The Better Angels of Our Nature

I thought this to be true too until I read an 844-page book titled The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker. This book first caught my eye because it had been recommended by Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook.

There is much to ponder in Pinker’s history of violence throughout the world. Pinker leaves no stone unturned in his treatise on crime. All of his observations and theories are backed up with statistics that prove his points.

The statistics for crime and violence in the US are most startling because they seem to be most difficult to explain. And yet it is possible to see how many circumstances in the US can apply to Trinidad and Tobago.

Pinker says, “Among western democracies, the United States leaps out of world-wide homicide statistics.

Instead of clustering with kindred people like Britain, the Netherlands and Germany, it hangs out with toughs like Albania and Uruguay, close to the median rate for the entire world.” Most violence is committed by 15-30-year-olds, and the upturn in crime during the 1960s was shared with every other western democracy.

Other statistics stand out in a startling way.

In the US, the homicide rate for black Americans is almost nine times higher than the homicide rate for whites, but it is a mistake to write off crime as a product of race. Pinker says southern whites are more violent than northern whites and southern blacks are more violent than northern blacks so crime rates soar for both races in the south. Crime and violence, he says, boils down to not having a sense of community.

In the US, slavery created communities of Afro-Americans who were essentially stateless. They had no government to buy into because government never offered a sense of belonging or a sense of protection. So Pinker argues that Afro-Americans began relying on a culture of honour, sometimes called the code of the streets, rather than calling on the law.

Could this partly explain crime in Trinidad? We certainly do have communities that do not feel protected by or represented by Government.

These are the communities that are run by gangs, and they rely on a vigilante style of justice. They don’t trust police.

Because there is so much crime and violence in the US that relates to guns, we tend to blame guns for crime. But it’s more complicated than that. Pinker argues democracy came too early to America.

In Europe, Government first disarmed people and then introduced democracy. In America, people took over the states and then tried to get people to lay down their arms. That is why the second amendment is so controversial in the US. The right to bear arms is ingrained in US citizens, and they won’t give it up in spite of mass murders and school shootings.

“In other words,” Pinker says, “Americans — and especially Americans in the south and west — never fully signed on to a social contract that would best the government on a monopoly of the legitimate use of force.” Is that true here too? The point is crime and violence have a complicated history, which I fear we have not begun to delve into yet.

N e x t week: Part two of The Better Angels of Our Nature: So what puts a dent in crime? Find out what Pinker has to say.