With the war in Gaza, ISIS spreading across Iraq and Syria, continued conflict in Afghanistan and a shooting war in Ukraine that has taken down a civilian 777 with 298 souls on board, its easy to think that we live in terribly violent times. But no. Steven Pinker argues convincingly in The Better Angels of Our Nature that we live in, roughly, the least violent times in human history. We hear about atrocities and war all the time, and they stick in our mind, but they happen less often and less massively than they once did. The firebombing of Tokyo, for example, happened 70 years ago. From Pinkers preface: Believe it or not -- and I know that most people do not -- violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species existence. The decline, to be sure, has not been smooth; it has not brought violence down to zero; and it is not guaranteed to continue. But it is an unmistakable development, visible on scales from millennia to years, from the waging of wars to the spanking of children.
Posted on: Fri, 18 Jul 2014 14:13:00 +0000
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