Book report: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, by Steven Pinker
Book report: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, by Steven Pinker This book makes the unbelievable claim that violence has declined in the world and that we are, in fact, living in the least violent time in human history. What?! Is he crazy? Come on, pal! Watch the news for an hour – with school shootings and terrorists and serial killers and abusive boyfriends – and then tell me what you think! And that’s actually one of the issues he talks about. What we see on the news is the unusual, the uncommon, the unlikely. If you look at the statistics – and believe me, he looks at the statistics – by practically every measure of violence, there is a steady downward trend in time. A couple hundred years ago, you were 30 times as likely to be murdered – yeah, murdered – as you are today. One of the very interesting things he does is to talk about some of the kinds of violence that used to be very common, but that we almost never see any more. Flogging. Pub