Dueling and slavery, according to John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State University, have disappeared. Steven Pinker, a psychologist at Harvard University, isn’t making the same argument. Rather, he argues that based on previous historical epochs, human beings have actually become more and more peaceful and civil; even if the news headlines are constantly screaming of violence, war, ethnic cleansing and cold-blooded murder. He has a point.
Classical works like Iliad, Odyssey, even Biblical documents, are rife with examples of sheer cruelties. Enemies of the scientific and political establishment are often disemboweled, quartered, indeed, literally torn apart into shreds. In vivid details, Steve Pinker was able to document all of these macabre events.
More importantly, Steven Pinker argued that the “survival of the fittest,” as spawned by Charles Darwin, a theory that has since acquired the status of science, aided and abetted not least by biology and anthropology, has always been a mischaracterization. Animals and homo sapiens are shaped like “survival machines.” They lash out against anything and anyone due to centuries of their evolutionary biology. Their offensive systems are premised on their self defense. This is the case with a mere cell, as it is a fully grown animal or human being. To the degree, our social systems are not facing an external threat, war can be a rarity, indeed, a random event, not a regular occurrence.
“The Better Angels of our Nature,” does not dismiss overt and covert aggression altogether. Rather, Steven Pinker believes that aggression is not as deterministic as many assume. Some of which were defensive actions, while others are egoistical projections of one’s wounded feelings. Either way, aggression is here to stay, and the world has seen less of it, but in and of itself, aggression is neither more or less. It has to be understood in a wider and deeper historical context.