Michelle: I'm going to give you a choice, Mark. You can live in modern-day London, or you can be an aristocrat in 14th-century England. Which do you pick? Mark: The aristocrat, obviously! Castles, feasts, maybe a cool suit of armor... no contest. I'll take the medieval life, thank you very much. Michelle: Bad choice. Your chance of being murdered was about 50 times higher than it is for the average Londoner today. Mark: Fifty times? Come on. That can't be right. I’d have guards, a moat… Michelle: It wouldn't matter. That's the kind of mind-bending data that fills Steven Pinker's monumental book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. And what's fascinating is that Pinker isn't a historian; he's a world-renowned cognitive psychologist from Harvard. Mark: A psychologist? So he's not just counting bodies, he's trying to get inside our heads. Michelle: Exactly. He came at this question by asking why our collective psychology seems to have shifted so dramatically away from violence. The book was a massive bestseller, praised by figures like Bill Gates, but it also kicked up a huge storm of controversy. Mark: I can see why! Every time I turn on the news, it feels like the world is falling apart. We see war, crime, political division... How can anyone seriously argue that we're getting more peaceful? It feels completely wrong. Michelle: It does. It feels counter-intuitive to almost everyone. And Pinker gets that. He says to understand our surprisingly peaceful present, we have to get brutally honest about our past.

Michelle: He asks us to take a trip to what he calls a truly foreign country: the past. And the customs there are… unsettling. Let's start with a 5,000-year-old cold case. In 1991, hikers in the Alps found a body melting out of a glacier. They thought it was a modern mountaineer. Mark: Right, I think I've heard of this guy. Ötzi the Iceman. Michelle: That's him. But when archaeologists got there, they found he was from the Copper Age. And for years, they thought he just got lost in a blizzard. But a decade later, new scans found something they'd missed: an arrowhead, lodged deep in his back, which had severed a major artery. Mark: Whoa. So he was murdered? Michelle: He was. Hunted down and shot in the back. He also had a deep cut on his hand from a close-quarters fight a day or two earlier. This wasn't an accident; it was a snapshot of the chronic violence of prehistoric life. Pinker’s point is that for most of human history, a violent death was a terrifyingly common way to go. Mark: Okay, that’s one 5,000-year-old guy. But what about, say, the Middle Ages? We romanticize it with knights and chivalry. Michelle: Romanticize is the right word. Pinker digs up the records, and it's horrifying. In 14th-century Oxford, a place of learning, the homicide rate was over 100 per 100,000 people. Mark: Hold on, what is it today? For comparison. Michelle: In modern Britain, it's less than 1. So, a student at Oxford back then was more than a hundred times more likely to be murdered than someone living in London today. And the violence was so casual. Public executions weren't just punishments; they were a form of mass entertainment. People would pack a lunch. Mark: That’s just… barbaric. So public torture was like the Super Bowl? Michelle: It's a grim analogy, but in a way, yes. And that's one of Pinker's most profound points. It’s not just that there was more violence; it's that their entire mindset, their sensibility towards suffering, was different. The revulsion we feel hearing about this? That feeling is a modern invention. Mark: I'm still stuck on something, though. Even if the distant past was a nightmare, the 20th century gave us World War I, World War II, the Holocaust, the Gulag... We invented industrial-scale killing. How does that fit into a story of declining violence? That feels like a massive, bloody exception. Michelle: It's the biggest challenge to his thesis, and he confronts it head-on. He argues that while the absolute numbers are staggering, we have to adjust for population. The An Lushan Revolt in 8th-century China, for example, may have killed a sixth of the world's entire population. Proportionally, it was far deadlier than World War II. But more importantly, he says these horrific events force us to ask: what went right the rest of the time? What forces were powerful enough to stop that from being the norm? Mark: Okay, I'm listening. What are these forces? Michelle: Pinker’s first answer is surprisingly un-romantic. It's not that we suddenly grew halos and became nice. It's that we were, in many ways, forced to be.

