The Better Angels of Our Nature Why Violence Has Declined

Master piece

An fascinating historical study of mankind and violence.

War is less and less common nowadays. And that’s good. But in order to savor the Long Peace, we need to continue working in that direction. The main goal of the author in The Better Angels of Our Nature is to document and explain how violence has declined throughout the ages. Steven Pinker explains in great details what type of horrifying things we did in the past. Why we thought that these things are normal. How we actually did them. And finishes, with what we need to do in the present days to preserve this and even improve upon. More: https://durmonski.com/book-summaries/...

Although it took me a long time to read, (this is a very dense book, well written but full of examples of statistics) I would recommend it to anyone and everyone. Steven Pinker proves that our world is getting less violent. This is flatly contradicted by our senses and experience every day. Any person alive now will be inundated with news of terrible violence around the world and believe that it's getting worse. All the proof is here. Examined from all sorts of angles, with doubts and attempts to disprove thrown in, as in all good science. But the proof still stands. It doesn't shy away from reality and includes all the atrocities and massacres but puts them into a greater context of all of humanity's history. This is one book that truly has changed my life, and it continues to protect me from tendencies to total cynicism and pessimism.