Subtitled “Why Violence Has Declined”
(Viking, Oct. 2011, xxvii + 802pp, including 106pp of notes, references, and index.)
Summary:
Chapter 9 concerns four ways in which humanity’s “better angels” turn people away from violence and toward cooperation and altruism. These are empathy and the circle of moral concern (with caution that empathy can subvert fairness, as when concern fora personal story distracts from the larger issue); self-control (with evidence that children who exhibit greater self-control becomes smarter and more successful in life); our moral sense (with the author favoring a set of four ‘relational models’ for talking about morality: Communal Sharing, Authority Ranking, Equality Matching, and Market Pricing; how political ideologies favor one or more of these; how the historical trend is away from the first two in favor of the latter two, i.e. toward social liberalism; and how these intuitions of community, authority, sacredness, and taboo and part of human nature and will always be with us);
And reason, denigrated by pop culture, yet with evidence that humanity is getting smarter as the moral circle has expanded, along with evidence that intelligence is correlated with classical liberalism. And what are the exogenous causes of these shifts? Geographical and social mobility, open societies, an objective study of history, and moral quandaries in fiction as books have become more widely read over the centuries.
Finally Chapter 10 notes that some forces have not worked to reduce violence, including weaponry, resources and power, wealth, and religion. Forces that *have* reduced violence can be assessed a “Pacifist’s Dilemma” chart: The Leviathan; gentle commerce; feminization; and expanding circle of moral concern; and the escalator of reason. Finally the author reflects on how the decline of violence may be the most significant event in the history of our species. People yearn for a simpler, peaceful past, but that past did not exist. Ending with two quotes, one about how limited in scope the lives of our ancestors were, the other about how those who think morality must be grounded in religious faith are mistaken.
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