Paul Crowley (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} ciphergoth) wrote,@ 2008-10-07 12:35:00 |
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| Entry tags: | bigpicture |
A history of violence
I watched this a while back, but the profound influence it's had on the way I think about the whole world has crept up on me. This 20 minute video is Steven Pinker giving a talk at the 2007 TED conference. His thesis is that these are the most peaceful times humanity has ever known, that the overwhelming trend in human history is for violence to go downwards, and that this is true whether you measure on a scale of decades, centuries, or millenia, and whether or not you include warfare.
Of course if you extend the timescale to include evolutionary time it's even more true - the murder rate among our closest cousins, chimpanzees and bonobos, makes South Central LA look like a sleepy hamlet (cf this or this). So I'm trying to be less surprised when people are occasionally a little thoughtless, or selfish, or mean, and a little more astonished that we don't kill each other daily...
