Narrator: What if the daily news, with its endless feed of conflict, crime, and chaos, is giving us a profoundly distorted picture of reality? What if, contrary to everything we feel, humanity is living in the most peaceful era of its existence? This is the startling and provocative argument at the heart of Steven Pinker’s landmark book, The Better Angels of Our Nature. It challenges our deepest intuitions about the world by marshaling an overwhelming amount of data to argue that violence, in all its forms, has been in a long and dramatic decline. The book embarks on a journey through millennia of human history to uncover not just that this decline has happened, but precisely why.

Narrator: To grasp the decline of violence, one must first confront the reality of the past, a reality our sanitized cultural memory often erases. Pinker argues that life for our ancestors was unimaginably dangerous. He doesn't just present statistics; he tells stories locked in ancient remains. Consider Ötzi the Iceman, a 5,000-year-old body discovered frozen in the Alps. Initially thought to be a lost hiker, scientists later found an arrowhead lodged in his back. He was murdered. Or Kennewick Man, a 9,400-year-old skeleton found in Washington state with a stone projectile embedded in his hip.

This brutality wasn't just personal; it was cultural. The Bible and Homer’s Iliad are filled with graphic accounts of genocide, rape, and massacre, presented not as tragedies but as facts of life. In medieval Europe, knights were not the chivalrous heroes of romance but often brutal thugs. Public entertainment included burning cats alive for laughs, and executions were gruesome public spectacles. Pinker’s point is clear: our modern sensibilities are a recent invention. The baseline from which we measure progress was not a peaceful garden, but a world of constant, casual, and celebrated violence.

Narrator: The first major drop in violence occurred with what Pinker calls the Pacification Process. Drawing on the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, he argues that in a state of nature, without a central government, life is a "war of all against all." Violence is a rational strategy driven by competition, fear, and the quest for glory. In such an anarchic world, a preemptive strike is often the safest bet.

The solution, Hobbes argued, was a "Leviathan"—a state or government with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. By punishing aggressors, the Leviathan removes the incentive for predation and the need for retaliatory vengeance. Archaeological and anthropological data support this. Homicide rates in non-state societies, like hunter-gatherer tribes, were astronomically high. Forensic analysis of prehistoric sites suggests that around 15% of people died violently. With the rise of the first kingdoms and empires, rates of violent death plummeted by a factor of five. The state, for all its own potential for cruelty, pacified daily life by disarming its people and becoming the sole arbiter of justice.

Narrator: While the state reduced tribal warfare, daily life in Europe remained incredibly violent for centuries. The second great decline, which Pinker calls the Civilizing Process, tackled this. Between the late Middle Ages and the 20th century, homicide rates in Europe fell by a factor of ten to fifty. In 14th-century Oxford, the murder rate was around 110 per 100,000 people. Today, in most of Europe, it is less than 1.

This change was driven by two forces. First, the consolidation of power by kings created a more effective infrastructure of justice. Second, the rise of commerce created new incentives. As the historian Norbert Elias argued, the zero-sum plunder of a warrior culture gave way to the positive-sum game of trade. In a commercial society, other people are more valuable alive than dead. This fostered a psychological shift toward greater self-control, long-term thinking, and empathy. Manners, etiquette, and the internalization of shame became tools for navigating a more complex social world, taming the impulsive violence that had once been the norm.

Narrator: The 18th-century Enlightenment triggered the next great wave of progress, the Humanitarian Revolution. This was the first time in history that organized movements arose to abolish socially sanctioned forms of violence. Thinkers like Voltaire, Cesare Beccaria, and John Locke argued that practices like judicial torture, religious persecution, and slavery were not just cruel, but irrational.

Pinker illustrates this with the horrific history of "superstitious killings." For centuries, thousands of people were burned at the stake as witches based on confessions extracted through torture. The Duke of Brunswick famously exposed the absurdity of this system. When a woman under torture accused two prominent Jesuit scholars of being warlocks, the Duke turned to the scholars and asked if he should now torture them until they confessed. The point was made, and the practice began to crumble under the weight of its own illogic. This revolution was fueled by the rise of literacy and cosmopolitanism, which allowed people to inhabit the perspectives of others, expanding the circle of empathy and making cruelty to others feel increasingly unacceptable.

Narrator: Despite the horrors of the 20th century, Pinker argues it contains two of the most profound declines in violence. The first is the Long Peace: the period since the end of World War II, during which the world's great powers have not fought a single war with each other. This is the longest stretch of peace between major powers in modern history. While the Cold War’s nuclear standoff—the "balance of terror"—certainly played a role, Pinker argues other factors were more decisive.

These include the spread of democracy, as democracies are far less likely to fight each other; the growth of international trade, which makes partners more valuable than conquests; and the rise of international organizations that promote peaceful dispute resolution. War between developed nations has, for the first time in history, become not just undesirable but unthinkable.

Narrator: Even more surprising is the New Peace, a trend that began after the end of the Cold War in 1989. Since then, the world has seen a steep decline in all forms of organized conflict. The number of interstate wars, civil wars, and genocides has dropped dramatically. The rate of death from these conflicts has fallen by over 90%. Even terrorism, despite its high media profile, kills far fewer people than it did in the 1970s and 80s. This peace is fragile and uneven, but the global trend is unmistakable. It is driven by the same forces behind the Long Peace, now amplified by a globalized network of peacekeeping, international justice, and a growing norm against violent conquest.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from The Better Angels of Our Nature is that progress is a real, measurable phenomenon. Human nature is not a fixed blueprint for violence; it contains a portfolio of motives. Our "inner demons"—like predation and revenge—can lead us to violence, but our "better angels"—empathy, self-control, reason, and a moral sense—can guide us toward peace. History shows that the right institutions and ideas can systematically favor our better angels.

The book leaves us with a profound and challenging thought. The decline of violence was not an accident, nor was it inevitable. It was the result of human ingenuity, of discovering and implementing ideas and institutions like government, commerce, and human rights. The great challenge, then, is to understand this fragile and precious achievement. If we can identify what we have been doing right, we can ensure that the long arc of the moral universe continues to bend toward justice and peace.