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A review by agnexperience
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker
4.0
3.5 Audio. On the whole, it's pretty uplifting. The first half of the book was amazing and the rest was OK. Too long - seriously, you could read only the first few chapters to satisfy most of your interest if you don't know much beforehand. The book has lots of statistics and relevant sources referenced, but he seems to have received a lot of criticism as well, so I don't know... Sometimes it seems that people are expecting an argument developed to perfection where there is only a flawed society making confused baby steps of progress to base it on. I mean... he isn't saying that there's no violence left in the world nor that it comes down to one single thing like horrible, horrible capitalism (or communism or woman-brains or atheism sth). Anyway, I wasn't too triggered, the author made it pretty clear that it's mostly conjecture. Still, I think that when read as a very general guide to trends in violence, everything holds up quite well. But it should be half as long.
The part that interested me the most concerned the rise of self control, "appropriate" behaviour and codes of public conduct together with more empathy.
“Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else’s thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person’s vantage point. Not only are you taking in sights and sounds that you could not experience firsthand, but you have stepped inside that person’s mind and are temporarily sharing his or her attitudes and reactions.”
***
“Self-control has been credited with one of the greatest reductions of violence in history, the thirtyfold drop in homicide between medieval and modern Europe. Recall that according to Norbert Elias’s theory of the Civilizing Process, the consolidation of states and the growth of commerce did more than just tilt the incentive structure away from plunder. It also inculcated an ethic of self-control that made continence and propriety second nature. People refrained from stabbing each other at the dinner table and amputating each other’s noses at the same time as they refrained from urinating in closets, copulating in public, passing gas at the dinner table, and gnawing on bones and returning them to the serving dish. A culture of honor, in which men were respected for lashing out against insults, became a culture of dignity, in which men were respected for controlling their impulses.”
The part that interested me the most concerned the rise of self control, "appropriate" behaviour and codes of public conduct together with more empathy.
“Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else’s thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person’s vantage point. Not only are you taking in sights and sounds that you could not experience firsthand, but you have stepped inside that person’s mind and are temporarily sharing his or her attitudes and reactions.”
***
“Self-control has been credited with one of the greatest reductions of violence in history, the thirtyfold drop in homicide between medieval and modern Europe. Recall that according to Norbert Elias’s theory of the Civilizing Process, the consolidation of states and the growth of commerce did more than just tilt the incentive structure away from plunder. It also inculcated an ethic of self-control that made continence and propriety second nature. People refrained from stabbing each other at the dinner table and amputating each other’s noses at the same time as they refrained from urinating in closets, copulating in public, passing gas at the dinner table, and gnawing on bones and returning them to the serving dish. A culture of honor, in which men were respected for lashing out against insults, became a culture of dignity, in which men were respected for controlling their impulses.”