Customer Reviews

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

5 star:		(34)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(8)
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1 star:		(7)

 

 

This is a huge book, but as Pinker says, it is a huge subject. He organizes himself by lists. First, there are six significant trends which have led to a decrease in violence.
1. Our evolution from hunter gatherers into settled civilizations, which he calls the Pacification Process.
2. The consolidation of small kingdoms and duchies into large kingdoms with centralized authority and commerce, which he calls the Civilizing Process.
3. The emergence of Enlightenment philosophy, and it's respect for the individual through what he calls the Humanitarian Revolution.
4. Since World War II, violence has been suppressed, first by the overwhelming force of the two parties in the Cold War, and more recently by the American hegemony. Pinker calls this the Long Peace.
5. The general trend, even apart from the Cold War, of wars to be more infrequent, and less violent, however autocratic and anti-democratic the governments may be. Call this the New Peace.
6. Lastly, the growth of peace and domestic societies, and with it the diminishing level of violence through small things like schoolyard fights, bullying, and picking on gays and minorities. He titles this the Rights Revolution.

Pinker then goes on to examine the traditional explanations of violence, the traditional explanations of human nature which account for violence. There is practical violence, which you might call necessary violence. Then there are dominance, revenge, sadism, and ideologically driven violence. Opposing these are what he calls the better angels of human nature, empathy, self-control, our moral sense, and reason. Many of these characteristics are shared with our primate brethren, the chimpanzees on down, but some of them are uniquely human. With our ability to reason, and the unique human ability to impute motive to conspecifics of our own or other tribes, and our ability to express ourselves verbally, we are better able than any other species to negotiate our way through situations of conflict. A good deal of the decline in violence has to do with the maturation of these processes through the genetic evolution of the human animal, and more recently, through the evolution of our society and the ways in which societies socialize their members.

He concludes with five historical forces, which I find a little bit harder to grasp, but which serve as a vehicle for explanations of a number of interesting phenomena in the recent evolution of society. We have evolved Leviathan societies, in which the individual is pretty well controlled by state force. Not only our police, but our employers, our schools, and every other institution holds violence firmly in check as a matter of its own functioning. Other forces are commerce, which only happens when the partners are on peaceful terms, the evolution of women from mere propagators of the species to intellectual equals and partners in all of our undertakings, the growing information networks which bind us together, a process he calls cosmopolitanism, and lastly the increasing application of reason, which we would probably call the scientific basis, to human affairs, leading to a recognition that violence is in most circumstances not the best way to achieve one's ends.

In his discussion of ideologically driven violence he spends several pages discussing ideologies themselves. Specifically, he describes the groupthink environment in which a group comes to embrace dogmas that most of the individuals within the group would reject, or at least question, if they approached them on their own. The key mechanism is punishment of dissention, the ostracism of people who don't mouth the groupthink. Sounds to me to describe political correctness at Harvard just as much as Communism under Stalin. I am pleased that Pinker had the courage to resist said PC and defend the science behind the observations which got Larry Summers fired as president of Harvard. Calls to mind the "Kinsley gaffe", "A truthful statement told accidentally, usually by a politician."

For a guy with a long history of writing about evolution, he seems to pretty much avoid its implications in this book. In fact, he has more or less morphed from a true scientist to a social scientist/historian. Whereas "The Language Instinct" and "Words and Rules" got into leading edge science, and "The Blank Slate" brought us up to date on the theory of human evolution, this book is pretty much a compilation of other peoples' statistics and observations, weighted with Pinker's opinions.

The question that will go through every reader's mind when reading a book on the subject this vast is "how do you know?" Pinker answers that question in a way that I really admire - statistics. He says that most of us reason from anecdotal evidence. For instance, because the news media play up terror deaths such as those in Fort Hood, they tend to be grossly exaggerated in our conscience. We would tend to equate the danger of death by an act of terror with that of dying from a lightning strike or industrial accident, when the latter are far more probable. Also, because there have been terror acts in the news lately, we would overlook the fact that the number of deaths attributable to terror have fallen off dramatically over the past few decades. Pinker does a good job of educating us by taking on our common sense understandings, showing that they are erroneous, and showing us a statistical methodology by which we can realistically estimate broad societal phenomena such as terror, death by war, murder and so on.

