It's hard to fathom from a present perspective, but Medieval Europe was insanely more violent and willing to torture than today's Western societies. Consider: Homicide rates were one to two orders of magnitude (~10 to ~100 times) greater back then.[a] There was a proliferation of devices designed to inflict pain and suffering that would make even Dr. Evil blush.[b] Just search for "medieval torture" online to see what I mean.
Steven Pinker has a good summary of the violent nature of Medial Europe in his book, "The Better Angels of Our Nature."[c]
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[a] https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/life-violence-m...
[b] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_methods_of_torture#Med...
[c] https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/...
Not only is the world better than ever, it is getting better faster than ever, and it's accelerating.
The news is getting more negative as the world gets better. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1461670X.2018.1...
This is happening because as subscription revenue dries up, the media is incentivized toward click-bait, and the human brain is biased toward negativity. As a hunter-gatherer, a negative incident can have much worse consequences than can a positive one, so we've evolved toward a negative bias for survival reasons.
https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/...
False premise; this is the opposite of what we see. https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/...
You can only make people stop fighting by (a) killing them; or (b) convincing them that fighting you is a mistake. There are no other ways.
[0]http://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0...
[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/149151...
[2 http://www.amazon.com/Tragedy-Great-Power-Politics-Updated/d...
That depends on what you mean. It is certainly true that our natural state is not to be psychopaths, indiscriminately killing everything in sight. But the evidence (and the theoretical foundations) indicate that a certain amount of violence is an inherent part of our basic nature, and so achieving peace requires work.
I do want to emphasize, though, that it can certainly be done. The internet, airplanes, McDonalds -- none of these are part of our basic nature either, and yet we've managed to achieve them. Peace is not out of reach, and indeed, the historical trend is towards an ever more peaceful world [1].
--- [1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/149151...
http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/149151...
Recommended read by Gates and Zuckerberg.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/149151...
In The Better Angels of Our Nature [1] Steven Pinker describes the process by which, in the past, humanity has expanded its "circle of empathy". Children, animals and countless other voiceless minorities have gained rights through this process.
One specific process he identified for expanding our collective circles of empathy is the expansion of literacy. "Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else's thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person's vantage point" [2].
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0...
[2] http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/nov/01/extract-better-...
http://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence-eboo...
Or to save the cost and hassle of getting his book, watch Pinker talking about it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5X2-i_poNU&feature=youtu.be...
[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/149151...
Violence for example is one, and Steven Pinker makes a great argument for it in this book: http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/014312...
Its hard to see these patterns if you just rely on news/anecdotal evidence as your barometer for whether the world is becoming a better place, because the news reports whatever will get views, and nothing gets views like bad news.
The Hacker News community should like it as it focuses on the stats and facts rather than anecdotal stories the media slings.
The main thesis: Violence (in nearly every form) has been on a precipitous decline in the modern era. War deaths (and civilian causalities) are at all time lows and still declining.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/014312...
By virtually every metric, the world is a much safer, healthier place than it used to be: http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/014312... .
Free trade would also be an economic boon to Europe and the U.S. A study by the Bertelsmann Foundation together with the Munich-based Center for Economic Studies found that "if the United States and the European Union are able to come together on a far-reaching free trade agreement, Germany would be one of the greatest beneficiaries. Fully 181,000 new jobs could be expected and per-capita income would spike by 4.68 percent." GDP/capita could rise "by 13.4 percent in the US and by 9.7 percent in the UK. More than a million new jobs would result in America. That number would be 400,000 in Britain." [3]
The benefits of free trade are one of the points economists have found consensus on.
[1] http://www.yale.edu/leitner/resources/docs/HORJune09.pdf "Trade Does Promote Peace: New Simultaneous Estimates of the Reciprocal Effects of Trade and Conflict" (Hegre, O'Neal, & Russett, 2009)
[2] http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/014312... The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker
[3] http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/study-on-trans-...
http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/014312...
http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/014312...
Pinker documents the increasing ratcheting down of violence in humanity, perhaps not in absolute terms but certainly in percentage of population terms. Take modern Western Europe, it has statistically the lowest homicide rate compared to anywhere and any time.
The decrease in violence has occurred with what Pinker calls Rights Revolutions at two points in history, around about the time of the American and French revolution and mid-twentieth century onwards. So we have people asserting the rights of man in general leading to the abolition of chattel slavery, the rights of woman in particular, gay rights, the rights of children, and recently the rights of animals. In England the last blood sport (fox hunting) was recently outlawed in the teeth of much protest from the good old boys that think cruelty to animals is A OK.
These rights revolutions stem from ideas born out the Age of Reason and the Age of Enlightenment which led most famously the amendments to the US constitution but which have there parallel in most of the Western world. Forces that work against these ideas are thus called counter-enlightenment forces. Getting back to the issue at hand (I've got a point I tells ya!) these laws represent a back-sliding and we should take these counter-enlightenment forces very seriously - we are talking about a centuries long struggle to eliminate violence (of whatever type) from our societies. I guarantee you that future generations will look back at our times and recoil in horror at the way we treat animals in much the same way that systemic torture, bear-baiting, corporal punishment, domestic abuse and so on leave most of us (apart from the odd sadist and sociopathic outlier) sickened nowadays.
† I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Here it is on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1455883115
Steven Pinker: The surprising decline in violence
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1455883115
Filmed Mar 2007 • Posted Sep 2007 • TED2007
http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen...
to which the counter=argument is somthing like this:
The biggest problem with [Pinker], though, is [his] overreliance on history, which, like the light on a caboose, shows us only where we are not going. We live in a time when all the rules are being rewritten blindingly fast—when, for example, an increasingly smaller number of people can do increasingly greater damage. (Scientific American)[1]
I don't fully dis-agree with this latter qualication. If you go back and read my initial comments, you will see this.
[1] from: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=bookreview-...; See also: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-decline...
Is that intended as a recommendation of a scientific source about long-term trends cross-culturally? I got a big volume of the collected "future history" stories by Robert Heinlein out of the library a year ago, and I was disappointed by how poorly those stories have aged. I also figured out, by rereading Heinlein (a favorite author of mine when I was a kid) that he never informed any of his stories with much perspective from non-Western cultures (although I give him credit for being aware of that kind of issue). Since I spent three years in the 1980s and later another three years spanning the turn of the last century living in a non-Western country, I don't turn to Western science-fiction stories anymore for my social commentary. I like to read real science based on verifiable history to puzzle out social trends. I can recommend a source
http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/014312...
and invite other readers here to recommend other sources. I'm not worried about fundamentalist religion "getting control" of science.
Maybe he should read Steven Pinker's new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Nature-ebook/dp/B005...
Here's a discussion of the main point of that book:
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/qa-with-steven-pinker/
Any amount of violence of one human being against another is deplorable, but the most recent century of human history is characterized by how remarkably little violence it has had compared to any previous human century since hunter-gatherer bands turned into tribes and then nation-states.
It is, in fact, much safer to be alive today than any other point in history. And a much lower chance of dying from violence due to other humans.
In fact there's a whole book about this if you're interested: https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/...