The Better Angels of Our Nature and Violence in the Second Trump Administration

The purpose of this essay is to look at Steven Pinker’s discussion of violence in his 2011 published book, The Better Angels of Our Nature.  The global trend in violence has been on the decline over the past millennia, he says. My paper views this trend in relation to the violence currently experienced in the Second Trump Administration.

Pinker takes the position that violence has declined in all forms over the past millennia and that the present is probably the most peaceful time in human history. To support his thesis, Pinker offers a huge store of data reflecting both time and geography. The data, he contends, shows declines in areas including military conflict, homicide, genocide, torture, criminal justice, and in the treatment of children, homosexuals, animals, and racial and ethnic minorities.

This trend, Pinker says, has not been constant and there is no guarantee it will continue downward. In fact, in the October 6, 2025, issue of the New Yorker, David Remnick speaks of a “new darkness” that is descending on our country. He cites the current attack on the rule of law, and the erosion of civil liberties, among other examples. In support of Remnick’s thesis, one can’t miss the images of the National Guard and federal agents patrolling the streets of some of our cities, stopping non-white people at random to ask for their “papers” or disappearing them in unmarked cars or vans. President Trump now says that the troops will remain in the cities until the mission is complete, with no indication of what the mission is or what complete means.

More evidence of the new darkness is the National Guard and federal agents’ raid on the apartment building at 7500 South Shore Drive in Chicago on Wednesday, October 1, at three o’clock in the morning. Here, families, including little children, were indiscriminately, and without charges, without explanations held outside in the cold, or taken to undisclosed locations. The children were separated from their parents, zip-tied together, some in their underwear, and held outside in the cold.

In this context, it's difficult not to think of German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller’s 1946 post-war confessional prose poem, “First They Came.”  First, they came, he says, for the Communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the Socialists and I did not speak out because I was not a Socialist. He goes on down a list until, then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Today, in 2025, they come for the undocumented. So? They’re breaking the law, we say. And anyway, I’m a citizen. They come for those with brown skin or look a little foreign, (meaning nonwhite). But I don’t have brown skin. I’m white. They come for their political enemies. But I’m not a political official or a former political official. Why should I care? They come for dissenters. But I ‘m just an ordinary middle-class person. I don’t speak out. They come for people against whom they have a grievance. But I’m anonymous, they don’t even know me.  It doesn’t matter; they come now for whomever they want.

It is sad and frightening to feel the darkness of Remnick’s resurgence of violence. An increase that should sharply bend Pinker’s violence trend toward the increase. And feel is a good word to use here. As crucially important trends are, they are abstractions, a synthesis of information generalized into ideas that help us understand the present and anticipate future developments and inclinations.

Violence, however, is not abstract.  It is an extreme form of aggressive action intended to cause severe physical, emotional, or psychological damage. This includes injury, or death to another person. It is intentional, always purposeful, always involving choice. The extrajudicial and illegal, according to US law and international law, killings today in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific are acts of extreme violence.  And violence, no matter the distance between the perpetrators and victims, is always personal. It does harm to the victims and offers a sense of power, control, and even satisfaction to the perpetrators. At the same time, it is insidious, it destroys something in both parties. 

Pinker, argues that aggression, leading to violence, does not have a single cause. His technical definition states, “It is the output of several psychological systems that differ in their environmental triggers, their internal logic, neurological basis, and their social distribution." (xxv) He offers five such psychological systems. We might call them systems through which we refine and apply our intentionality.

The first, Pinker says, is predatory or practical violence, violence used to exploit or oppress others. The second is dominance: the urge for authority, prestige, glory, and power. The third psychological system is revenge: the moralistic urge toward retribution, punishment, and justice. The fourth is sadism: the deliberate infliction of pain for no purpose but to enjoy a person’s suffering. We might call this, simply, cruelty. The fifth is ideology: a shared belief system, usually involving a vision of some utopia that justifies unlimited violence in pursuit of unlimited good.

Unfortunately, we are all too familiar with all these internal systems and their output.

So, what then are the angels of our better nature that we can call forth to counter or temper these aggressions? Citing Hume, Pinker agrees that there are faculties infused in the human system that “produce a cool preference of what is useful and serviceable to mankind above what is pernicious and dangerous.”

Pinker points out four of these faculties: empathy, self-control, the moral sense, and reason. It’s important to note that Pinker posits that these faculties are endogenous. They are caused by the system’s internal dynamics. Like the aggression causing systems mentioned above, they are part of our nature.

The first is empathy. Empathy embraces but goes well beyond the sympathetic, and often sentimental, sense of relating the condition of another to one’s own circumstances. “I feel your pain,” for example, became a cliché as it was overused by Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential campaign. Empathy in a deeper sense, is the commitment to the other as an individual, and unique human being with the same right to be as safe from harm and exploitation as oneself. I would add, and to have free access to the advantages and benefits that a civilized society offers everyone.

Self-Control, is the second angel, Pinker says. It “allows us to anticipate the consequences of acting on our impulses and to inhibit them accordingly.” (xxv) Dickens, in Barnaby Rudge, says, So, do the shadows of our own desires stand between us and our better angels. Self-control allows us to penetrate these shadows, identify our impulses and desires and respond, if necessary, to their pernicious impact.

