Especially the part about the peaceful tribal peoples.
How about developing representative democracy based on personal sovereignty, (exactly)?
This definitely is an interesting historical article.
No MoFo better touch my cats.
Forty or fifty years is a blip in the time-scale he’s using. He cherry-picked his starting point and his conclusion is nonsense.
There was nothing like the world-wide scale of violence, sadism, terrorism seen by the preceding forty years from the Russian Revolution through the Japanese terrorizing of China and Korea through Stalin’s monstrousness and Mao’s long march (and all the Soviet and Chinese satellite states, including the supposedly non-Stalinist Tito whose death island was as utterly sadistic and mindlessly cruel as anything Stalin or Mao did). Go back fifty years and the “enlightened” Turkish genocide against the Armenians can be added to the roster of infamy.
Even if one starts from 1950 (mid-twentieth century) we have Pol Pot, the Cultural Revolution in China, Mao’s deliberate wasting of millions of lives using the Koreans as proxies for his ambitions, Idi Amin, Rwanda, Darfur, the North Korean starvation and ongoing death camps—sadism is alive and well in each of those and was/is being used as means of political control exactly as it was in the past. Moreover, violent manipulation of people’s minds along the lines of Orwell’s 1984 is one of the reasons that overt violence has been dispensed with in some instances.
And no mention whatsoever of the millions of babies burned alive by saline, ripped limb from limb or just suctioned out of their homes into oblivion since 1973.
To tout the “decline” of the last fifty years or so as heralding a sea-change in human evolution is stupid, just stupid. Cruelty, terrorism as policy, sadism was used by rulers for thousands of years, to be sure. But those rulers lacked the sheer technical means to apply those methods to millions at a time. They relied on making brutal examples of a few in order to cow the rest.
Our sadists of the past 100 years—including the Jihadists of today—employ terrorism and sadism in order to control people but are capable of doing it to entire populations with an efficiency undreamed of by tyrants of a thousand or five hundred years ago.
Pinker is a fool, a naive fool, who plays into the hands of the next round of genocidal monsters.
Violence is the first recourse of the competent.
These are exactly the kinds of things the Founders were thinking of when they forebad "cruel & unusual punishments." This is just one way in which the emergence of America (whose political culture grew out of Reformation Christian thinking) as the dominant world power, and the spread of our ideas, has made the world better. Those gruesome punishments were all used by governments which did not "derive their powers from the consent of the governed," but exploited their people on behalf of heritary elites and corrupt established churches. Communist, Muslim, and Third World countries still live by that barbaric system, and they and their socialist allies would gladly move us back into serfdom.
France had recently murdered or expelled its Protestants (Huguenots), which is a major reason why their society became, and remains, such a corrupt and unstable one.
You don't need to like this for it to be true...
Good article. Thanks for posting!