and it has not guaranteed to continue.

nonetheless, it is a persistent historical development, visible on scales from millennium to years, from wars and genocide to the spanking of children and the treatment of adults. this evening i am going to discuss six major historical declines of violence. the immediate causes in terms of particular historical events of the era that a historian would single out, but also, the ultimate cause is in terms of general historical forces interacting with human nature. the first major decline i call the pacification process. until about 5,000 years ago humans everywhere lived in anarchy, without central government's. what was life like in this state of nature? this is a question, which people have had opinions for many centuries. thomas hobbes, 1651, famously said that in the state of nature

the life of man is a solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. one hundred years later crusoe countered that in the state of nature nothing can be more gentle than man in his presence -- present state. both of these men were pontificating from the armchair. neither of them knew anything about what life was like in the state of nature. today we can do better. there are two methods to measure death rates in nine states societies. one of them is forensic archaeology, a kind of csi paleolithic. namely, what proportion of prehistoric skeletons have signs of violent trauma, such as ast in skulls, decapitated skeletons , arrowheads imbedded in femurs, perry thatcher's on owner bones, the kind you get when you hold up your arm toward off a blow, and mummies found with ropes tied around their necks. well, if -- unfortunately this

base won't accommodate visuals, but i have a graph of 20 prehistoric archaeological sites in which archaeologist hard to estimate the proportions of skeletons with signs of violent trauma. they range from 0% to 60%, and the average is about 15%. let's compare the 15 percent figure with those of some state societies. for example, the united states and europe through the 20th century, the comparable rate of death from warfare was about 1%. if we try to get the worst possible figure by throwing in all of the war deaths, all of the debts from genocide, and all of the deaths from man-made famines throughout the world during the 20th century, the fixture -- figure is up 3%. the figure for the world in 2005 for the most recent decade, on

the graph is invisible because it is far less than a pixel. it is about three tenths of one -- three tenths of 1%. the second way of estimating the rate of violent death in modern day society is by examining ethnographic vital statistics. that is, what percentage of people living in extent or recent non state societies, hunter-gatherer's, hunter quarter cultural, and other trouble societies, die at the hands of their fellow humans. again, the graph that i would display, if i were displaying graphs cautious 47 societies for which such figures are available ranging -- here are plotted been using the conventional criminologist scale of violent deaths per hundred thousand people per year. the death rates range from zero to 1500, but the average is

about 500 deaths per 100,000 people per year, that is one-half of 1%. again, let's compare that figure , a bit more than 500, with the corresponding figure for so states. again, we will stack the deck against states by choosing the most violent states in the most violent areas in their history. such as germany in the 20th century, two world wars, the figure of about 150, a similar figure to what we have for russia in the 20th century, which went through two world wars, revolutions, and the sole or. japan in the 20th century was closer to 60. the united states in the 20th century was less than three. and the world in the 20th-century is about one-third of a death per 100,000 per year. sorry. that is the world, the first decade of the 21st century.

the world in the 20th century, throwing in all of the world wars, genocides, and man-made famines is about 60 per 100,000 per year, far less than the 500 on the four per 100,000 per year that we find in non state peoples. what was the immediate cause of this change in the rate of violent death? the most likely is the rise in expansion of states. since of history are familiar with the various pieces imposed by an empire or had to monde, the packed room on a compact among the complex britannica, packs seneca, and so on. so when the state imposes control over the territory it tends to try to stamp out travel rating and feuding. it is not because this comes from a benevolent and first @booktv test and the welfare of the subject peoples, but rather, all of this is a nuisance to the overlords

because it settles scores among them and shuffles resources around at a net loss to the overlords who just assumes keep the people live to provide them with taxes and tributes and slaves answers. just as a farmer has an interest in preventing his cattle from killing each other because it's a dead loss to him. so, and emperor or warlord will try to keep his subject peoples from killing each other and a loss to himself. the second historical transition and violence as until the civil is in process. life in the middle ages. a lovely -- putting daggers through peasants and the early modern time. in turns out that in many parts of europe, homicide statistics go back hundreds of years to the 14th and often the 13th

century. and, if you plot homicide statistics over time, over the centuries you find that they plummet from an average rate of about 35 per 100,000 per year to the contemporary european rate of one per 100,000 per year, it declined by about a factor of 35. and this is one of many grafts that i'm going to ask you to imagine, which consists of eight jagged line that meanders from the top left of the graph when statistics first started to be kept for the category of violence i will be discussing, and meanders its way down to the bottom right of the graph, which represents the era in which we are now living, and that is true for homicides in your. the immediate cause of the european homicide decline was identified by the german sociologists, norbert aliyahs,

