Getting Better

I've been taking my reading of Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature at quite a slow pace despite its readability. It's much less technical than his work on language and the mind and it would be easy to storm through it without sufficiently engaging with the ideas on offer. But each example he gives to backup his thesis is in itself worth pondering. The interest lies in the details.
 
Judging from Pinker's characterisation of just how radically unacceptable his thesis is for many readers I seem to be in a small minority in thinking that it's obvious that the violence of which mankind is capable has fairly steadily declined over the centuries. Yet it seems to me that anyone with a feel for history who's reasonably widely read would know this. I seem to remember Stephen King making the same point in a somewhat looser manner in one of his reflections on his own writing in the horror genre. (I think it might be in Danse Macabre somewhere.) King's idea was that in writing about violence he was reminding readers who rarely if ever experienced it what it felt like and how central to human nature our aggression is, even though we are capable of keeping it under control.

I suppose the fundamentally optimistic notion that we can exert a remarkable degree of control over our baser instincts goes against the fundamental easy pessimism of our age. It's a bit sad, isn't it, that it's so difficult for us to recognise when we get something right.