This book is about what maybe the most important thing that has ever happened in human history. 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.

No aspect of life is untouched by the retreat from violence. Daily existence is very’ different if you always have to worry about being abducted, raped, or killed, and it’s hard to develop sophisticated arts, learning, or commerce if the institutions that support them are looted and burned as quickly as they are built.

The historical trajectory of violence affects not only how life is lived but how it is understood. What could be more fundamental to our sense of meaning and purpose than a conception of whether the strivings of the human race over long stretches of time have left us better or worse off? How, in particular, are we to make sense of modernity—of the erosion of family, tribe, tradition, and religion by the forces of individualism, cosmopolitanism, reason, and science?

So much depends on how we understand the legacy of this transition: whether we see our world as a nightmare of crime, terrorism, genocide, and war, or as a period that, by the standards of history, is blessed by unprecedented levels of peaceful coexistence.

The question of whether the arithmetic sign of trends in violence is positive or negative also bears on our conception of human nature. Though theories of human nature rooted in biology’ are often associated with fatalism about violence, and the theory that the mind is a blank slate is associated with progress, in myT view it is the other way around. How are we to understand the natural state of life when our species first emerged and the processes of history began?

The belief that violence has increased suggests that the world we made has contaminated us, perhaps irretrievably. The belief that it has xxi decreased suggests that we started off nasty and that the artifices of civilization have moved us in a noble direction, one in which we can hope to continue.

This is a big book, but it has to be. First I have to convince you that violence really has gone down over the course of history, knowing that the very idea invites skepticism, incredulity, and sometimes anger. Our cognitive faculties predispose us to believe that we live in violent times, especially when they are stoked by media that follow the watchword “If it bleeds, it leads.”

The human mind tends to estimate the probability of an event from the ease with which it can recall examples, and scenes of carnage are more likely to be beamed into our homes and burned into our memories than footage of people dying of old age.1 No matter how small the percentage of violent deaths maybe, in absolute numbers there will always be enough of them to fill the evening news, so people’s impressions of violence will be disconnected from the actual proportions…..

Contents

Epigraph
Preface

• Chapter l – A FOREIGN COUNTRY
• Chapter 2 – THE PACIFICATION PROCESS
• Chapter 3 – THE CIVILIZING PROCESS
• Chapter 4 – THE HUMANITARIAN REVOLUTION
• Chapter 5 – THE LONG PEACE
• Chapter 6 – THE NEW PEACE
• Chapter 7 – THE RIGHTS REVOLUTIONS
• Chapter 8 – INNER DEMONS
• Chapter 9 – BETTER ANGELS
• Chapter 10 – ON ANGELS’ WINGS

Notes
References
Index
ALSO BY STEVEN PINKER

Language: English
Size: 3.32 Mb