Humanity's lust for violence has
undergone a long, precipitous decline at every level of social
interaction, from domestic abuse to violent crime to interstate wars.
That's the sweeping and somewhat counterintuitive thesis of psychologist
Steven Pinker's new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.
The pacification of humanity, says Pinker, is “a fractal phenomenon,
visible at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years.”
Pinker
writes that the “very idea invites skepticism, incredulity and
sometimes anger.” He sets out to overcome that barrier by surveying a
broad swath of data, from examinations of ancient bones unearthed in
peat bogs and on long-forgotten battlefields, to homicide statistics
based on European coroners' inquests and local records dating back 800
years, to databases of modern interstate conflicts and civil wars.
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