in his book called civilizing process. during the transition from the middle ages to maternity there was a consolidation of central states and kingdoms out of the european patchwork of principalities. as a result, criminal justice was nationalized, and a life of feuding warlords. they were called night, but today we would call them warlords, it was replaced by the kings justice, where some genius had the idea that instead of the family of a victim collecting blood money from the family of a killer, if it was the state that collected that money it would be a constant revenue stream. in fact, the king sent a representative to every town once a year to tally the number of homicides so that the king could collect compensation from the family of the perpetrator. this agent of the crown was

called the corner, which is why we still call the official who assesses causes of death the corner. aside from the consolidation of states, the transition from italy to maternity sought a growing infrastructure of commerce. institutions such as money and finance and contracts that could be enforced and recognized within the boundaries of these new consolidated states and technology transportation that arose among rivals for horses the west germans the trade keeping and technology. the result was that the zero some it was increasingly replaced by positive some trade were both parties to a voluntary exchange can benefit. the third major transition can be illustrated by some of the

message that the early states used to impose peace on their kingdoms, punishments such as breaking on the wheel or the victim would be tied to a wagon wheel and the executioner would smash his or her arms of the sledge hammer, at which point there would be hoisted up on the wagon wheel and left to die of exposure in shock. burning at the stake, and half from the crotch out, and palin into the rectum and climbing flash with wire hoax. however, in a remarkably narrow slice of time scented and 18th-century torture as a form of punishment was abolished by every major country, including the united states and its famous prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment in the eighth amendment to the constitution. this was part of the global

movement to abolish judicial torture. the 18th-century also saw the abolition of other institutionalize forms of violence that we now considered barbaric, such as the frivolous application of the death penalty . england in the 18th-century had 222 capital offenses on the books, including poaching, counterfeiting, running a rabbit board, being in the company of gypsies, and strong evidence of malice in a child aged seven to 14 years of age. this was not just of the radical possibility, but was carried out with relish. samuel johnson, for example, in his diary, speaks about a seven year-old girl who was hanged for stealing a petticoat. by 1861, the capitol crimes went down to four, basically high treason, murder, and some of its variations. in the united states there was an enormous list of capital crimes in the cool of --

colonial and early independent time frame. i have a graph showing the percentage of american executions for crimes other than murder, and it meanders from close to 100 percent in the colonial time down to pretty much as 0%. nowadays the only crimes against people that are punishable by execution of it and murder are conspiracy to commit murder. the death penalty itself was put on death row starting in the 18th-century, and it began a gradual and then exit this wave of abolitions of capital punishment, nowadays the united states is the only western democracy that even has the death penalty, and even then, only two-thirds of the states. even then, the united states has the death penalty, it's a bit of a fiction. if you look at the number of american executions as a proportion of the population it

has been plunging, and so now the graph hugs the floor. nowadays about 50 people are executed every year in a country that has posted 17,000 homicides even here in the backwater of death penalty ebullitions the death penalty is a shadow of its former self. other ebullitions during the humanitarian resolution include which haunts, religious persecution such as burning her tics at the stake, dueling, blood sports, debtors prisons, and, of course, slavery where the end of the 18th-century saw the beginning of a tidal wave of abolitions of slavery. the united states, again, but behind the curve, not doing it until the 60's, but today for the first time in history knows leave -- the slavery is not legal anywhere in the world, it used to be the slavery was legal everywhere in the world, and, indeed, endorsed as part of the natural order of things by the

ancient greeks, by the bible, and by just about everyone else. the immediate causes of the humanitarian revolution, well, i looked at a number of candid says the most plausible in terms of something that happened before the humanitarian revolution. advances in printing and literacy. printing was the only industry that showed an increase in productivity. the cost of printing plants in the 16th and 17th centuries. the result was an exponential increase in the number of books that were published in european countries, and there were more people who could read them in the 18th century for the first time a majority of englishmen were littered. well, why should literacy matter? the causes are those that we abbreviate with the term the enlightenment.

for one thing, knowledge replaced superstition and the birds. as walter said, those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. as your society becomes smart enough to debunk various forms of hogwash such as that heretics' cut to help colleges poison wells, which is caused crop failures, children are possessed and africans are british, a kings rule by divine right and someone calling is bound to undermined many traditional rationales for violence. also, literacy can be part of a general current toward cosmopolitanism, also encouraged by technologies such as ships that allow the easy movement of the mixing of peoples, and it is possible that as people spend more of their waking life reading fiction and history in journalism they start to inhabit other people's minds, see the

world from their point of view. therefore they develop more empathy and less cruelty. if you reflexively try to imagine what it is like to be some other person, maybe you are less likely to enjoy seeing them disemboweled. [laughter] the fourth historical transition had to wait another 150 years or so, and it is a development borrowing from the political scientist, i call it a long peace. it speaks to the common conception in the 20th century , the most violent in history. now, interestingly, people who repute that claim never back it up with any numbers from any century other than the 20th-century. and it is highly likely the that claim is fallacious. now, it certainly is true that the second world war was the deadliest event in human history in terms of the absolute number of people were killed.

