[CliffFletcher]

Man is violent because we're status-seeking primates. The rate of violence among primitive people was staggering.

Originally Posted by peter12

Scientific humanism has also wrought horrors never seen before in history. Pinker breezes past the genocide of indigenous people, the enslavement of Africans, and the Holocaust like they are outliers.

No, he doesn't. Read the book. He captures all of those events and includes them in his empirical analysis.

He also documents the incredibly high level of day-to-day violence in pre-state peoples. Ever since Rousseau, thinkers in the West have been attractive to the myth of the noble savage. Of Eden before the fall. But it's nothing more than a projection of our desires. We're uncovering more and more evidence of systematic violence among our earliest ancestors. Heads stove in. Bones showing terrible trauma from weapons. Mass strangulation.

Read up on the way Russian peasants lived before the revolution. It's as good a window into the Middle Ages as we have, and it was appalling. Brutal, ignorant people living in cramped and filthy conditions, the man of the house a vicious tyrant who routinely threatened and beat his children, spouse, in-laws, farm-hands. Disputes over boundaries and farm tools routinely leading to someone's head getting stove in with a rock. Drunken festivals devolving into family feuds with savage beatings and murder by knife or club.

The murder rate in medieval London and Paris was twenty times what is it today. Affairs of honour, whether the crude disputes of gambling dens or the ritualized duels of gentlemen, routinely led to someone bleeding out on the ground. This sort of low-level violence is responsible for far more deaths than wars.

Then there's non-lethal violence. Spousal beating, severe corporal punishment of children, and grotesque cruelty to animals were commonplace up until recently. Three hundred years ago a family visiting a market in Europe would roar with delight at the spectacle of a cat being lit on fire, or dogs tearing apart a bear.

Originally Posted by peter12

This past century was the most violent, oppressive, blood-soaked century in human history.

Not on a per capita basis. The conquests of the Mongols in the 13th century, for example, left 40 million dead. That's the equivalent of 278 million people in the mid-20th century (55 million were killed in WW2). Pinker's stats rank WW2 as the 9th most lethal event in history. The most level event? The An Lushan revolt in China in the 8th century, which left an estimated 36 million dead (or the equivalent of 429 million in the mid 20th century). Our sense of scale when it comes to violent events has a strongly Western bias, the East being largely ignored by popular Western culture.

You can read some of Pinker's responses to frequently asked questions here.

Originally Posted by peter12

If the detente we have now is only because weapons of war have become too deadly to use on a scaled basis, then this is not some sort of massive altruism unleashed by modernity, but an existential dread that has frozen us all in place.

Nobody has claimed it's altruism that has prevented war. The long peace post-WWII is owed to a monopoly on violence by a small number of great powers, an expanding web of mutually-beneficial trade arrangements, the decline of religion, the rise of democracy, the modern ridicule of honour culture, and increased cultural exchange.