This is a very complicated question, yet I am struck by the simplicity, and naivete of Pinker's methods. Does he really think it's all convincing to look at victims of violence as an overall decreasing percentage over human history? Is this some sort of joke?
I am almost certain, knowing Pinker through his other books, that this is exactly it, and all that he did. If you read the literature of human violence, especially Thucydides, you find that the conditions of violence are constant: self-interest, fear, and a desire for glory. This is the cause of every human conflict, be it a mugging, or a world war.
The conditions for decreasing violence depend upon a fragile foundation, namely the spread of globalization, material wealth, and cultural pluralism. Due to technology, and its efficiency, we (meaning the West) has managed to do this to a degree unprecedented by imperial civilizations that have come before us. Yet, the events of this century, filled with mankind's greatest horrors (like a good social scientist, I am sure Pinker dismisses the Holocaust as an externality), must make us reflect on the overall thesis of Pinker's utopian futurism, and most likely reject it.
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