More than in his other books, Pinker reminds us of his Jewish roots, gently chafing Christianity for celebrating the sacrifice of an innocent man, and turning the cross, the instrument of sacrifice, into its holy icon. He also takes the obligatory swipes at George W. Bush for his bloodthirsty wars, conveniently overlooking the neocons like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle who provided the intellectual foundation for the adventure. He also conveniently over looks the fact that President Obama, despite his vehement campaign rhetoric to the contrary, has continued the wars, presumably also with strong backing from AIPAC, and that he has likewise been captive to advisors such as Larry Summers. His writing is such a thrill to read that I overlook these tropes with an grin. And I appreciate that he is willing to defend the "dead white men" of the Enlightenment and make politically incorrect observations about the different peoples who make up America.

I note, although Pinker does not address them in great detail, some concommitment trends. At the same time violence is decreasing, our religiosity, fertility and our tribalism are likewise decreasing. We are not fighting wars in the interests of religion because large swaths of humanity no longer believe. We are not fighting for lebensraum because we are not having the children that would be needed in order to populate more territory. In other words, at the same time we're becoming less violent, we're losing some of that zest for evolutionary success which led us to become violent in the first place. We can pray along with Doctor Pinker for a world in which there is increasingly less violence, but we need also pray for one in which the drive for human excellence continues to manifest itself.

Afterward: For an excellent review by a professional historian, albeit somewhat more critical than this review, I recommend you google "timothy snyder war no more". Snyder is the author of "Bloodlands," which I also review favorably here on Amazon.

In his lauded but controversial best-seller "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature", Steven Pinker set out to quash a romanticized nostalgia for the lifestyle of people in pre-state societies: the myth of the "noble savage". Now, in his new book "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined", Steven Pinker extends this rectification of prevailing but misguided opinion to grand scale, presenting a strong case for our ennobled present; we are living in the most peaceful era humanity has ever known.

Pinker blows the reader away (forgive the violent metaphor) with sheer weight of analytical shot. At 700 pages of text interspersed with graphs and heaps of reference data, "Better Angels" is thorough-going and methodical because it has to be; contradicting common folk theories (like the noble savage), overriding an often overwhelming sense of unceasing or imminent violence from media coverage (see compassion fatigue), and compensating for a general lack of statistical thinking and probabilistic understanding in the lay public is no easy task. People are right to be skeptical of controversial theories, and knowing this Pinker has patiently lain it all out for us to see for ourselves that violence truly has declined with clear and unambiguously downward direction.

"Better Angels" is structured around an inventory of six Trends, five Inner Demons with four Better Angels, and five Historical Forces (Pinker can't help but enumerate). More than half of the book is dedicated to a chronological exploration of the Trends of our history, six paradigm shifts in the human condition: The Pacification Process, The Civilizing Process, The Humanitarian Revolution, The Long Peace, The New Peace, and The Rights Revolutions. The bulk of the remaining half of the text is a fascinating look at psychology and sociology, showcasing a combined total of nine human traits (the Better Angels & Inner Demons) that dictate our behavior depending on their interplay with our environment and circumstance. The last five items in Pinker's syllabus, the five Historical Forces, feature in the concluding chapter and encapsulate much of the book's overall content by reflecting combinations of historical trend and human trait.

The Five Major Historical Forces for Peace:

The Leviathan (the state; reigns in internal violence)
Gentle Commerce (economic incentives for cooperation)
Feminization (empowerment of women; men are naturally more violent)
The Expanding Circle (empathy; sympathizing with ever wider classes)
The Escalator of Reason (rationality; application of empathy)

A few minor quibbles with value judgments aside, "The Better Angels of Our Nature" assiduously justifies its subtitular contention: violence really has declined, and now it's not so hard to see why. Steven Pinker has assembled vast quantities of data to support his position, sourced in turn by the assemblies of other preeminent scholars in ethnography, anthropology, and the history of man. Add to this a trove of lab-tested social psychology, game theory, and the areas of Pinker's own expertise in cognitive psychology. The resulting dissertation, structured with the incredible skill and forethought that define Steven Pinker's books, sums these component analyses into the rational juggernaut needed to upend the conventional wisdom it is up against. Though consistently dispassionate in tone and bearing throughout, the title of this book betrays its emotional impact: optimism for humanity.

