The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes by Stephen Pinker

It has become a cliché that the great increase in material wealth over the centuries has not been accompanied by any corresponding moral advance. Human nature, it is said, remains the same — with the implication that much of it is pretty nasty. Here, however, comes a leading evolutionary biologist, Stephen Pinker, to claim that human violence has decreased over the millennia and centuries.

He is in a good position to make that claim, having previously got into trouble with the Left by showing that we are ‘hard wired’ for much of our behaviour and that it is not all due to environmental influences. In this 800-page book, which encompasses everything from anthropology and ancient history to brain scanning and empirical psychology, he has a fine shot at making good his claim.

How can this be true after two world wars, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the rise of  religion-backed terrorism, not to speak of the lives lost in Iraq and Afghanistan and many other horrors? The big mistake made by the fashionable pessimists is their failure to treat deaths and other results of violence as a proportion of the relevant population.