Review: Raine, The Anatomy of Violence

[truepenny]

The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime by Adrian Raine

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Raine is a neurocriminologist, someone who looks for the causes of crime in the structures and functions of the brain. I learned a great deal about what various bits of the brain do and about what happens when they don't do their jobs properly. Raine dabbles his toes in evolutionary biology, about which I am sometimes a little dubious, and he leans toward determinism, which--I don't care if it's an illusion, I still prefer to believe I have free will. He at least suggests that there's a spectrum from free will to determinism, that people whose brains function properly have more choice about their actions than people whose brains don't. But I still don't know.

What irritated me most was Raine's attitude toward his readers. He assumes that his readers assume they are "normal" and that they've never thought particularly about the functioning of their own brains. Which, hello, WRONG. He discusses social science as if it is made of failure and doubly so for interpretive lenses like Marxism and feminism, which I think is an overly simplistic dismissal. Ditto for his attitude toward people who work for human rights and civil liberties. He sees them only as people who wrongheadedly prevent criminals from getting the treatment they need. And he's very naive about politics (for which he is to be forgiven, because this book was written before 2016).

So basically his material was fascinating, but his interpretations were sometimes sketchy.



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