Steven Pinker's Whiggish Faith in Progress

In his enormous new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, psycholinguist turned best-selling popular-science writer Steven Pinker calls the drastic decline in violence in the modern era “the most important thing that has ever happened in human history.” But we’ve remained so fixated on daily reports of murder, repression, and insurrection, he tells us, that we’ve failed to note the larger trend behind them and forgotten the many millennia in which we condoned or celebrated brutal practices long since abandoned. “Readers of this book,” Pinker writes, in one of many catalogues of infamy that punctuate his triumphal survey, “no longer have to worry about abduction into sexual slavery; divinely commanded genocide; lethal circuses and tournaments; punishment on the cross, rack, wheel, stake, or strappado for holding unpopular beliefs; decapitation for not bearing a son; disembowelment for having dated a royal; pistol duels to defend their honor; beachside fisticuffs to impress their girlfriends; or the prospect of a nuclear world war that would put an end to civilization or to human life itself.”