“It is a little-known fact that most terrorist groups fail, and that all of them die” – Steven Pinker

Listening to the media today, one could be forgiven for assuming that human society is incurably and irredeemably violent. Nonsense, says Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of our Nature, and he has the statistics to back it up.

The UK, for example, had 20 times as many homicides in the 1300s as in the 1900s. Murder rates as a percentage of population were higher in many traditional hunter-gather societies, like the Inuit or the !Kung, than in even the most violent US decade. Even rates of death in war were higher in historical New Guinea than in Germany in the 20^th century. In fact, you are less likely to die  from violence today than at any time in history.

Over time, Pinker argues, humans have undergone a “humanitarian revolution”, actually caring about the welfare of others. The ability to read, for example, allows us to empathize with people we’ve never met by putting us in their place, while modernity has expanded our circles of acquaintance to include those with very different backgrounds. We’ve also begun a “civilizing process”, adopting norms that forbid violence, and in so doing have created governments with a monopoly on law enforcement, helping us avoid a Hobbesian trap. Government is not enough, however. To truly reduce homicide rates to 1 or 2 per 100,000, he argues, there must be faith in the rule of law. It is places with limited belief in the ability of government to enforce justice that see increased rates of violence. In particular, some Southern U.S. states have both little faith in government enforcement and homicide rates close to that of Central and South America, and Pinker suggests this is no coincidence.

Better Angels is a comprehensive book, spanning 800 pages and psychology, history, economics, sociology, criminology, statistics, biology, and a dozen other fields. On the way, it asks whether human nature is good or bad, whether society is progressing, and whether we should be optimistic about our common future. Better yet, it’s engaging, entertaining, and intelligent. To be blunt, it’s among the most interesting books I’ve read in years, and well worth the time. The decline of violence is a macro-trend we too often fail to appreciate, and understanding it is a key step to continuing it.

Want more enlightenment? Keep reading (or in the UK or Canada).