on the other hand, the world had a lot more people in the 20th century than it had in the past centuries, and we record and care about more deaths more in the 20th-century than people did in previous centuries. if you try to estimate, admittedly retrospectively the death tolls from atrocities in past centuries and use kill them by the size of the world's population at the time, it is not so clear that the 20th-century was the worst. i have taken figures from several across apologists, as they call themselves up to seven matthew white, a forthcoming book the great big book of hair to such terrible things . he lists the 100 worst things that people have ever done to each other that we know of. i divided them by estimates of the world's population at the time, and what happens is that world war ii comes in ninth place and world war one does not even make the top ten.

other atrocities such as the mongol invasions, the african slave trade, the annihilation of native americans. basically every time a dynasty fell in china, there could be several tens of millions of people killed. and if you look at the worst atrocities throughout human history plotted over time, they pretty much form an even cloud for 2,500 years. if you then zoom in on the last 500 years, what we could do a little bit better, instead of just plodding the atrocities, we can add them up for the centuries, the political scientist jack levy has done that for a particular category of mass violence, namely great power worse. wars that embroil the 800-pound gorillas of the day, the largest states, and the ones that, in fact, do far more damage when they get into a war than all the

little wars combined. if you plot the proportion of years between 1,502,000 in which the great powers of the day fought each other, you see a curve in which for the early centuries the great powers were pretty much always a war. there were many points in the curve that hit 100 percent of the years in a quarter-century. now, the great powers are virtually never at war. the last great power war was the korean war that ended in 1953. if you plot the duration of wars involving a great power on at least one side the duration goes down. we used to have things like the 30 years' war, the 80 years' war, hundred years' war, and the 20th century, the 6-day war. if you bought the frequency of wars involving a great power, that is how many new wars are started every year, again, you have a curve that works its way downward from 1500 to the

present. however, there is one curve that goes in the opposite direction. if you look for most of that, if you plot the deadliness of words involving a great power, that is not how many wars started but how many people are killed once the war does begin. that goes in the other direction. that goes up word, that is nations that better and better at killing larger and larger numbers of soldiers until 1945 and which that curve does an abrupt u-turn. since 1945, wars for the first time in history have become both less numerous and less deadly per nation year of war. if you then combine these two figures, multiplied the number of wars by the deadliness of each for you get a zigzag curve that the crucial point is that the last point on that curve representing the last 25 years,

in fact, the last two points, the last 50 years, hitting all-time lows over the last 500 years. this is the phenomenon called a long piece, namely that the last two-thirds of the century since 1945 there has been a historic the unprecedented decline in interstate war, wars between countries. to be exact, and here are some statistics that are very easy to convey, they don't need a graph because they all consist of the number zero. there were no wars between the soviet union and the united states, which may sound unexceptionable today, but every expert predicted that world war three was inevitable.

every expert prediction. as i mentioned, there have been no wars between great powers since 1953, probably the longest span of time without a great power war since the roman empire there have been no wars between western european countries. again, your first reaction might be to say, well, of course that happened. no one expects to say, you know, france and germany go to work. what a concept. or sweden and russia. but, of course, any student of european history knows that this was the rule, not the exception until the precipitous decline of interstate war after 1945. there have been no wars between developed countries, that is the 45 or so countries with the highest gdp per capita. now, what about the rest of the world? well, there is a major decline of violence that i call the new

peace that refers to the rest of the world. so, what happens -- what has happened? we set aside the great powers of the western european countries, the rich countries, what was the rest of the world doing? well, there was a worldwide decline in the number of interstate wars where one country declares war against another. that has been a huge increase in civil wars. mainly exploding starting in the 1960's when newly independent states with and that governments were challenged by insurgent movements, and both sides were armed and financed and egg on by the cold war superpowers. however, since 1991, even the number of civil wars has declined with the end of the cold war. and we now have passed, if the number of interstate wars went down the number of civil wars went up. which one kills more people believe the answer is very clear.

interstate wars kill far more people, or at least they have this the late 1940's. there is nothing like a pair of great powers checking artillery shells at each other, bombing each other's cities, sending massive numbers of tanks to do battle to rack up high body counts in a hurry in comparison some teenagers armed with a kate 47 can truly make life miserable in the local areas in which they work, but they simply don't do the same amount of nationwide damage. again, i have a graph showing the deadliness of interstate in civil wars over the last 55 years. the number of deaths per year of war has plotted for civil wars and just a slight increase followed by a decrease. if you had a bed deaths from all sorts of work and interested in civil, what you find is a bumpy

