The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

Weve all asked, What is the world coming to? But we seldom ask, How bad was the world in the past? In this startling new book, the bestselling cognitive scientist Steven Pinker shows that the world of the past was much worse. In fact, we may be living in the most peaceable era yet.Evidence of a bloody history has always been around us the genocides in the Old Testament and crucifixions in the New the gory mutilations in Shakespeare and Grimm the British monarchs who beheaded their relatives and the American founders who dueled with their rivals.Now the decline in these brutal practices can be quantified. Tribal warfare was nine times as deadly as war and genocide in the 20th century. The murder rate in medieval Europe was more than thirty times what it is today.