Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature has been, since 2011, the kind of book that attracts either conversions or denunciations — rarely the long-form responses it actually asks for. Rachel Kessler’s The Better Angels, Revisited is the book a careful reader wanted someone to write: not a demolition, not a vindication, but a patient re-examination of Pinker’s claims in light of fifteen years of additional data and the sharper methodological questions that have accumulated around them.
Kessler, a historian of violence at the University of Edinburgh, takes the original argument seriously. The opening chapters are an admirable summary, less polemical than Pinker’s own and in places more favorable: where Pinker’s critics have sometimes dismissed the entire downward-trend thesis, Kessler concedes the direction is real across several domains, most robustly for interpersonal violence in settled states.
What the book disputes — and where it earns its title — is the mechanism, the completeness, and the forecast. On mechanism, Kessler shows that Pinker’s preferred explanations (the Enlightenment, commerce, the “civilising process”) systematically under-weight the role of administrative state capacity, which is messier and less ideologically charming but empirically better correlated with violence declines. On completeness, she assembles an unusually careful catalogue of domains where violence has not declined, or where the decline depends on how you count: state-inflicted harms, structural harms, violence internal to carceral institutions, and forms of harm that the data infrastructure of the twentieth century was not built to see.
Where the Book Is Strongest
The chapter on “statistical invisibility” — what it means that we can reliably count battlefield deaths but not deaths in for-profit detention, and how this shapes which declines we trust — is the best thing I have read this year on the epistemology of large-scale moral claims. Kessler is not arguing that the figures are invented; she is arguing that the figures we have are the figures someone chose to gather, and that treating the resulting trend lines as straightforward descriptions of reality is a philosophical mistake, not merely a statistical one.
Where It Could Go Further
The book is less incisive on the future. Kessler’s scepticism of linear-progress narratives is well-taken, but her own forecasts, in the final chapters, are notably hedged — hedged, I think, in ways that do not quite acknowledge how much of the reader’s interest in the question is about what happens next. A book that is this good on the history could afford to be a little braver on the future.
Still: this is the first long response to Better Angels that feels like it was written to persuade thoughtful readers rather than to win a Twitter thread. Recommended without qualification for anyone interested in moral progress as a question rather than a slogan.