on violence became more effective. But the second engine is commerce. As trade networks expanded, other people became more valuable to you alive than dead. Michael: The idea of 'gentle commerce.' A trading partner is worth more than a corpse you can loot. It’s a positive-sum game replacing a zero-sum one. Kevin: Exactly. And these two forces, he argues, created the conditions for a profound psychological shift. He borrows from the sociologist Norbert Elias, who claimed that over centuries, Europeans went from being "warriors to courtiers." They learned to inhibit their impulses, to think about long-term consequences, and to consider the feelings of others. A culture of honor, where you'd kill someone for a perceived slight, slowly gave way to a culture of dignity, where self-control was the mark of a superior person. Michael: And the evidence for this internal change is... etiquette guides? Kevin: It sounds almost comical, but yes. He presents these medieval guides that give advice we'd find baffling. "Don't greet someone while they are urinating or defecating." "Don't blow your nose into the tablecloth." "Turn away when spitting lest your saliva fall on someone." The point is that basic self-restraint we take for granted had to be learned. Michael: I'm not sure I'm buying the direct link. So the argument is that the decline in homicide rates—which were incredibly high, maybe 20 or 30 times what they are today in some parts of Europe—is tied to the rise of guides telling us not to stir the sauce with our fingers? Kevin: He uses a shocking anecdote to illustrate the mindset he's talking about. In 14th-century England, there's a court record of a parish chaplain, a man of God named William of Wellington. He gets into a petty dispute with a local man over the price of a candle. And his reaction? He strikes the man in the head so hard that, and this is a quote from the record, "his brains flowed forth," killing him instantly. The casualness of it is what's stunning. Pinker argues this wasn't an aberration; it was a reflection of a society with a much lower threshold for violence and much less impulse control. Michael: I see the point, but it feels like we're confusing correlation, or even just a general vibe, with causation. It seems like a massive oversimplification. Sure, manners improved, but so did sanitation, nutrition, the rule of law, literacy, and a million other things. Why are we so sure the key variable was this internal 'civilizing' of our emotions, and not, say, the fact that people were less likely to be starving, sick, or drunk on cheap gin, all of which are major drivers of violence? Kevin: That's the core challenge to the theory. Pinker sees these external factors—the state, commerce—as the triggers that forced the psychological change. The critics would say he's under-weighting those material factors and putting too much emphasis on a vague, unprovable shift in collective psychology. Michael: It just feels like he's anchored himself to this one elegant idea—the Civilizing Process—and now he has to attribute everything to it. But history is messy. For instance, there was a huge spike in homicides in England between the 1580s and 1620s. Did everyone just forget their manners for a generation and then remember them again? It's a neat story, but it feels too neat to be true. Kevin: And that's a problem that gets even more acute when he tries to apply this same logic to the modern world.

Michael: Which brings us to the modern era, and where the book gets really... spicy. After walking us through these massive historical declines, Pinker gets to the post-World War II period, which he calls the era of the 'Rights Revolutions.' Kevin: And on the surface, this is the most optimistic part of the book. He charts the undeniable progress made by the civil rights movement, women's rights, gay rights, and even animal rights. He shows how these movements have led to measurable declines in violence. The data is stark. Lynchings, which were a horrific and common feature of American life, fall to virtually zero. The rate of reported rape in the U.S. fell by a staggering 80% between 1973 and 2008. The rate of physical abuse against children fell by half between 1990 and 2007. These are incredible, life-saving victories. Michael: No one can argue with that. These are real, tangible improvements in human well-being, fought for and won by activists. But this is where Pinker pulls the rug out from under the reader. After celebrating this progress, he suggests that these very movements have been so successful that they're now entering a 'decadent phase.' Kevin: He creates these controversial parallels. He says the racial oppression that inspired the civil rights movement involved lynchings and night raids. Today, he says, the conversation might be about Black drivers being pulled over more often. The oppression of women used to include laws allowing husbands to rape and beat their wives. Today, he frames it as a debate over whether an elite university's engineering department has a 50/50 gender ratio. Michael: He explicitly says, "None of this means we should be satisfied with the status quo," but it's a classic case of saying one thing while doing another. What else could the point be, other than to suggest that modern activism is a matter of diminishing returns, a kind of luxury belief now that the 'real' violence is gone? It feels like he's built this entire 800-page argument for progress just to provide intellectual ammunition for telling modern activists to... well, to calm down. Kevin: He even brings up the campaign to ban dodgeball in schools as an example of this overreach. He quotes an education group saying dodgeball is inappropriate because "you win by hurting others." He presents this as a kind of self-parody, the final, absurd endpoint of a culture so averse to violence it can't even tolerate a schoolyard game. Michael: And that example is so telling. Because you could see it as a sign of moral progress—that we're now sensitive enough to care about the emotional well-being of the least athletic kid in gym class. Or you could see it, as he does, as a sign of decadence. His choice of interpretation reveals the ideology. He's not just a neutral observer of data; he's making an argument about where the escalator of reason should stop. And it seems to stop right around the time his own generation's grievances were addressed. Kevin: It also ignores the context. When he talks about a food fight in a Chicago school leading to arrests, he frames it as "the campaign to quarantine children from violence." But he fails to mention the school is 99% Black. This isn't an example of over-sensitive liberals; it's an example of the school-to-prison pipeline, a clear case of modern racial injustice. He's so focused on his grand theory that he misreads the data right in front of him. Michael: And that's the paradox of the whole book. He's a brilliant synthesizer of data who shows us this incredible, optimistic long-term trend. But when he zooms in on the present, his lens seems to get distorted by his own cultural and political biases.

Kevin: So, at the end of this journey, we're left with this powerful, data-driven story of declining violence. A story of how states, commerce, and reason have, over centuries, favored our 'better angels' and pulled us up an escalator away from the brutality of the past. It’s a narrative that is, in many ways, profoundly hopeful. Michael: But it's a story that's also haunted by its own ideological project. It's a story that can be, and has been, used as a tool for what some critics call 'toxic optimism.' An optimism that risks patting ourselves on the back for how far we've come, while downplaying the very real, very modern struggles we still face. The argument that things are getting better can easily become an excuse for not trying to make them better still. Kevin: He wants to believe that history has a direction, that the escalator only goes up. But he seems to dismiss the idea that the very forces he celebrates—technology, centralized power—also gave us the capacity for violence on a scale our ancestors couldn't have dreamed of, like the Holocaust or the atomic bomb. Michael: He chalks those up to statistical flukes, horrific blips in an otherwise positive trend. But you can't just control for the 20th century. Those events created the world we live in. They are the context. And ignoring that context feels less like a scientific analysis and more like an act of faith. Kevin: So here's the question to ponder: Is it possible to celebrate the immense progress of the past without becoming complacent about the injustices of the present? Michael: Can we acknowledge our better angels without ignoring the demons that are still very much with us? Can we look at the data and feel hope, while still feeling the urgency to keep fighting? That, I think, is the real challenge Pinker's book leaves us with.