decline with peaks where the korean war, the vietnam war, the ron iraq war. in the last ten years the figures had the floor. basically a narrow little strike . you can see the picture. i will describe in numbers. in the -- during the worst years of world war ii the death rate from more was about 300 per 100,000 per year. during the late 1940's and early 1950's, it had fallen to about 22 her when hundred thousand per year. in the last -- this past decade, it has been at one-third of a death per 100,000 people per year. using a constant yardstick of battle deaths, and this is the phenomenon that i have been calling the new peace. it would be a bit of an exaggeration, but not too much of an exaggeration to say that the dream of the 1965 singers is

almost coming true. that is the world is almost putting an end to war. the immediate causes of the long peas in a new peace? well, one influential hypothesis came from emanuel in 1795. his essay, perpetual feast. interstate trade and an international community all would drive down the likelihood of war. recently a pair of political scientists have tested the hypothesis by measuring these factors and showing, first of all, that all of us have increased in the second half of the 20th-century, and all of them are statistical predictors of peace. the number of democracies exceeded the number of autocracies around 1990, and i show an increase. the amount of international trade skyrocketed after the end of the second world war.

the in intergovernmental organizations has steadily increased throughout the 20th century, and especially since 1990 there has been a huge increase in the number of international peacekeepers, that is, soldiers with blue helmets from and other neutral parties to get in the way between opposing forces. they don't always prevent their reigniting, but they do far more often than when there are no peacekeepers. finally, the sixth historical decline of violence i call the rights revolutions, which refers to the targeting of violence at smaller scales against vulnerable minorities, such as special minorities, women, children, homosexuals, and animals. the civil rights movement put an end to lynchings, which used to take place at a rate of about 150 per year.

that went down by the 1950's to zero. hate crime murders of blacks have been in the single digits since they were first recorded and have since then plunged to about one per year. on -- non-lethal hate crimes against blacks such as intimidation and assault have declined since there were first measured. the kind of racist attitudes that in the past where the license outbursts of violence such as genocide's and programs have been in steady decline. in the united states if u.s. white people, would you move if a black family moved in next door? do you believe black and white students will go to separate schools? do you think the income gap between blacks and whites is due to lower ability or to lower motivation? all of those racist attitudes have been in steady decline. many of them have fallen so low there in the realm of crank opinion, and the pollsters have dropped them from surveys.

the woman's right movement has seen an 80% decline in rates since the early 70's when the statistics were first kept, also, it pursued this decline in domestic violence, a strong decline in the most extreme forms of domestic violence, namely xor's site and florida side, that is the killing of wives and husbands. although, here, i must add that the decline has been far steeper for wives killing husbands than husbands killing wives. the women's movement has been very, very good for man. [laughter] that children's rights movement has seen a steady decline in the number of american states that have corporal punishment or paddling. a decline in every western country in the degree of approval of spanking. a decline in second -- physical abuse and sexual abuse of children since statistics were first kept, and a decline in school violence such as biting

and non-fatal crimes. the gay-rights movement has seen an increase in the number of state senate decriminalized homosexuality, both states world wide end american states. a decline in anti-gay attitudes, such as whether homosexuality is morally wrong, should be made illegal, or whether gay people should be denied equal opportunity it with. the rise of the apparel. well, all of this raises a question. why have all of these graphs meander downward over the course of history? why have there been so many different declines of violence at different scales of magnitude and time? well, one possibility is the human nature has changed, and

somehow people have lost their inclinations toward violence. i consider this an unlikely explanation. for one thing, toddlers continue to hit, kicked car and light. the boys continue to play fight. grown-up boys and many girls enjoys various forms of vicarious violence and murder mystery, shakespearean drama small video games, ice hockey,. [laughter] , and movies starred in a certain next governor of california and a number of social psychologists have assessed the prevalence of homicidal fantasies. have you ever fantasized about killing someone you don't like? well, it turns out that about 50 percent of women and about one-third of men frequently fantasize about killing people they don't like. more than 60 percent of women and three-quarters of men at least occasionally fantasize about killing people with they

don't like. and the rest of them are lying. [laughter] the more likely possibility is that human nature is extraordinarily complex, and it comprises both inclinations toward violence and inclinations that counteract them. what abraham lincoln called the better angels of our nature from which i took the title of my own book. and historical circumstances have increasingly favored our peaceable inclinations, are better angels. well, what are these forces in conflict? fighting it out inside. i think that violence is not a single psychological category. we have a number of psychologically and even narrow biologically very distinct motives that can result in violence. there is sheer exploitation, the use of violence as a means to an end when some living thing is an obstacle in the path of something that you want, which we see played out in violence

such as rape, plunder, conquest, and the elimination of rivals. very different from that is the quest for dominance, the drive for individuals to climb the pecking order and the alpha male, and the analogous among groups for ethnic, racial, anathema to the national, religious supremacy. the very large category of revenge and moralistic violence which results and in this. perhaps the biggest category consists of violence pursued in questions and ideology such as militant religions,. [applause] fascism, but not season, and communism which can license vast boundaries of finance because a significant utopian analysis. if it holds out the prospect of a future world that is

