The Better Angels of Our Nature
If Books Could Kill
Michael Hobbes & Peter Shamshiri
4.6 • 8.2K Ratings
🗓️ 22 February 2024
⏱️ 98 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week we're tackling Steven Pinker's 900 page dissection of the reasons why violence, torture and war have declined over the last 10,000 years. Was it an indeterminate mixture of politics, economics, technology and serendipity? Or did some European guys write some books that said murder was bad?
Special thanks to Philip Dwyer, Eleanor Janega, David M. Perry and Doug Thompson for help researching and fact-checking this episode!
Where to find us:
Sources:
- The Darker Angels of Our Nature
- Getting Medieval On Steven Pinker
- The Decline of Violence in the West: From Cultural to Post-Cultural History
- Pinker’s (Mis)Representation of the Enlightenment and Violence
- Herding and Homicide: An Examination of the Nisbett-Reaves Hypothesis
- Peace in Our Time
- John Gray: Steven Pinker is wrong about violence and war
- The business class doesn't understand the Enlightenment
- Delusions Of Peace
- Pinker And Progress
- Norbert Elias and the History of Violence
- Modernization, Self-Control And Lethal Violence
- Explaining Long Term Trends in Violent Crime
- The Enlightenment’s Dark Side
Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Peter? Michael. |
| 0:01.0 | Michael. |
| 0:02.0 | What do you know about the better angels of our nature? |
| 0:04.3 | I don't know what's worse. |
| 0:05.7 | Living in a society where you might die by the spear or living in a society where there |
| 0:10.6 | are 900-page non-fiction books. So today we are talking about the better angels of our nature by Stephen Pinker. |
| 0:31.7 | This is one of those books that didn't sell like Oprah, well, the number |
| 0:36.3 | that I've seen Bandied about is 1 million copies, which is still a shitload, but nowhere |
| 0:41.0 | near things like the secret. But it is one of the most influential books of the last 20 years. |
| 0:48.0 | Bill Gates called it the best book he's ever read. |
| 0:50.0 | It's been promoted very heavily by like the Davos set and it has turned Stephen Pinker into Aspen royalty. |
| 0:57.0 | He's one of the most prominent public intellectuals in the United States and a lot of it is by spreading this message that it might seem bad but in fact |
| 1:06.1 | things have gotten a lot better over the last 500 years. You thought it would have ruled to be a caveman, but it's actually not true. |
| 1:15.0 | This episode is a little bit different than previous ones. |
| 1:18.0 | Or maybe it's the same, who knows, but as we mentioned on our last bonus episode, I got some sort of weird bug over Christmas. |
| 1:25.8 | And Michael, I'm sorry, but the plague was worse. |
| 1:29.1 | And so I don't want to hear about this. |
| 1:32.6 | But I basically have not like left the house |
| 1:35.1 | or like been very functional since Christmas. |
| 1:38.6 | But I usually have like a couple hours a day |
| 1:40.8 | where I can like concentrate and read stuff. |
| 1:42.4 | And so I have basically |
... |
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