A Guy in the Pew

I had previously posted about Steve Pinker's fascinating article about how the world today is far less violent and far less cruel than in the past. According to Pinker, the "leading edge [of the decline in violence and cruelty] has been in Western societies, especially England and Holland, and there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the Age of Reason in the early seventeenth century." The New York Times published a very interesting article this week about Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis, who believes that the Industrial Revolution — the surge in economic growth that occurred first in England around 1800 — occurred because of a change in the nature of the human population. I may blog about Clark's work in a separate post, but what I found most fascinating in the article was the graph above that confirms Pinker's assertion--that there was a sharp drop in violence beginning in the sixteenth century. Not...

The March 19, 2007 edition of The New Republic includes a fascinating article by Steven Pinker, a professor at Harvard, about the largely unnoticed decline in violence and cruelty worldwide since the 16th Century: "In sixteenth-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. According to historian Norman Davies, "[T]he spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized." Today, such sadism would be unthinkable in most of the world. This change in sensibilities is just one example of perhaps the most important and most under appreciated trend in the human saga: Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth. "In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century o...