Steven Pinker - the Better Angels of our Nature

Having got my eyesight back after two years of drug-induced cataracts and with migraine headaches most days, I am enjoying some heavy-duty reading again. Steven Pinker's book is getting me very excited.

His thesis is that violence in the human species is continuing a dramatic fall, stretching over millenia, dating indeed from the agricultural revolution. Because this is so counter-cultural, he needs the book's 900 pages to prove it and hypothesise about it.  Bill Gates' cover blurb ('one of the most important books I've read -- not just this year, but ever') is for once more than the polite puffing of friends.

The book is so counter-cultural because those  of us who read the news in the 60s, 70s and 80s saw a world going to pot; Pinker shows this was just a counter-cultural eddy against a much longer flow, and the fall in crime in the1990s and beyond is merely a resumption of that old norm. Totally fascinating.

So much to think about! (This is me speculating, not Steven Pinker)
1. So history has a direction after all and 'human progress' means something? The twentieth century rather left that 19th-century view bleeding in the street.
2.  Here is evidence-for me--though certainly not for the convinced non-Christian Steven Pinker--that Christ is King and 'of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end.' It is not the case that the world was going bad until Jesus came and fixed it. But it can surely be argued that here we have the 'left hand of God' and the 'right hand of God' working together. God guides human history generally into a more fruitful and less violent place; and at the epicentre, acclerating this trend and filling it out with revelation, is the life, death and resurrection of Christ and the peace-making activity of his people. I don't think Prof Pinker would enjoy this conclusion (I would like to write another blog about his so-called humanism and measured disapproval of the Christian faith) but I find it a bit stunning-- a large body of unsuspected social-science evidence that beautifully complements natural theology, not completely unlike the body of physical evidence that leads physicists to conclude the Universe began in a moment of creation at the Big Bang.

You gotta read the book.