The Better Angels of our Nature

I have spent some of the last week carrying a hefty book around on trains. The Better Angels of our Nature, by Stephen Pinker, has had a great deal of coverage and carries an important message. Pinker argues, eruditely and compellingly, that on almost every measure you can think of life has got better for everyone over the last few centuries.

As you read the book you are persuaded by the extraordinary weight of historic knowledge to believe that of course there is less violence, less brutality, less intolerance and less human misery on a global scale that at any time in recorded time. The arc of history, Stephen Pinker argues, is a positive one with untold benefits.

For an organisation fundamentally concerned with what happens to people and places in poverty this is a challenge indeed. Week after week we at JRF respond to the problems we face whether through forced labour, or the falling living standards of the poorest, the desperate plight of homeless people and the misery of impoverished communities. Does our concern with social justice blind us to the greatly improved world we inhabit? Are we just deliberately wallowing in social misery?

It seems to me that there is something much more interesting going on. There are moments in history when that arc of improvement is fundamentally disrupted, and the victims of that disruption will often be the poorest people and communities. I think we may be facing one of those moments now. The scale of the global financial crisis, combined with the challenge of needing urgently to adjust our consumption of the worlds resource, is creating different victims and increasing inequality – not just across the UK, but globally.

In a decade of such disruption we can do one of two things: we can let events take their course, in the full knowledge that the people paying the highest price will be those who can least afford it, or we can work tirelessly to ensure that the better angels of our nature prevail, and we move through this period of terrifying transition in a way that benefits the poorest people and places.