Pinker tells us we may be living in the most peaceful ear of man's existence. This conclusion is substantiated via six trends, five 'inner demons,' four 'better angels,' and five historical forces.

The first of the six trends took place over millennia, and consisted of the transition from the anarchy of hunting and gathering societies to agricultural civilizations with cities and governments some 5,000 years ago. That change brought a reduction in chronic raiding and feuding, and an approximate 5X decrease in violent death rates. The second spanned more than half a millennium (between the late Middle Ages and the 20th century), and brought a 10 - 50+X decrease in European homicide rates. The reduction is attributed to consolidation from a patchwork of small territories into large kingdoms and an infrastructure of commerce. The third transition took centuries and began in the 17th and 18th centuries via movements to abolish socially sanctioned violence like despotism, slavery, dueling, judicial torture, superstitious killing, sadistic punishment, along with the beginnings of pacifism. The fourth took place after WWII, with the great powers and developed states ceasing to wage war on each other. The fifth trend, though more tenuous, is based on the further decline of civil wars, genocides, autocratic government, and terrorist attacks since the end of the Cold War. Pinker's final trends consists of the growing revulsion against aggression on smaller scales, including violence against minorities (civil rights), women (women's rights), children (children's rights), and homosexuals (gay rights).

The five inner demons include predatory violence deployed as a means to an end, dominance(urge for authority, prestige, glory, and power, revenge (retribution, punishment, and justice, sadism (pleasure in another's suffering), and ideology (shared belief system that justifies unlimited violence in pursuit of unlimited good). The four better angels are motives orienting away from violence and towards cooperation and altruism. These include empathy, self-control, moral sense, and reason (allows us to reflect on ways to better live our lives). The five historical forces are comprised of a state with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, commerce providing a positive-sum game in which everybody can win and technological progress, feminization involves increasingly respecting the interests and values of women, cosmopolitan forces such as literacy, mobility, and mass media prompt people to take the perspective of those unlike themselves, and reason can bring people to recognize the futility of trying to boosting their own interests over others.

Bottom-Line: 'The Better Angels of Our Nature' reaches a somewhat surprising, though well-documented, well-reasoned, and welcome conclusion.

Pinker's new book encompasses a prodigious collection of disparate lines of evidence and I would recommend it. However, I just wanted to comment on a technical point about research on the so called "Warrior Gene", which Pinker mistakenly dismisses (monoamine oxidase A (MAOA). Pinker writes:

"[A]n association between the gene and aggression has not been found in non-European populations, perhaps because they have evolved other ways of regulating their catecholamine levels. (Genes often act in networks regulated by feedback loops, so in populations in which a particular gene is less effective, other genes may step up their activity to compensate.) For now, the Warrior Gene theory is staggering around with possibly fatal wounds."

The mistake Pinker makes is that this is based on a paper by Widom and Brzustowicz which does not control for Gender. As the gene does not seem to affect female behaviour the study isn't helpful for looking at ethnic differences.

Pinker is apparently completely unaware that studies have found that MAOA influences aggression in non-europeans (see Weder et al). Kevin Beaver's research on MAOA's effect on gang membership and weapon use also helps support this association.

Finally, Pinker repeats a mistaken figure on the representation of MAOA in Chinese populations, stating:

"[T]he low-activity version of the gene is even more common in Chinese men (77 percent of whom carry it), and the Chinese are neither descended from warriors in their recent history nor particularly prone to social pathology in modern societies."

A study by Lu et al found that 42 Taiwanese men, or 55% of their 77-subject control sample, had the 3-repeat allele of MAOA. Lea and Chambers copied the information incorrectly. Then, an editorial against MAOA research by a doctoral student repeated the falsehood. Now, Pinker has repeated it too.

