Is Violence Really on the Rise?
Many older people will rue the “good old days”. Some aspects are obviously individual preferences; which means they are subjective and hence there’s nothing to argue about on those points. How about something more objective, something that is not just an opinion? Steven Pinker looked at the evidence of the amount of violence over the years in his book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined : the book’s title makes obvious the conclusion he came to. But that seems so counter-intuitive when ISIS, Ukraine, Gaza, terrorism, violence against children and rapes are in the news/our minds all the time. Most people would agree with Michael Ignatieff’s description of today’s world: “The tectonic plates of a world order that are being pushed apart by the volcanic upward pressure of violence and hatred.” Pinker wrote an article summarizing his book’s points . So how does he explain all such news? “News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen. W...