Does Peacekeeping Work? Steven Pinker Checks the Stats
The Long Now Foundation - Herbst Theatre
Steven Pinker, the author of THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE: Why Violence Has Declined, talks about how humanity has been successful in reducing violence, cruelty and injustice.
First, he presents exhaustive evidence that the tragic view of history is wrong and always has been. A close examination of the data shows that in every millennium, century, and decade, humans have been drastically reducing violence, cruelty, and injustice---right down to the present year. A trend that consistent is not luck; it has to be structural.
So, second, he boldly founds a discipline that might as well be called "psychohistory." As a Harvard psychologist and public intellectual (author of The Language Instinct and The Blank Slate), he sought causes for the phenomenon he's reporting---why violence has declined. Real ethical progress, he found, came from a sequence of institutions, norms, cultural practices, and mental tricks employed by whole societies to change their collective mind and behavior in a peaceful direction.
Humanity's great project of civilizing itself is far from complete, but Pinker's survey of how far we've come builds confidence that the task will be completed, and he illuminates how to get there.