The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker Page A

that will last into the indefinite future. Jordan too will make a lasting peace with Israel. Syria will engage in sporadic peace talks with Israel, and the two countries will not go to war.
    In South Africa, the apartheid regime will be dismantled, and the white minority will cede power to the black majority. This will happen with no civil war, no bloodbath, no violent recriminations against the former oppressors.
    Many of these developments will be the results of long and courageous struggles. But some of them will just happen, catching everyone by surprise. Perhaps some of you will try to figure out how it all happened. I congratulate you on your accomplishments and wish you success and satisfaction in the years ahead.
     
    How would the audience have reacted to this outburst of optimism? Those who were listening would have broken out in snickers and shared a suspicion that the speaker was still tripping on the brown acid from Woodstock. Yet in every case the optimist would have been right.
     
    No sightseer can understand a country from a city-a-day tour, and I don’t expect this skitter across the centuries to have convinced you that the past was more violent than the present. Now that you’re back home, you are surely filled with questions. Don’t we still torture people? Wasn’t the 20th century the bloodiest in history? Haven’t new forms of war replaced the old ones? Aren’t we living in the Age of Terror? Didn’t they say that war was obsolete in 1910? What about all the chickens in factory farms? And couldn’t nuclear terrorists start a major war tomorrow?
    These are excellent questions, and I will try to answer them in the rest of the book with the help of historical studies and quantitative datasets. But I hope that these sanity checks have prepared the ground. They remind us that for all the dangers we face today, the dangers of yesterday were even worse. Readers of this book (and as we shall see, people in most of the rest of the world) no longer have to worry about abduction into sexual slavery, divinely commanded genocide, lethal circuses and tournaments, punishment on the cross, rack, wheel, stake, or strappado for holding unpopular beliefs, decapitation for not bearing a son, disembowelment for having dated a royal, pistol duels to defend their honor, beachside fisticuffs to impress their girlfriends, and the prospect of a nuclear world war that would put an end to civilization or to human life itself.

2
     
    THE PACIFICATION PROCESS
     
    Look, life is nasty, brutish, and short, but you knew that when you became a caveman.
    — New Yorker cartoon 1
     
     
     
     
    T homas Hobbes and Charles Darwin were nice men whose names became nasty adjectives. No one wants to live in a world that is Hobbesian or Darwinian (not to mention Malthusian, Machiavellian, or Orwellian). The two men were immortalized in the lexicon for their cynical synopses of life in a state of nature, Darwin for “survival of the fittest” (a phrase he used but did not coin), Hobbes for “the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Yet both men gave us insights about violence that are deeper, subtler, and ultimately more humane than their eponymous adjectives imply. Today any understanding of human violence must begin with their analyses.
    This chapter is about the origins of violence, in both the logical and the chronological sense. With the help of Darwin and Hobbes, we will look at the adaptive logic of violence and its predictions for the kinds of violent impulses that might have evolved as a part of human nature. We will then turn to the prehistory of violence, examining when violence appeared in our evolutionary lineage, how common it was in the millennia before history was written down, and what kinds of historical developments first reduced it.

THE LOGIC OF VIOLENCE
     
    Darwin gave us a theory of why living things have the traits they have, not just their bodily traits but the basic mindsets and motives