Short Review and Comments on Steve Pinker's The Better Angles of our Nature

By Dr. Omar Javaid

Steve Pinker in his behemoth 800+ pages book The Better Angles of our Nature totally misses the point. Pinker use cherry picked statistical data from across history to make the point that we are now living in significantly more peaceful times. He also never explained how archaeologists calculated the population from ancient times and how their population estimate are accurate. While he spent lots of time explaining how archaeologists found out the number of homicides or deaths along with their causes. The Data, is also very much Eurocentric, so it excludes the experience of the eastern part of the world.

A part from the data being biased, Pinker fails to address perhaps a more important point! Are we happier during these peaceful times? Yuval Noah Harari, a best selling author, historian, for example, would rather respond in negation. Harari believes that we might be living in materially well-off or perhaps peaceful times, but our subjective well being is worse than the people who lived before us though in difficult time but who at least had a meaning in their lives.

Finland for example is ranked as the happiest country in the world by UN, Nordic countries are also considered happier then the rest of the world, also perhaps more peaceful in comparison. However, more people commit suicide in Nordin countries then in many other parts of the so called underdeveloped world. Suicide rate of Finland for example is 6 times that of Pakistan as a percentage of population.

The percentage of millennials and generation Z in Finland who are suffering from a clinically depressed is significantly higher also as compare to those countries who are considered to be less happier as per the scales of UN. Will Storr argues that if anti-depressant drugs would not have been invented, the percentage of suicide would have been many times higher than it is today particularly in the so called first world.

So the ultimate Question which Pinker should have focused rather is that are we living a more meaningful or happier life these days? Is there a statistical data to confirm that our state of subjective well-being is better as compare to that of our Ancestors? The point here is not to justify violence, that violent times are better because we feel better during violent times. The act of violence in fact has nothing to do with out sense of subjective well-being, it is rather our sense of meaningfulness and internal contentment that we experience.

In fact our life become meaningful when we aspire for goals higher then our own selves (see Victor Frankl for details). When we strive to improve the lives of others around us. And if we have a framework to make sense of our extra-rational (generally referred to as irrational) dimension of our internal experience which includes our emotions, dreams, intuition etc (see Carl Jung for details).

Harari believes that we were better at making sense of our extra-rational inclinations while connecting it with a sense of meaningfulness. We had a purpose, a worldview, a narrative, which connected everything into a single whole. That narrative could have been a fairy-tale, but was rational in every meaning of the word in view of Nassim Nicholas Talib. Talib argues that does a narrative collective shared by a group of people in theri material and subjective survival? If yes, then the narrative is to be referred to as rational. If it doesn't, it isn't.

Unsurprizingly our ancestors did had such a narrative, while modernism stripped it away from our lives in the name of rationalism, or in the name of science which cannot give meaning to our extra-rational experiences. If my life is result of an accident which happened billions of years ago,

So the question which Steve Pinker should rather focus is, are we happier now? instead of asking if we are living in a more peaceful time, as if I am not happy, and unable to bear the burden of my own existence, then I might very will kill my ownself.