Michelle: He calls the first great shift the "Pacification Process." It's based on an idea from the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who argued that life in a "state of nature"—without a government—is a war of all against all. It’s constant fear. Mark: Because your neighbor might decide he wants your stuff and there's no 911 to call. Michelle: Exactly. You might attack him first, just in case he's thinking of attacking you. It’s an endless, paranoid cycle. Hobbes's solution was what he called the "Leviathan"—a state, a government, a king—that holds a monopoly on violence. Mark: So, the Leviathan is basically the biggest, baddest sheriff in town who tells all the smaller gangs to knock it off or they'll have to deal with him. Michelle: That's a perfect way to put it! The state disarms the populace and says, "You don't get to use violence for revenge or gain anymore. I'm the only one who gets to do that, and I'll do it through courts and laws." This dramatically reduces the incentive for everyday aggression. You're less likely to get into a knife fight over a parking spot if you know the consequences aren't just a black eye, but jail time. Mark: That makes sense. You trade some personal freedom for a whole lot of security. Michelle: You do. And this process was supercharged by a second one Pinker calls the "Civilizing Process." Over centuries in Europe, scattered feudal territories were consolidated into large, centralized kingdoms. The warring knights and barons were either crushed or brought into the royal court. They had to trade their swords for table manners. Mark: From warriors to courtiers. Michelle: Precisely. And at the same time, something else was happening: the rise of commerce. Pinker argues that trade is a powerful engine for peace. In a zero-sum world of raiding, your neighbor is more valuable to you dead, so you can take his land. But in a positive-sum world of commerce, your neighbor is more valuable alive. Mark: Because he can be your customer. Or your supplier. Or your business partner. Michelle: Exactly! Commerce forces you to practice empathy, to see things from the other person's perspective to make a deal. It creates networks of interdependence. And the data here is stunning. As these two forces—the Leviathan and commerce—took hold in Europe from the late Middle Ages to the 20th century, homicide rates plummeted by a factor of ten to fifty. Mark: That is a staggering drop. But it also sounds a bit cynical. Is peace really just a byproduct of government control and capitalism? That's a bit bleak. Michelle: It is! Pinker would be the first to admit this isn't a feel-good story about humanity's noble spirit. It's a pragmatic story about changing incentives. But it's hard to argue with the results. It's the difference between settling a dispute with a duel to the death versus suing someone in court. One is definitely less bloody. Mark: True. But it also creates a new problem, right? The Leviathan itself can become the source of violence. Government tyranny, oppression, genocide... that's the state using its monopoly on force. Michelle: Absolutely. And that's why Pinker says the Leviathan is only part one of the story. It solved the problem of everyday anarchy, but it created the problem of institutionalized violence. To solve that, we needed another revolution. This time, it was a revolution inside our own heads.

Michelle: Pinker calls this next phase the "Humanitarian Revolution," and it really takes off during the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries. For the first time, people started systematically questioning forms of violence that had been accepted for millennia. Mark: What kind of things are we talking about? Michelle: Think about judicial torture. For centuries, it was standard legal procedure to stretch people on the rack or burn their feet to get a confession. It was considered logical. But then, thinkers like Cesare Beccaria in Italy came along and wrote these explosive essays arguing that torture was not only barbaric, but also stupid. A person being tortured will say anything to make the pain stop, not necessarily the truth. Mark: So it's an unreliable way to get information. A rational argument, not just an emotional one. Michelle: Exactly. And these ideas spread like wildfire. Within a century, almost every major European nation had abolished judicial torture. The same thing happened with witch hunts, religious persecution, and slavery. These weren't just top-down decrees from kings; they were grassroots movements driven by new ideas. Mark: Where did these new ideas come from? Why then? Michelle: Pinker points to a fascinating technological and cultural shift: the explosion of literacy and the invention of the novel. Before the 18th century, most people's perspective was limited to their family and village. But when you read a novel, especially an epistolary novel written as a series of letters, you are literally placed inside the mind of another person. You feel the hopes and fears of a character who might be a different gender, class, or from a different country. Mark: Wow. So you're saying reading a book can literally make the world less violent? That's an incredible thought. It’s like a technology for empathy. Michelle: That's Pinker's argument. He suggests that this expanding circle of empathy is one of our "Better Angels." It's one of the key psychological faculties that pulls us away from violence. Mark: What are the other "Better Angels"? Michelle: He names four. First is Empathy, which we just discussed. Second is Self-Control, the ability to inhibit our impulses and think about long-term consequences, which the Civilizing Process helped develop. Third is the Moral Sense, a set of shared norms about right and wrong. And fourth, and perhaps most important for Pinker, is Reason. Mark: Reason seems to be the one driving all the others. Michelle: I think he would agree. Reason allows us to step outside our own parochial viewpoint, to see the futility of cycles of revenge, and to recognize that other people, just like us, don't want to suffer. It allows us to design better systems, like democracy and human rights, that institutionalize peace.

Mark: So if I'm putting this all together, it's a three-act story. Act One: The past was a violent, chaotic nightmare. Act Two: Powerful external forces, the state and the market, forced us to behave whether we wanted to or not. Act Three: A revolution of ideas and empathy, our 'Better Angels,' taught us to want to behave better. Michelle: That's a perfect summary. And Pinker's ultimate point, which is both hopeful and deeply sobering, is that this isn't a story of inevitable, magical progress. It's a story about humanity stumbling upon a series of brilliant solutions to the problem of our own violent nature. The Leviathan, commerce, humanism, reason—these are, in a sense, technologies for peace. Mark: And technologies can break. Or be forgotten. Michelle: Exactly. The progress isn't guaranteed. It depends on us maintaining and improving those technologies. It's a constant project. The decline of violence is the most important and least appreciated story in human history, but the final chapter hasn't been written. Mark: It really makes you look at the world differently. The past seems so much more brutal, and the present, for all its flaws, feels a bit more precious. Michelle: It does. And it leaves you with a really powerful, and maybe uncomfortable, question. Pinker quotes Voltaire: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." It makes you wonder, what are the 'absurdities' we believe today that future generations will be horrified by? What violence are we still blind to? Mark: That is a heavy question to end on. And a good one. We'd love to hear what you all think. Drop us a comment on our socials. What do you think is our modern blind spot when it comes to violence? Michelle: This is Aibrary, signing off.