This is a huge book which has one central thesis that claims this: violence is down. Compared to the atrocities committed in the past by many sane or insane rulers, groups or tribes, today we are lucky to live in a relatively Long Peace( to quote Pinker's quotation of Gaddis).
The book is divided into a historical part and a psychological one. To be more precise: the first part is about the historical dimensions of crimes perpetrated by the human beings against each other throughout history, starting from the Old Testament days, the Roman Empire, culminating in the Middle Ages, where many and various ingenuous torture methods were applied on people. These chapters contain a lot of data, figures and graphs to support the thesis that the past, meaning from the Neanderthal Man to the present, has been riddled with atrocities, while the change of all this occurred during the 18th century onwards. The reason was the Scientific Revolution which took place then and the rise of skepticism, the rise of reason and the decline of religion. All this came after the civilizing process started, a term that was used by Norbert Elias in his famous book. Elias argued that this process started in the Middle Ages, when feudal states decided to start establishing commercial relations. The invention of printing and the education of the masses by the reading of books has softened the appetite of them for blood and has caused to a re-evaluation of certain axiomatic ideas in this respect. Literacy and the state, or "the Leviathan", have been the factors which contributed to the decline of violence, although Pinker is cautious about the interpretation of statistical data and facts which might contradict his own thesis.
The second part of the book is about the structure of the brain and the way the human beings are wired for aggression. Yes, we are and will probably be aggressive from the first to the last day of our lives. In two chapters Pinker explains to the reader the functions of the various brain parts and their relevance to his discussion. In his view, the twentieth century was not the most violent one, as many observers have opined. He blames this misjudgement of historical myopia, since historians and other researchers tend to overlook the facts of the distant past and concentrate of the last 200 years, thus magnifying the present and distorting the past events which, in his view, contained much more violence than all the wars combined in the twentieth century. Genocides are far from being a modern invention. The process of civilizing has known some setbacks after World War Two, especially in the 1980s, but has gone back on the right track since then. Feminisation, the civil rights movements, the awareness of and fight for animal rights, the preservation of minorities' rights in the USA or elsewhere and democracy-all these have played a part in reducing violence in those respective regimes and countries. In fact, most crimes were committed by regimes whose rulers were totalitarian and for whom democratic principles were a big taboo. Mass media and the mobility of the masses convinced people in the Global Village that others like them have various opinions and beliefs or values. Pinker adds that the application of reason can further lead to a continuation of the process he describes.
All in all, this book is very interesting, although some chapters might not be for those who have a sensitive stomach because of the graphic scenes contained in them. The language is friendly and vivid, even humorous. However, there are two problems in my view which are a minus: the book is extremely long and requires a lot of patience and many parts of it are repetitive. I do understand that Pinker worked hard in order to convince his readers, and the fact that he commands such an enormous corpus of sources is commendable. Still, it would have been better for the editor to have deleted some of its parts. That's the reason I award it only four stars.

In The Better Angels, Steven Pinker has finally hit his stride and established himself as a true public intellectual. In what is by far his best book, Pinker makes a compelling case that we live in the most peaceful, violence-free period in history, and that there is a clear long-term historical trend of the reduction of physical violence of every kind and at every level. What is extraordinary is that, not only does this fly in the face of conventional wisdom, but no one seems to have made this argument or even suggested this before. The book is long, detailed, and full of graphs, charts, and statistics, but that is because it has to be - for the Conventional Wisdom insists that this claim cannot possibly be correct. Conservatives believe that society is in a breakdown mode due to the decay of traditional family and religious values; liberals believe that violence is endemic to global capitalism and imperialism; the average person believes the criminals and child molesters are running wild on the streets. But Pinker demonstrates beyond any reasonable doubt that just the opposite is true. This is perhaps the most important single development in all of human history, and it is simply astonishing that no one seems to have heard of it. And probably no one else could have written this book besides Pinker, with his brilliance, his willingness to challenge conventional wisdom, and his omnivorous reading habits in many disciplines, from science to philosophy to literature.

Pinker's book sets out not only to document this trend, but even more ambitiously, to give an explanation for it. And here Pinker is successful as well (with a few caveats, mentioned below). Greatly to his credit, Pinker departs from the standard evolutionary psychology approach (in which we are deterministic "demonic males" and so forth) and ventures to give a sort of explanation that is almost entirely out of fashion these days especially in scientific circles, and that will come across as sentimental softness. But Pinker makes a compelling case that it is not our instincts, our "mental modules" or "stone age minds" that have caused the decline in violence, but rather our REASON and our MORALITY. There is, Pinker says, nothing more powerful than an idea (415). Over time, people have come to develop their rationality and their moral faculties in a way that makes violence no longer an acceptable way of solving problems. Moreover, government plays an essential role in this process (despite the fashionable conservative mantra that government is the source of all our problems). By establishing a monopoly on force, the state made the single most important contribution to violence reduction. And by providing universal education and ensuring that commerce can take place in a nonviolent setting, the state set the stage for ever-decreasing levels of violence.

