* Compared to most of the postwar period, 2015 has been relatively peaceful
* Compared with previous centuries it has been very peaceful indeed
* 'For 500 years, Western European countries started two new wars a year; since WWII the number has been zero,' points out a Harvard psychologist
* Attacks of the kind that killed civilians in Paris, Ankara, California, Beirut and Garissa in Kenya this year are big news because they are rare, he adds
* Almost every other kind of violence, including murders, capital punishment, domestic violence, torture and hunting, has also fallen
This year may be remembered for barrel bombs, beheadings and the Bataclan massacre, but according to a Harvard psychologist, a remarkable long term downward trend in violence is continuing.
Wars are far less common and deadly than in the recent past, terrorism is rare, and the European refugee crisis is nothing new, said Steven Pinker, a bestselling science author.
'The news is a systematically misleading way to understand the world,' he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview.
WNU Editor: I am not that optimistic .... war and conflict is in our nature, and this lull in wars and conflict is just that .... a lull.
2 comments:
"For 500 years, Western European countries started two new wars a year; since WWII the number has been zero,' points out a Harvard psychologist"
Zero, he says... Well, he obviously doesn't consider Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and all the other conflicts that are off the radar in the media, 'wars'...
I would certainly consider them wars.
I've read this book and believe it is worth the time. This may be semantics, but Western Europe didn't start the wars in Afghanistan or Libya or Iraq (they were either already in a state of war or started by the US; IE:Iraq) The thesis of S. Pinker's book is spot-on. It is the lack of appreciation for the fragility of the system that has led to a decrease in violence that we should pay attention to. just because you are less likely to die a violent death today does not mean that will hold true tomorrow. We are all still cave-men afraid of the tiger in the bushes; all that has change are our tools. those tools are certainly more deadly, but some of them have created an environment that makes violence toward one another costly or undesirable. Remove those tools from our collective toolbox and we will all devolve back into cave-men. Don't write off S. Pinker's ideas too quickly; they could save our lives.
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