ARE HISTORICAL BOOKS ABOUT PROGRESS “COMFORT HISTORY”? Pinker’s book is a sequel to his THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE, which was discussed in several posts on this blog some six years ago. You can find those posts by using the Archive feature with the name “Pinker”. Here is a post which summarizes some of our discussion. Note that the caption on that post is “A COMFORT BLANKET FOR THE SMUG”, and the title of Wootton’s review is “COMFORT HISTORY”. The same phrase is still being used to attack Pinker’s optimistic view (a variant of the Whig Theory) that the world has gotten better over time.
In his review, David Wootton says that the graphs in Pinker’s book do something “enormously important”: “they kill off the idea that things are getting better for some of us, it must be because others are suffering so that we may thrive. Improvements in Western life expectancy have not been purchased by shortening the lives of others….”