The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,426

from the head. But the limited reach of empathy, with its affinity for people like us and people close to us, suggests that empathy needs the universalizing boost of reason to bring about changes in policies and norms that actually reduce violence in the world (chapter 9). These changes include not just legal prohibitions against acts of violence but institutions that are engineered to reduce the temptations of violence. Among these wonkish contraptions are democratic government, the Kantian safeguards against war, reconciliation movements in the developing world, nonviolent resistance movements, international peacekeeping operations, the crime prevention reforms and civilizing offensives of the 1990s, and tactics of containment, sanctions, and wary engagement designed to give national leaders more options than just the game of chicken that led to the First World War or the appeasement that led to the Second (chapters 3 to 8).

A broader effect of the escalator of reason, albeit one with many stalls, reversals, and holdouts, is the movement away from tribalism, authority, and purity in moral systems and toward humanism, classical liberalism, autonomy, and human rights (chapter 9). A humanistic value system, which privileges human flourishing as the ultimate good, is a product of reason because it can be justified: it can be mutually agreed upon by any community of thinkers who value their own interests and are engaged in reasoned negotiation, whereas communal and authoritarian values are parochial to a tribe or hierarchy (chapters 4 and 9).

When cosmopolitan currents bring diverse people into discussion, when freedom of speech allows the discussion to go where it pleases, and when history’s failed experiments are held up to the light, the evidence suggests that value systems evolve in the direction of liberal humanism (chapters 4 to 9). We saw this in the recent decline of totalitarian ideologies and the genocides and wars they ignited, and we saw it in the contagion of the Rights Revolutions, when the indefensibility of oppressing racial minorities was generalized to the oppression of women, children, homosexuals, and animals (chapter 7). We saw it as well in the way that these revolutions eventually swept up the conservatives who first opposed them. The exception that proves the rule is the insular societies that are starved of ideas from the rest of the world and muzzled by governmental and clerical repression of the press: these are also the societies that most stubbornly resist humanism and cling to their tribal, authoritarian, and religious ideologies (chapter 6). But even these societies may not be able to withstand the liberalizing currents of the new electronic Republic of Letters forever.

The metaphor of an escalator, with its implication of directionality superimposed on the random walk of ideological fashion, may seem Whiggish and presentist and historically naïve. Yet it is a kind of Whig history that is supported by the facts. We saw that many liberalizing reforms that originated in Western Europe or on the American coasts have been emulated, after a time lag, by the more conservative parts of the world (chapters 4, 6, and 7). And we saw correlations, and even a causal relation or two, between a well-developed ability to reason and a receptiveness to cooperation, democracy, classical liberalism, and nonviolence (chapter 9).

REFLECTIONS

The decline of violence may be the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species. Its implications touch the core of our beliefs and values—for what could be more fundamental than an understanding of whether the human condition, over the course of its history, has gotten steadily better, steadily worse, or has not changed? Hanging in the balance are conceptions of a fall from innocence, of the moral authority of religious scripture and hierarchy, of the innate wickedness or benevolence of human nature, of the forces that drive history, and of the moral valuation of nature, community, tradition, emotion, reason, and science. My attempt to document and explain declines of violence has filled many pages, and this is not the place to fill many more in exploring their implications. But I will end with two reflections on what one might take away from the historical decline of violence.

The first concerns the way we should view modernity—the transformation of human life by science, technology, and reason, with the attendant diminishment of custom, faith, community, traditional authority, and embeddedness in nature.

A loathing of modernity is one of the great constants of contemporary social criticism. Whether the nostalgia is for small-town intimacy, ecological sustainability, communitarian solidarity, family values, religious faith, primitive communism, or harmony with the rhythms