Just looking at Steven Pinker's new book in a bookshop, and the preface has a comment about modernism that I found fascinating. Can't see quote of exact words but the gist is about moving from family, tribal and religious ways of being to rational open law and rights based ways. They are utterly different worlds.
I had ridden to the shops on my bike, wearing a high tech winter jacket, warm artificial fabric hat and carrying a mobile phone and various debit and credit cards with chips in them. I am unaware that I was wearing anything religious or tribal.
I saw many people wearing religious garb of various types.
Why are so many people still displaying openly such old fashioned ways of thinking and being? Are they unaware of how seriously out of step they are with the modern world?
Are we by being tolerant of these behaviours actually allowing people more respect than they deserve and therefore allowing people to wallow in nasty dangerous tribal and religious ways?
We’ve all had the experience of reading about a bloody war or shocking crime and asking, “What is the world coming to?” But we seldom ask, “How bad was the world in the past?” In this startling new book, the bestselling cognitive scientist Steven Pinker shows that the world of the past was much worse.
With the help of more than a hundred graphs and maps, Pinker presents some astonishing numbers. Tribal warfare was nine times as deadly as war and genocide in the 20th century. The murder rate of Medieval Europe was more than thirty times what it is today. Slavery, sadistic punishments, and frivolous executions were unexceptionable features of life for millennia, then suddenly were targeted for abolition. Wars between developed countries have vanished, and even in the developing world, wars kill a fraction of the people they did a few decades ago. Rape, battering, hate crimes, deadly riots, child abuse, cruelty to animals—all substantially down.
How could this have happened, if human nature has not changed? What led people to stop sacrificing children, stabbing each other at the dinner table, or burning cats and disemboweling criminals as forms of popular entertainment? The key to explaining the decline of violence, Pinker argues, is to understand the inner demons that incline us toward violence (such as revenge, sadism, and tribalism) and the better angels that steer us away. Thanks to the spread of government, literacy, trade, and cosmopolitanism, we increasingly control our impulses, empathize with others, bargain rather than plunder, debunk toxic ideologies, and deploy our powers of reason to reduce the temptations of violence.
Topic: Modernism