infinitely good forever, well, what a you entitled to do in order to attain that world? will, you could commit pretty much as much thought to have as much violence as you want and you will still make the world better place by this cost-benefit analysis. also, i imagine that you, vouchsafed with the one true faith according to which there is a utopia to which you can strive, and there are some people who hear about this utopia, but they just stubbornly rejected. well, how evil eye they? well, you do the math. arbitrarily evil. that is why the details of the distribution of massive violence tends to be pushed outward by utopian ideology. well, what do we have on the other side to counteract these motives for violence? what are our better angels? will, self control, the ability to anticipate the consequences

of our behavior and to inhibit violent impulses. there is end of the, the ability to feel of his pain. there is the moral sense, which is a family of intuitions, some of which, like tribalism, a authoritarianism, and puritanism can actually increase violence, at least one flavor of the moral sense, the drive for fairness in counteract violence. and then there is reason, the faculties and allow us to update in objective attached analysis. well, if we have these inclinations toward violence on the one hand, these innovations against violence on the other, what has to the balance over the course of history? what has brought out our better angels? the first possibility was proposed by hommes in his book called the leviathan. the leviathan referring to the state and a judicial system with a monopoly on the legitimate use

of violence can eliminate the incentives for its what'd a punishing it. thereby it can reduce the need for deterrence and vengeance, can circumvent the self-serving by a cs by which both sides through dispute always believed that they on the side of the angels, and at the other side is wicked or stupid or stubborn or all three. people that we know from social psychology, research exaggerate their adversaries malevolence and exaggerate their own innocence. this can still cycles of revenge, unless you have a disinterested third party deciding who is to blame and meting out the penalties. some historical evidence that this has been in pacifying force consists of the first to transition that i discussed this evening, the pacifying and civilizing effects of states and the fact that we can watch these movies and refers in zones of

anarchy were, indeed, violence can reroute, such as the american wild west with a cliche of the cowboy movies was. the nearest sheriff is 90 miles away. states and empires, and in mafias and street gangs to deal in contraband and therefore cannot settle their disputes by calling in the state. they cannot file a lawsuit, down 911 because the nature of the work that they do, and so they have to enforce their interest with their own rough justice cahn resulting in the corleone these, sopranos, and those kinds of and that is. other evidence on the international scale and with the effectiveness of international peacekeepers. the second historical force that draws out our better angels, i suggest, is gentle commerce, the idea that plunder is a zero sum game, but trade is a positive sum game in which everyone can

win. over the course of history as technology improves and allows the trade of good and ideas over long distances, and larger groups, and at lower cost, more and more of the rest of humanity becomes more valuable alive than dead. a concrete example might be that there is not a whole lot of affection between the united states and china these days, but it is not terribly likely that it will go to war. among other things, then make too much of our stuff, and we of into much money. so, historical evidence with. gentle commerce consists of historical -- on story, statistical analyses showing that countries with open economies in greater amounts of international trade get embroiled and your wars, most fewer civil wars, and host fewer genocides. the third historical force has been called the expanding circle. this is a concept named by peter singer, but first endorsed by charles darwin more than a

century before. the idea is that evolution bequeathed us with a sense of empathy. unfortunately, by default, we apply it only to a narrow circle of friends and family. but over the course of history, you can see these circle of and the these and spending to embrace not just the family, but the village and the klan and the tribe and the nation and then it is extended to other races, both sexes, children, and eventually to others engine beings, other species. this begs the question of what expand the circle. as i hinted earlier, technologies that increase cosmopolitanism may have that effect. the growing appreciation of history, literature, media, a journalism, growing opportunities for trouble, and we know from the social psychology laboratory that if you get a person to adopt the perspective of some other real or fictitious person they are more sympathetic to that person,

and they are more sympathetic to the category of people that that individual represents. historical evidence includes the fact that in the 17th and 18th century there was an expansion of literacy and travel, the so-called republic of letters, which preceded the humanitarian revolution. it may not be a coincidence that the second half of the 20th century, which had a long piece and the race relations was also the era of the global village, and it is often been speculated that the rise of internet and social media has assisted the color revolutions and the arabs spring. the final historical force i call the escalator of reason. the possibility that the growth of literacy, education, and public discourse has encouraged people to think more abstractly and more universally. they get into the habit of

rising above their parochial vantage point, which makes it harder to privilege you're on interest over the interest of others. it is encourages you to replace a morality based on tribalism, authority, and puritanism with immorality based on fairness and universal rules. it encourages people to recognize the futility of cycles of violence, and increasingly to see violence as a problem to be solved, rather than as a contest to be one. what is the evidence? well, one intriguing piece of evidence is that abstract reasoning abilities as measured by iq tests, believe it or not, increased over the course of the 20th century. the route the 20th century and all over the world iq increased by about three points per decade. the so-called flash and a fact. how could this have affected violence? well, other studies have shown that people and societies with higher levels of education and measured intelligence holding

