Subtitled “Why Violence Has Declined”
(Viking, Oct. 2011, xxvii + 802pp, including 106pp of notes, references, and index.)
Here, a full eight years after I began, I’ll finish posting my outline and notes on Steven Pinker’s 2011 book. This is not, I stress again, a dry treatise about rates of violence over the centuries, but rather virtually a history of the human race, considering how the forces that have changed it have brought about a more peaceful and enlightened world. (And his almost-as-substantial follow-up book, ENLIGHTENMENT NOW, 2018, extends this book’s case.)
If there’s a grand theme of the book I can boil down into one sentence, it’s not about violence per se, it’s about how forces we would now call progressive have, throughout history, improved the human condition. And my observation: that these are forces that many conservatives to this day resist.
Posts on this book: This page with quotes at the bottom; Post 1; Post 2; Post 3; Post 4; Post 5; Post 6; Post 7