The third is the moral sense which Pinker defines as “a set of norms and taboos that govern the interactions among people in a culture.” (xxv) These are internalized norms and taboos that advance the civilizing process of human kind, and not to codify for self-service those narrowly defined in self-contained groups, or authoritarian and puritanical societies. Calling on norms, for example, I can remember my mother admonishing me, “You know better than that!” Of course I did, and that calls forth the last better angel of our nature Pinker discusses: reason.

Reason, he writes, “allows us to extract ourselves from our parochial vantage points.” (xxv) We act within a larger context which includes those of empathy, self-control, and the moral sense cited above. Within this context, reason is effective because, it is an open-ended, self-correcting, combinatorial system, “an engine,” Pinker says, “for generating an unlimited number of new ideas. Once it is programmed with a basic self-interest and an ability to communicate with others, its own logic will impel it, in the fullness of time, to respect the interests of ever-increasing numbers of others.” (p. 401)

Calling on the work of Norbert Elias and his classic work The Civilizing Process, Pinker tells us Elias proposed that beginning in the 11th or 12th centuries and maturing in the 17th and 18th with the Renaissance, Humanitarian Revolution, and the Enlightenment, “Europeans increasingly inhibited their impulses, anticipated long-term consequences of their actions, and took other people’s thoughts and actions into consideration.” (p. 70) In, fact the Renaissance, the Humanitarian Revolution, (An ongoing process as late as our civil rights movement.), and the Enlightenment moved Europe out of the Middle Ages and into the beginning of the modern era.

Why did this happen?

Citing Elias’ theory, Pinker reports that there were two exogenous triggers that began the process. The first was that central monarchies gained in strength, eventually nationalizing justice. The honor-code faded and violence became the prerogative of the government. The rule of law was born. It was disordered, as one can imagine, and still is, because laws and justice must be administered evenly, fairly, and without prejudice or the people lose confidence and trust in the institution and the old ways of self-justice return.  But the rule of law created a safe and level playing field that made the second trigger possible.

It occurred during the late Middle Ages and represented an economic revolution with the expansion of trade and the use of money as a medium of exchange. To aid and abet this enlargement, the state regulated commerce and encouraged its development by building and supporting the necessary infrastructure such as roads.

In sum, Elias considered these two triggers part of a single process. “The centralization of state control,” Pinker says, “and its monopolization, of violence, the growth of craft guilds and bureaucracies, the replacement of barter with money, the development of technology, the enhancement of trade, the growing webs of dependency among far flung individuals, all fit into an organic whole. And to prosper within that whole, one had to cultivate faculties of empathy and self-control until they become, as he puts it, second nature.” (p.78) Elias’ thesis worked as Europe and other parts of the world experienced declines in violence.

One significant bump in violence occurred in the US during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s followed by a decline in the 1990s. Pinker offers a substantial analysis of the reasons for these fluctuations with particular emphasis on the increase in violence in the 1960s. Anyone living through this period will find his study fascinating.

The upward trend in violence reversed in the 1990s and continues to decline today. When I mention this to friends, they appear incredulous. We are in an extremely violent period, they say. It is cruel and oppressive. As proof, they cite the new darkness sweeping the country mentioned by David Remnick, and cite many of the examples mentioned above.

It is undeniable, though some do, that in the second Trump administration we are experiencing a palpable, graceless, and cruel violence that has not yet revealed itself as statistical trend data. Withholding emergency food funds from 42 million low-income people, as in the SNAP program, is a new and willful type of cruelty. As is the budget reconciliation bill under which 10 to 14 million people are projected to lose health insurance so the wealthy can receive greater tax breaks. A new level of violence and a new level of cruelty.

Where are we, this holiday season then, and what name will history give this brief period?  If it is named for Trump, and it probably will be, the title should be linked to the pejorative, like, (2016-2028, The Trump Decivilizing Era.)

As argued in Pinker’s, The Better Angels of Our Nature, the civilizing of human society and its attendant humanizing impact, has been marked by an, albeit uneven, but steady trend downward in the rate of human violence and an increase in the humanizing of humankind.  In the scope of human history, then, and perhaps even within the scope of the 250 years of US history, this Trump Decivilizing and dehumanizing period will appear as little more than a pernicious anomaly. Because of the loss of life, however, the taking, even disappearing of people without due process, the destruction of life-giving institutions, the negation of truth, and the wounding of civilizing norms, it will not be forgotten. Not for vindictive purposes, but because the dehumanizing attitudes and acts of this period must be identified to inform the rebuilding of future civilizing and humanizing activity.

We are people of the Enlightenment and even though we recognize that the world is a threatening and messy place, and that we are vulnerable to pressures from our own predatory nature, our itch for prestige and power, the desire for retribution over minor affronts to serve our bruised ego, and our unexpected penchant for cruelty we do have resources to address, examine, and counter their control. The better angels of our nature that brought us out of the violence of the Middle Ages and into modernity, continue to draw us forward. Again, Pinker names them as empathy, self-control, the moral sense, and reason. These faculties are the best tools we have for addressing and tempering our desires that lead to aggression and violence. And even though they are part of our nature, they do not respond on their own. They must be called forth, recognized, embraced, and acted on. This is the heart of the humanizing process.