all else equal commit fewer violent crimes on average, cooperate more in experimental gains, have more classically liberal attitudes such as opposition to racism and sexism, and are more receptive to democracy. well, why do -- why have i ended up with this list of four very different seemingly very different forces? why are they all pushing in this indirection toward less violence? the closest that we could come to an overarching theory is that violence is what beer is scully social dilemma. it is always tempting to an aggressor to engage in predatory or exploited violence, but on the other hand, quite ruinous to the victim. in the long run, all parties are better off if violence is avoided. our dilemma and humans, it's how to get the other guy to refrain from violence at the same time you do. if you're the only one then you

are a sitting duck for invasion by the bad guys. everyone has to decide to beat their swords into plowshares at the same time. one can see these forces, cases in which humans experience and ingenuity gradually solves this problem, just like other scourges of nature like pestilence and hundred that we have dealt with and that all of these for the -- forces increased the material, emotional, and positive incentives of all parties to avoid violence simultaneously. well, regardless of the correct explanation for this decline of violence, i think the implications for understanding the human condition on profound. for one thing they call for reorientation of efforts toward violence reduction from on moralistic mind set to an empirical mind-set. instead of asking why there is war, we might be better off asking waters peace. instead of what we are doing

wrong, we might ask what we have been doing right. because, we have been doing something right, and it sure would be good to find out exactly what it is. think you very much. [applause] [applause] >> thank you very much, steven pinker. this was a fantastic presentation. already people are lining up for the questions. i am going to ask again. i know and never successful, but i'm going to keep trying. i would like you to keep your questions really brief. everyone will get a chance, and steven, i would like you to keep your answers brief. so, it works both ways. and if you are comfortable, please send your name. >> i am dr. caroline thompson. my question is, germany.

it is the most cosmopolitan, highly educated society, arguably in your. they did the most horrible crimes. >> well, it is a little misleading to say it because there were sectors of germany that, indeed, were cosmopolitan educated. also sectors that were more tribal in their mind set, deeply anti-semitic. even among the german elite there was a widespread rejection of the enlightenment, which was this massive. rather than an acceptance of the idea of universal rights and an emphasis on the flourishing of individuals, there was a lot of primitive embrace of tribalism. granted, you are right. there was a flourishing of

cosmopolitan sentiment among some sectors of the german population. the problem is there were all murdered. so the general answer is that when it comes to an entire society, it is important to see how dynamics can lead to competition among the various sectors, and it is only if you have a robust democracy -- democracy. the cosmopolitan people are not murdered, it can affect the course of society as a whole. >> first a comment and then the question. appreciate the great spanish film maker and perhaps the covers of all, as he was dying said in his autobiography, only every ten years i could get up out of the grave and get a newspaper and keep in touch with what is going on. the presentation in terms of overt violence is extraordinarily impressive. on the other hand, there is a

containment in one sense in the proliferation of violent games starting with kids as young as two and three. a tremendous compulsive preoccupation with violence and all of the media and football and so forth. i would call it a kind of externalization, not a sublimation. but contained. part of it, i think, floyd spoke of the pervasively of violence and the aggressive drive. you can kind of identify with people who were suffering and say, think, god. it isn't me. even more important, murder mysteries. somebody, i can fantasize that i

have done this murder, but somebody else's point to be discovered, and i can go conscience-free. >> i agree. the pleasure taken in violent entertainment is a great constant of the human experience . violent entertainment causes violence, the huge expansion of violent video games has been accompanied by the great american crime declined since the early 1990's. also, i'm not convinced by a kind of hydraulic model that if you get your violent urges out through violent entertainment uranus' likely to commit it in real life. i think that it is a guilty pleasure the people of all areas of fat. if you look at today's andromeda's, if you look at the penny dreadful, the old testament, the lies of the saints, a lot of really gruesome stuff. people enjoy it for interesting reasons. the ones that you mentioned, the

tenuous connection to real-life violence. >> very few people in terms of the total population, and now it is a large part of the population. >> well, people came out and brought out the whole family to watch really stomach turning public edge @booktv executions. breakings and strangulation is into some moments in the past. it was possible for an entire population to be overcome by a kind of collective citizen. >> one last comment. i noticed there was laughter when you talk to this moment. >> folks, we have a long line. i would like everyone to get their chance. >> good evening and happy new year's to whom it is applicable. if anyone wanted to give names, i will give an nickname and leave it to the imagination to figure out.