The one pervasive flaw in Pinker's approach is his dogmatic, reflexive bias against religion. In Pinkerworld, all good things came out of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution/Age of Reason, and everything that happened before then reflects ignorance, superstition, and anti-humanism. This bias distorts his historical analysis, for instance entirely discounting the influence of Christiantiy. Like so many New Atheists, he quotes at length from the violence of the Old Testament, but entirely ignores the opposite message from the New Testament that supersedes the Old one. Jesus is after all the Prince of Peace, and his message is to turn the other cheek, not resist evil, forgive, love your enemy, etc., etc. One would have thought that this moral revolution might have figured large in a book on the decline of violence, especially as Christianity is the world's biggest religion. But Pinker dismisses it in a couple of lines, presumably because it threatens his ideological view that nothing good can possibly come from religion. Similarly, Pinker sings the praises of teh 18th century idea of universal human rights, but almost entirely dismisses the fact that all major religions discovered the idea of the Golden Rule thousands of years before. However, the thesis of the book stands even despite this bias, and indeed the development of religion in a direction towards nonviolence if anything would only strengthen Pinker's thesis, if he were not so dogmatically hostile to religion.

This is a powerful and important book, and it should have a wide influence on public policy debates. Unfortunately, since politicians get votes by scaring voters about the terrible evils out there (terrorists, criminals, etc), it probably won't get the attention it deserves. It is also a 700-page tome, and hence most people won't have the time to go through it carefully. But they should - it is that important.

Pinker is as ever brilliant, and I found much intriguing and enlightening in this collection of cherry-picked psychological research in support of a sociological thesis: stated simply (my words, not Pinker's): However unpleasant they may be from time to time, elites are necessary if society is to function properly. For one example among many of Pinker's selectivity, he includes cutting edge evolutionary psychologist David Buss's work where it supports his own argument, but ignores his seminal inferences concerning reciprocal altruism, which differ in important ways from Pinker's. Buss is far less convinced than Pinker that violence defines man more than the urge to connect. Attachment theory doesn't even appear in the index. When Pinker suggests that one reason for the correlation between modernism and relative peacefulness is because power increasingly controls who can and cannot be violent, which he considers not such a bad outcome, he enters the domain of the famous Frankfurt School sociologists and the postmodernists who followed. However, he carefully avoids dialogue with renown thinkers dating from Gramsci to Foucault who illuminated how power renders people passive, depressed, uninformed and authoritarian through techniques of propaganda, misdirection, and cooptation. Thus, non-physical, but profoundly destructive methods of social control cast no shadow on Pinker's view of modern Western elites as in the main, progressive. In sum, this seems less a comprehensive study than a scholarly polemic. Having said this, much of the material is absolutely fascinating.

When reviewing a bottle of wine, the old Monty Python joke is that the wine isn't so much good for drinking as for home defense. It's tempting to make the same joke with this hefty tome but if there's one thing it does well, it's to convince me that home defense might be a lot less important than I think. In admirably exhaustive detail and with his characteristic light humor and solid prose, Pinker covers the history and the present state of violence in humans, first making the case that it has declined steadily (if jerkily) throughout our history and especially in the last century, and then covers many possible contributing factors. Despite covering so much material, it rarely ever feels like work. He remains conversational and engaging, adding in anecdotes, first-person accounts from history and plenty of light jokes to keep us engaged. And in spite of its length, the writing is tight and concise with little extra verbiage; it is simply a very complex subject and Pinker tackles the diverse factors well.

Every one of these factors takes several chapters, with each chapter broken into many topical sections, and each one of these feels thorough and extensively footnoted. Like a good scientist, he spends much of his time looking at the best counter-arguments and, where applicable, even concedes their strengths. What emerges is a very complex but uplifting and thought-provoking discussion and gives us several ideas for how we might continue to build a safer world.

