The Decline of Violence?

Psychologist Steven Pinker argues that violence is declining. And there’s evidence to suggest that he’s right. “…if we consider the evidence, we find that the decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon: We can see the decline over millennia, centuries, decades, and years…” (Greater Good)

That said, violence remains a serious problem… and despite a “fractal” decline in violent death… there’s so much about the phenomena of political violence that we don’t understand.

Here Pinker gives a speech on the "Myth of Violence" at TED.

“Our seemingly troubled times are routinely contrasted with idyllic images of hunter-gatherer societies, which allegedly lived in a state of harmony with nature and each other…

But now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler. In fact, our ancestors were far more violent than we are today. Indeed, violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth…

In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, that statement might seem hallucinatory or even obscene. But if we consider the evidence, we find that the decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon: We can see the decline over millennia, centuries, decades, and years.” (Greater Good)