In a preview of his next book, Steven Pinker takes on violence. We live in violent times, an era of heightened warfare, genocide and senseless crime. Or so we've come to believe. Pinker charts a history of violence from Biblical times through the present, and says modern society has a little less to feel guilty about.
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Steven Pinker: A brief history of violence
Category: Behavioral Biology
Posted on: January 23, 2008 8:00 PM, by Greg Laden
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Comments
There are two separate issues here, really:
Posted by: ravi | January 24, 2008 11:25 AM
Pinker's views seem to be in accord with those like philosopher Peter Singer and economist Amartya Sen that the "circle" to which we allow equal rights with ourselves has expanded greatly over the centuries, particularly in modern times i.e. since the Enlightenment. We now include people who do not share language, gender, religion, culture, state or skin colour with us. Some (less-than-human) rights are even exended to animals.
Conditions may appear to be worse in out time simply because the flow of information can be almost instantaneous in our own time. News of a genocide in a central African state would have taken months, maybe years, to reach the outside world in at the end of the 19th century and then it would have been only a small column in a newspaper. After the Rwanda genocide, the TV was full of bodies floating down rivers within days.
Posted by: Toby | January 25, 2008 1:23 PM