The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker

Nor does he duck-indeed he begins-with the tough questions that would immediately cross any skeptic’s mind: But what about the Holocaust, what about the Armenian genocide, Rwanda, Darfur, the killing fields of Cambodia, World War I and II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, Pakistan, South African Apartheid, American Slavery, lynching in the south, child armies in the Sudan and, here at home, September 11? In a fifty-minute lecture during which he barely paused to catch his breath, Pinker passionately and elegantly summarized an epic 800-page book that makes a case which overturns received wisdom and restores one’s confidence in human progress.

Who knew? I wondered to myself as I watched his amazing graphs in a power point lecture that ranged from evidence gathered from 5,000 year-old buried human skeletons with embedded arrowheads, crushed skulls and ropes encircling their necks, all indicating the path of destruction they had encountered on their way to an early grave, to official historical records charting the gradual social and cultural evolution towards more peaceful times. “The folk singers’ dream of the 1960s,” he sums up at one point, “has all but been realized,” citing the antiwar songs of Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Phil Ochs, Malvina Reynolds, Arlo Guthrie (whose Alice’s Restaurant is quoted at length) and Country Joe McDonald, not to mention a quirky novel that celebrated its 50th anniversary this year-Catch-22-war is slowly but persistently heading toward the dustbin of history. At the same time that they have declined, they have also become near universally condemned. Surveying 5,000 years of recorded history, and pre-history that has become interpretable due to archaeological science, he concludes that we live in a world marked by a measurable decline of violence of every kind: war-both between nations and civil war–genocide, murder, rape, child abuse, spousal abuse, capital punishment, torture and even corporal punishment of children. In fact, argues Pinker, nothing could be further from the truth. The Harvard Psychologist and author of the new book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Viking Press, NYC, 2011), came to Cal Tech’s Beckman Auditorium to offer a profoundly contrary view to contemporary beliefs that we live in a more violent and dangerous world than ever before, one in which terrorists hold more cards than enlightened rationalists, one in which violence is ever-present and Thomas Hobbes’ assessment of life in nature has become the hallmark of our post 9/11 century: it is mean, nasty, brutish and short. Steven Pinker has documented what John Lennon could only imagine: a world in which war is not nearly as popular as it used to be. The Cal Tech Lecture for the Skeptics’ Society

The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker