The Better Angels of Our Nature
Why Violence Has Declined
by Steven Pinker
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The Better Angels of Our Nature
In 1991 two hikers stumbled upon a corpse poking out of a melting glacier in the Tyrolean Alps. Thinking that it was the victim of a skiing accident, rescue workers jackhammered the body out of the ice, damaging his thigh and his backpack in the process. Only when an archaeologist spotted a Neolithic copper ax did people realize that the man was five thousand years old.
Ötzi the Iceman, as he is now called, became a celebrity. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine and has been the subject of many books, documentaries, and articles. Not since Mel Brooks’s 2000 Year Old Man (“I have more than 42,000 children and not one comes to visit me”) has a kilogenarian had so much to tell us about the past. Ötzi lived during the crucial transition in human prehistory when agriculture was replacing hunting and gathering, and tools were first made of metal rather than stone. Together with his ax and backpack, he carried a quiver of fletched arrows, a wood-handled dagger, and an ember wrapped in bark, part of an elaborate fire-starting kit. He wore a bearskin cap with a leather chinstrap, leggings sewn from animal hide, and waterproof snowshoes made from leather and twine and insulated with grass. He had tattoos on his arthritic joints, possibly a sign of acupuncture, and carried mushrooms with medicinal properties.
Ten years after the Iceman was discovered, a team of radiologists made a startling discovery: Ötzi had an arrowhead embedded in his shoulder. He had not fallen in a crevasse and frozen to death, as scientists had originally surmised; he had been murdered. As his body was examined by the CSI Neolithic team, the outlines of the crime came into view. Ötzi had unhealed cuts on his hands and wounds on his head and chest. DNA analyses found traces of blood from two other people on one of his arrowheads, blood from a third on his dagger, and blood from a fourth on his cape. According to one reconstruction, Ötzi belonged to a raiding party that clashed with a neighboring tribe. He killed a man with an arrow, retrieved it, killed another man, retrieved the arrow again, and carried a wounded comrade on his back before fending off an attack and being felled by an arrow himself.
From The Better Angels Of Our Nature by Steven Pinker. Published by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copyright © Steven Pinker, 2011
The Better Angels of Our Nature
Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime and terrorism, one might think we live in the most violent age ever seen. Yet as New York Times bestselling author and experimental psychologist Steven Pinker shows in The Better Angels of Our Nature, the opposite is true: violence has been diminishing throughout history, and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species’ existence. For most of history, war, slavery, infanticide, child abuse, assassinations, pogroms, gruesome punishments and genocide were ordinary features of life. But today, Pinker shows (with the help of more than a hundred graphs and maps) all these forms of violence have dwindled and are widely condemned. How has this happened?
Pinker mixes history and psychology to paint a picture of an increasingly nonviolent world. The key, he explains, is to understand our intrinsic motives—the inner demons that incline us toward violence, and the “better angels” that steer us away—and how changing circumstances have allowed the latter to prevail. Exploding myths about humankind’s inherent violence and the curse of modernity, this ambitious and provocative book challenges the ways in which we think about our society.
Hardcover : 832 pages
Publisher: Viking Penguin/Div of Penguin Putnam ( October 04, 2011 )
Item #: 13-412078
ISBN: 9780670022953
Product Dimensions: 6.125 x 9.25 inches
Product Weight: 43.0 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
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