Towards the end of listening to 1929 by Andrew Ross Sorkin, he references Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. I’ve heard of Pinker’s book, but never read it and there was an upcoming opening on my Audible dance card, so I downloaded the book and have started listening to it. Notably, Pinker wrote the book in 2011, fifteen years ago. In it, he argues that, despite widespread perception to the contrary, humanity has become dramatically less violent over the course of history. His core thesis is that violence — war, murder, torture, slavery, rape, abuse, etc. — has declined sharply across millennia, centuries, and decades, both in absolute terms and especially per capita. He says that this is one of the most important, under-appreciated facts about human progress. The historical evidence
Pinker marshals is an enormous amount of data to show that prehistoric and tribal societies were far more lethal than modern ones, with a far higher percentage of people dying violently. He states that the consolidation of states and governments (the infamous Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes) dramatically reduced local raiding, feuding, and murder. Nothing could be more poignant to the thoughts I have every day in these turbulent times we are living through at the moment, so I am glad to be listening to Pinker’s excellent compilation around this subject.
The “Humanitarian Revolution” of the 17th–18th centuries brought the abolition of torture as entertainment, the decline of slavery, and reductions in cruel punishment. The 20th century, despite its world wars and genocides, was not the most violent in history on a per-capita basis — and the post-WWII era (“the Long Peace”) has seen the lowest rates of interstate war ever recorded. The late 20th century brought a further “Rights Revolutions” — civil rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, gay rights, and even animal rights — all reflecting expanding circles of moral concern. The trend in my lifetime has been wonderful, but things are starting to change…and not for the better.
Let’s start by exploring why Pinker says violence has declined. He identifies several driving forces, which he calls the “better angels of our nature”: Empathy — the capacity to feel others’ pain, Self-control — the ability to inhibit impulses, Moral sense — an instinct toward fairness and rights, and Reason — the ability to think abstractly and expand the circle of concern beyond the immediate tribe. These are counterweights to humanity’s “inner demons” like predation, dominance, revenge, tribalism, and ideology. Let’s think about Donald Trump in the context of a scholar’s abstractions about these concepts, written in a time that significantly predates Trump descent on that golden escalator in Trump Tower in 2015. I don’t think I need to give much argument or example about Trump’s lack of empathy, self-control, moral sense and reason. Equally, I think that especially in the last year, as he has gotten his power-hungry footing, his predilection for predation, dominance, revenge and tribalism have shown in the extreme. I’m a bit confused by the only one of these negative attributes that he does not show, which is ideology, but I suspect that is just overwhelmed by his narcissism and perhaps his abject lack of reason.
Pinker suggests that it is institutional and cultural forces, beyond individual psychology that have driven the world to this better, more non-violent place. He credits several historical forces: the rise of the nation-state and rule of law; the expansion of trade (which makes other people more valuable alive than dead); the spread of literacy and the “reading revolution” (perhaps better called the “internet revolution”) which built empathy by allowing people to inhabit others’ perspectives; and the “escalator of reason,” which forces people to apply consistent moral logic beyond their in-group. How ironic that Pinker has defined the escalator of reason while Trump has taken us on the down-escalator of tribalism.
The Leviathan is one of the most important and enduring concepts in political philosophy. It comes in several related forms that are biblical, philosophical, and political, but its core meaning concerns the nature of power, order, and the state. Hobbes’ masterwork is one of the most important books in the history of Western thought. What would human life look like without government or law? His answer is famously bleak. In the “state of nature,” there is no authority, no law, no property, no justice. Every person is at war with every other person. Life, in his most quoted phrase, is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Rational humans, Hobbes argues, would recognize that this situation is intolerable. So they make a deal or a social contract. Each person surrenders their “natural freedom” (the right to do anything to survive) to a sovereign power in exchange for security, order, and the protection of life. I wish some of my Second Amendment lovers would read Leviathan.
John Locke agreed on the social contract but disagreed fundamentally on its terms. For Locke, people surrender only some rights but not all of them. Government exists to protect natural rights (life, liberty, property), and if it violates those rights, the people may legitimately overthrow it. This is the philosophical foundation of the American Revolution. Pinker uses “the Leviathan” as one of his key explanatory mechanisms for declining violence. He argues that the rise of centralized states, with monopolies on legitimate force, court systems, and law enforcement, dramatically reduced local violence, raiding, feuding, and murder. When people can’t take justice into their own hands because the state will do it for them, cycles of retaliatory violence are broken.
Order is not natural, it is constructed. Peace doesn’t just happen, it requires an institution powerful enough to make violence unprofitable. That institution, with all its coercive force, is what we call the state. The Leviathan is the price of civilization. But now we get to the Guns & Butter part of the discussion. Guns & Butter is one of the most fundamental concepts in economics, used to illustrate the core problem of scarcity and trade-offs. “Guns” represent military spending and national defense. “Butter” represents civilian goods and consumer welfare. Because resources are finite, a society cannot have unlimited amounts of both. Producing more guns means producing less butter, and vice versa.
The history of American defense spending is worth considering in that context. Early America through WWI the U.S. historically spent very little on defense — around 1% of GDP. The country remained deeply isolationist until Pearl Harbor forced the question. World War II was the most dramatic mobilization in American history. Defense spending peaked at 41% of GDP in World War II — nearly half the entire economy devoted to the war effort. Defense spending climbed substantially under Reagan, reaching 6.8% of GDP by 1986. Defense spending had declined to 3.45% of GDP by 2001 and then the September 11 attacks ended that era entirely. Defense spending has increased more than 48% in inflation-adjusted terms in just the first 24 years of this century. The largest total DoD budget was $796 billion in FY 2010, at the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The $850 billion earmarked for defense in 2025 represents about 3% of GDP. The U.S. also accounts for nearly 40% of global military spending.
And now, President Trump has proposed a $1.5 trillion military budget for 2027, representing roughly a 50% increase over current levels.
Guns & Butter. Scarcity forces choices, and every choice has a cost. Americans care about affordability and that means more butter and less guns, but Trump doesn’t see it that way. Pinker needs to update his book on our better angels. Trump has chased away the better angels of our nature and Guns, Butter and Angels are forced to squabble for their share of the American dream.