The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined

his book is about what may be the most important thing that has ever hap­ pened in human history. Believe it or not—and I know that most people do not—violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence.

The logic of the Leviathan can be summed up in a triangle. In every act of violence, there are three interested parties: the aggressor, the victim, and a bystander. Each has a motive for violence: the aggressor to prey upon the victim, the victim to retaliate, the bystander to minimize collateral damage from their fight. Violence between the combatants may be called war; violence by the bystander against the combatants may be called law. The Leviathan theory, in a nutshell, is that law is better than war.

the central theses of the Enlightenment, according to which what is true, or right, or good, or beautiful, can be shown to be valid for all men by the correct application of objective methods of discovery and interpretation, open to anyone to use and verify.

Of course, real wars fall into a power-law distribution, which has a thicker tail than an exponential (in this case, a greater number of severe wars). But an exponential can be transformed into a power law if the values are modulated by a second exponential process pushing in the opposite direction. And attri­ tion games have a twist that might do just that. If one side in an attrition game were to leak its intention to concede in the next instant by, say, twitching or blanching or showing some other sign of nervousness, its opponent could capitalize on the “tell” by waiting just a bit longer, and it would win the prize every time. As Richard Dawkins has put it, in a species that often takes part in wars of attrition, one expects the evolution of a poker face.

Social scientists should never predict the future; it’s hard enough to predict the past.

Metaphorical thinking goes in both directions. Not only do we apply dis­ gust metaphors to morally devalued peoples, but we tend to morally devalue people who are physically disgusting (a phenomenon we encountered in chap­ ter 4 when considering Lynn Hunt’s theory that a rise in hygiene in Europe caused a decline in cruel punishments). At one pole of the continuum, white­ clad ascetics who undergo rituals of purification are revered as holy men and women. At the other, people living in degradation and filth are reviled as subhuman.