Mark Zuckerberg picks Steven Pinker as his book club’s next choice

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/19/mark-zuckerberg-stephen-pinker-book-club-facebook

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Mark Zuckerberg has chosen Steven Pinker’s argument that humanity has become less violent over the millennia as the second title for his new book club.

The Facebook founder’s initiative, hailed by some as a successor to Oprah’s book club, which turned the titles it picked into major bestsellers, kicked off earlier this month with a work of economics, Moisés Naím’s The End of Power. The book shot up the charts, with its publisher saying that it had sold more ebooks of the title in the two days after Zuckerberg’s announcement than it had sold in the year-and-a-half before.

Related: Mark Zuckerberg’s book club opens with a disappointing first chapter

The Facebook founder has since told members that he had been challenged to “beat the popularity of Oprah’s book club”, and that he had “accepted that challenge”.

Next up, the book club will discuss Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, a Samuel Johnson prize-shortlisted work of non-fiction in which the psychology professor posits that despite the conflicts which occur daily around the world, violence has actually declined from prehistory to today, and individuals are now much less likely to be deliberately killed than ever before.

Zuckerberg called Pinker’s work “timely”, and said it had been recommended to him by a few people, who had called it the best book they had ever read. “Recent events might make it seem like violence and terrorism are more common than ever, so it’s worth understanding that all violence – even terrorism – is actually decreasing over time. If we understand how we are achieving this, we can continue our path towards peace,” he wrote on Facebook, adding that he would be taking a month, rather than the planned two weeks, to tackle the title, as it is a “long book”.

He has also posted a largely positive review of Naím’s work on a new official site for the project, writing that he was “fascinated by the depth and validity” of the author’s thesis, with which he agreed. “I noted that the book is an intellectual exploration by [sic] the extent in which power is shifting base from the military, governments, and large corporations and taken by individuals. I strongly believe that giving power to the people is far much more consequential than leaving it to lie with the old order,” wrote Zuckerberg.

“I have a strong emphasis on portability of power and redefining the areas where power should be concentrated, from the governments to the people. In addition to that, I hold that empowerment of the people will come from making sure that power is not concentrated but rather diffused.”

But the Facebook founder also criticised the book’s “limitations”, writing that “there is a low likelihood that the government is going to lose all its power in the near future”, and taking issue with Naím’s definition of power itself.

“[It] is not original, does not offer new insight, and is generally wanting,” writes Zuckerberg. “His definition of power is that ‘what we exercise over others that leads to behave in ways they should not otherwise have behaved’. A close look at the definition shows a lot of similarity with definitions of power by other scholars such as Max Weber.”

He concludes, however, with praise for Naím’s new ideas, his original research and empirical evidence. “It takes a courageous person for to come up with new ideas that are valid and challenge the conventional knowledge. Moises Naím does just that,” Zuckerberg writes. “Overall, Moises Naím’s book The End of Power is a valuable and an unputdownable book.”