S teven P inker , The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

Abstract

VIKINC PREFACE This book is about what maybe the most important thing that has ever hap-I pened 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 deveþ sophisticated arts,learnin& or commerce if the institutions that suppott them are looted and burned as quickly as they are built. The historical trafectory of violence affects not only how life is lived but how it is understood. What could be more fundamental to our sense of mean-ing and purpose than a conception of whether the strivings of the human race over long stretches of time have left us better or wotse off? How, in particular, are we to make sense of modernity-of the erosion of family, tribe, traditiorç and religion by the forces of indívidualism, cosmopolítanism, 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 unprece-dented levels of peaceful coexistence.