The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

802 pages

English language

Published Dec. 4, 2011

ISBN:
978-0-670-02295-3
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Goodreads:
11107244

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(2 reviews)

From Goodreads: Selected by The New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of the Year The author of The New York Times bestseller The Stuff of Thought offers a controversial history of violence.

Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think we live in the most violent age ever seen. Yet as New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true: violence has been diminishing for millennia and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species's existence. For most of history, war, slavery, infanticide, child abuse, assassinations, pogroms, gruesome punishments, deadly quarrels, and genocide were ordinary features of life. But today, Pinker shows (with the help of more than a hundred graphs and maps) all these forms of violence have dwindled and are widely condemned. …

5 editions

Surprisingly, Books Written By Grifters Are Garbage.

Steven Pinker, like many of his ilk, is nothing more than a grifter pretending to have been widely read in a specific (and too broad) topic, and this book proves that he really needed to shut up for a second and actually engage in a wider range of discussions and explorations in order to better understand "violence." He does not understand violence in any capacity, and he does not understand anything beyond a very narrow view of the world that only further benefits people like him.

My initial problem with the book is that he never outlines what he considers "violence" to be, and that should immediately position someone to ask the same handfuls of questions over and over again while they read this. He keeps saying things like "violence has decreased," but he never seems to recognise what violence is and often hems and haws over what to include. …