anyway, the question is this, and by the way, very much impressed by your presentation. i have always wanted to the meat you. [laughter] just me. the question is this, do you think some people are actually biologically have a tendency to almost be inherently evil and sometimes look at clowns in the dark and look like is there may be the fear of clowns could arouse evil? little children holding says is behind their back and saying, to year-old, you know, pretty little girls, want to play, want to play. get too close and watch out. and no matter how you raise them, adopted by the nicest,

kindest people, intellectually brilliant, there is something about them that they like to see others suffered. >> the answer is there is a substantial component to antisocial tendencies. at the extreme and violent antisocial tendencies, it is not obviously completely heritable, but within a population the troublemakers, of a more callous and impulsive people, they get that way in part before genetic reasons because thanks to the real-life research that carries out, namely compare adoptive children to their biological parents and their adoptive parents. there is some statistical tendency. the most extreme are psychopaths. a few percentage points of the population. it seems to be without the ability to develop a conscience that counts the interest of others, so it is among individuals there does seem to

be some irritability. >> you never know. >> i think we need to move on. it is only fair that everyone get a chance. >> high. my name is no. my question is, the backroom boys. used to refer to the duponts developed napalm that was used to great effect in the war against an agenda, the vietnam war. so in reviewing the records of the backroom boys, you know, remarked that there is an objectivity in distance from the effects of their actions. very technological occupations. he traded it to the 30 years' war, mentioning that this institutionalized violence by objective and rational and reasonable people to

technological means has its roots in this prolonged genocidal complex that you mentioned has abated. 30 percent of the czech republic just perished to the effects of that war. as you mentioned, the percentage of genocidal conflict has declined precipitously. but the institutions seem to remain with particular dispassion, reasonable and objective countenance with extreme violence, like these backroom boys and dupont in the 1950's developing a poland and other very effective killing agents. >> well, what i have really been concerned with is when these agents have been deployed, and it is interesting that contrary to what i often hear, namely as we develop high-tech push button forms of warfare, circumvent the inhibitions that we have against hands-on liddy, gory violence and therefore that leads you to expect violence to go away.

i don't think that is consistent with the process of history. the 30 years' war, horrific violent death and those were carried out by pikeman with weapons and so on. i think people can very easily overcome their resistance to hands on violence. in effect, it is often the most high-tech forms of violence that are deployed most gingerly. nuclear weapons being an example, which have not been used since nagasaki. so i think the correlation is much less than people think simply because it is so easy to commit hands on violence. >> the historical record. on this historical link between the technology of violence in that particular pattern of -- particularly europe and northern europe and technologically rich and devoted cultures of violence. you have reviewed this history of violence. how clear is that connection? >> the highest technology of any

culture is typically applied to weapons of war. the linoleum words on horseback had amazingly well engineered, said those that could do vast amounts of damage very quickly, so that's something. people's ingenuity. >> psychiatrist here in town. i'm wondering if you could just comment. you may be dismissing the change in human nature a little too quickly in the sense that genes are always in advance with the environment, and i know you cite -- i read your book and no use like greg clark and his research , remarkable in looking what happened, starting in the 13th century with the royals just being much more fertile than the lower class is. the bourgeoisie. and then they created the

enlightenment, but it took 500, 600 years for the industrial revolution to happen. we have more people in england who had what was called attention surplus disorder, and fewer people with attention deficit disorder, less impulsivity, greater concentration, greater self control, and when a society moves in that direction you reach a critical mass that may eventually change the way it fuels, certainly fuels just change in the culture. >> yes. and i discussed that possibility in the book. i end up not embracing it, though not rejecting it, mainly because of lack of evidence. it makes the prediction, for example, that englishmen, regardless of their culture should be genetically less prone to impulsivity and violence than people from other cultures and races. this is not the possibility. even test.

maybe unnecessary. very early in the investigation of recent biological evolution. but given that some of the developments that i discuss occur far too rapidly to be attributable to generic evolutions, such as the plunging of the crime rate since 1992, or the rights revolutions, so something must have happened that was not genetic that could account for that plummeting, so on grounds of parsimony, i figure we don't have any need for the hypothesis that there has also been a genetic change while not ruling it out. >> i am a terrible public speaker, but a huge fan, so try to keep it together and ask your question. i'm curious about people's relationship and representative democracy with civilian law enforcement, and it is interesting to hear about the declining rates of violence and at the same time things like paramilitary police force in and it's what teams that have gone way beyond their original intention ifs office, even

famously last year someone breaking into people's homes over college loans. so if rates of violence are really declining much the people, why are civilian law enforcement. >> in the muscles and the way that doesn't correlate with the decline in violence. >> well, we have to of look at figures over time of government violence perpetrated against civilians. does suspect but there's not been much in all of an increase in the earlier decades and centuries. bringing in the leviathan to keep people from each other's throats, you then introduce a second problem of keeping the leviathan from people's throats. that first transition was a tough bargain because it did lower the rate of violence, but then it gave you these blood thirsty despots to deal with. the democratic revolution, and indeed, the continuing battle

