Our Better Angels

Steven Pinker’s recently published and really big book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, has attracted substantial attention from scholars and general audiences alike. Pinker has been one of our most influential thinkers for twenty years or so, and this book is not only startling in its wide-ranging research and rich insights, it’s also fun to read.

In Better Angels, Pinker argues very persuasively that the human species has become dramatically less violent over the millennia, and even over the last few decades. This argument may seem counterintuitive because we seem to be bombarded constantly by news of horrific violence just about everywhere just about every day. But that is actually part of Pinker’s point: violence nowadays is in fact newsworthy, not just an everyday run-of-the-mill feature of life on earth. To bolster that point, Pinker starts his analysis with a sickening parade of anecdotes about the savagery of life in human groups and communities before large-scale civilizing institutions like governments and commercial arrangements wrote new scripts for the human drama.

Pinker’s analysis is so useful to our understanding of collaborative leadership that I intend to cover it in my next four blogs on Leading Together. Each of those blogs will cover one of the following topics from The Better Angels of Our Nature: six trends, five inner demons, four better angels, and five historical forces. Those are the topics that animate Pinker’s arguments. If you want to understand those arguments better, I suggest that you buy the book or borrow it from your public library. Then you can compare your own reading to my summaries and interpretations in my next four blogs. In either case, happy reading.