To explore but one of many examples, Pinker addresses the subject of torture today and through history. If you're like me, you were probably a little shocked, upset or depressed by the news that torture is still practiced today, even in the West. Hadn't we grown out of that? Doesn't this show that things haven't changed? Pinker looks first at how torture was used in the past. It has been a public spectacle, a form of entertainment, a means of punishment for comparatively trivial crimes, and a means of forcing confessions. It was done openly and often. Today it is done in secret, to extract specific information (and not intentionally to coerce confessions), and requires a lot of subterfuge and denials when it is revealed. It isn't merely that the absolute and relative numbers have declined (and they have), but the rationale and the public reaction has changed immensely.

It serves as a welcome illustration that the stories of a better, more wholesome past (whether that is 20 years ago, 50, 100 or 1000) are a myth. We are living in the safest, most peaceful time in history. Pinker gives us the data and the perspective to let us really understand that this is happening and walks us through several factors which are contributing and which we can continue to push us even further.

An important, engaging work.

How does this sound for entertainment: Your date asks you out to the theater to watch a live cat slowly lowered into a fire and burned to death, howling with pain as it is singed, roasted, and finally carbonized?

If that isn't your idea of entertainment, don't hop into the next time machine heading back to medieval Europe.

In 16th-century Paris, throngs - including kings and queens -- flocked to watch such gruesome spectacles, shrieking with laughter as cats and other animals were tortured to death on stage.

Torture and violence were woven into the fabric of life, from the sexualized sadism of London, where elaborately designed and decorated torture devices were the pinnacle of artistic creativity, to the widespread practice of hacking off the nose of anyone who spited you (the source of the strange idiom, "to cut off your nose to spite your face").

In contrast, whether we know it or not, we are now enjoying the most peaceful period in all of human history. Indeed, the precipitous decline in violence of all types may be "the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species," argues Steven Pinker, a renowned professor of psychology at Harvard University, in an epic tome, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

Given the tenor of the daily news headlines, Pinker knows his claim sounds far-fetched. But in 800 pages of research and analysis, augmented by hundreds of charts and tables, he convincingly establishes that violence is indeed heading in one direction: down.

The decline is drastic across-the-board, in both state-sanctioned and individual violence: International wars, civil wars, terrorism (an obsession far out of proportion to its prevalence), slavery, sexual violence, child abuse, infanticide.

Key to the decline, Pinker argues, is the diminishing currency of both tribalism and faith-based dogma, with its belief that suffering will be rewarded in the after-life and its press to defend unverifiable tenets with violence.

Our ancestors were a "morally retarded" bunch, he argues, who couldn't see past their own noses - that is, if they still had them - to consider the perspectives of others.

A combination of scientific rationality, literacy, mobility, urbanization, and technology has enabled humankind to become more self-reflective and to feel sympathy for others - from racial and ethnic minorities to women to homosexuals to children and even to animals.

In his zeal to share his glad tidings, Pinker has an annoying habit of glossing over current problems. He pays scant attention to the United States's current practice of endless war, or the escalating costs of military engagement. He claims that the political disenfranchisement of African Americans has been remedied, ignoring the fact that millions of Black men in America are systematically denied the right to vote due to felony convictions. Similarly, he trivializes antigay violence, relying on FBI data that drastically underestimates its prevalence. It's hard to be too thrilled when inner-city children are still sleeping in bathtubs to avoid being killed by stray bullets. At times, he seems overly enamored of his own brilliance, rambling on and becoming repetitious.

Still, the central theme is crucially important. Despite all of the world's problems, the dramatic decline of violence, notes Pinker, "is an accomplishment we can savor, and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible."

Steven Pinker does an excellent review of the threads of data related to human violence. As a psychiatrist, I find his scientific approach both comprehensive and salient. There are many places where he puts things in a way that really gets you thinking. I especially liked the postulation that the world has too much morality. Indeed, Pinker points out that many murders are self-justified as acts of a moral nature, as determined by the person who perceives being wronged. It is interesting that Pinker in his younger days trended toward anarchism, then moved away from it. One can see in his writing his appreciation for a libertarian viewpoint while the evidence points toward the utility of a Hobbesian social contract.

This book is worthy of a read by anyone fascinated with the violent nature of our species and the means we have found to limit that nature, when we apply those means. Certainly, professionals in psychology, social work, law, politics, and teaching ought to be conversant about the content of this book. Also, many lay people are simply misled by myths that violence is worse than ever, and the good ol' days need restored. If nothing else, this book is a call to reject the regressive social forces that adore a past that was never very good.