for democracy and civil liberties is an attempt to find the sweet spot where the government is powerful enough to deter purgation by one citizen over another, but not so powerful that it becomes a menace to its own citizens. that is something that we are, i suspect, always going to muddle through. thank you. >> i'm going to make sure that everyone in line gets to ask the question. that will be it for tonight. >> hi, my name is gregory walsh. i have been looking forward to reading this book ever since seeing a speech you gave three or four years ago at the pen conference on the same topic. i was, however, wondering if you could comment on some allegations made in a book recently read called sex at dawn, the prehistoric origins of modern sexuality in which the authors allege that some of the

data you present about rates of violence among hunter gatherer cultures, which they call non state people's is erroneous. they allege, for example, that the data at the time it was collected, these people had contact with modern society for many decades and are not come in fact, and pneumatic. they are settled peoples. i have just been a curious ever since reading that to your your response to some of those allegations. ..

there are some societies that don't have homicide or deaths in war, but on average these are way up there and they are from many societies of different kinds. what they have in common is not really under government and that seems to uniformly give, there are some at the tail of the distribution but on average give grace to high violence them from what i can tell from the ethnographic and archaeological literature that's a solid conclusion in eyesight many survives -- surveys that have the numbers. >> thank you. >> thanks for your stimulating presentation. when you are listing factors on the decline of violence in our society come, everything from paddling to the death penalty to

rape i guess one exception that stood out in my mind was incarceration. a very high level of incarceration and of course there are violent people that deserve it but there is also non-violent crimes and there are huge sentences, people thrown into a situation where prison life is not getting less violent. i was wondering how you factor into that the larger picture? >> in historical terms modern american prisons as horrible as they are much less violent than prison several hundred years ago when you could have say prisoners shackled to the floor or wearing iron spiked callers and their family would have to pay for easement of irons for the spike collared to be taken off when there was extremely high rates of death from disease and starvation. this is not to defend the current american prisons by any means but historically it would be inaccurate to take the current american imprisonment as evidence that nothing has improved.

now the american prison partly was a way of reducing the counteracting, the enormous increase in street violence and violent crimes of all types that had overtaken the united states from the 60s to the 1980s. the homicide rate was doubled in those decades. the rate of rape and the rate of assaults. so as a rather clumsy countermeasure there was an increase in incarceration, which in part was responsible for the fact that the violent crime rates have plunged back to earth since the 1990s. not entirely because there were a number of other causes for the violence declined that most statisticians to crime attributed at least part of the decline to the increase in imprisonment. in the united states as with many other of the trends i have been mentioning, it is a little misleading. this is the country we know best and tend to think it is western

democracies. it is really an outlier at a lot of the trends i've mentioned are true for every western democracy but the united states is kind of pulling up the rear. it's true of homicide, stroke capital punishment, strew of engaging in wars and it's true of imprisonment where we throw a disproportionately large proportion of our population in prison compared to other western democracies. but certainly in the century scale there is no comparison between today's prisons and those of the 19th and 18th centuries. >> my name is -- and i was wondering if you could share with us a bit about the methods used to arrive at the numbers you talked about tonight. did you do kind of an independent testing with statistics, like kind of look at this type of cause, like does

this factor cause x to change these things? could you share with us the source of your numbers and how you arrived at them? by it depends on the numbers because in different periods. there were different kinds of numbers in the numbers have different kinds of sources. for the state and nonstate contrasty came from ethnography is of exigent tribal people from forensic archaeology. for the extreme homicide in europe it came from historical criminology such as the unearthing corners records for every year in a particular parish or town in europe going back to the middle ages. in the case of war, depends on the period. since 1946 there have been meticulous statistics kept on deaths in armed conflicts by a couple of scandinavian organizations. before 1946 there was a core list of war project which looked at death rates among the largest wars from 1816 to the present.

prior to 1816, it becomes as you can imagine the farther back you go the further you just statistics get but there is a line of historians, quantitative historians that have tried to triangulate on estimates of the death tolls from various wars to come up with best guess estimates. for homicide more recently, the fbi keeps recently good statistics at least they have since the 1930s. for crimes other than homicide like rape and assault, the best agar victimization surveys which aren't contaminated by people's willingness to report a crime to the police are go for still others like child abuse and domestic violence, there are victimization surveys or other social science methodologies so it all depends on the kind of violence. >> have you taken a new approach with analyzing? >> generally it's a good data sets in their entirety's from other researchers and never

second-guess the criteria come either the start date, the stop date, what gets included and what gets excluded. i didn't want to do any cherry-picking to try to favor this hypothesis, so the data sets that i use varied in their quality for sure but none of them were select that in order to show a decline or manipulated in order to show a decline. i dumped all the data and even when i used some of the inclusions were dodging for various reasons i didn't give myself the freedom of cherry-picking them. >> thank you. >> hi. i was just wondering, putnam finds social capital has been declining in the united states, interconnection community and i would have thought that would lead to me by more violence, more crime but it seems like we have had a decline in crime despite you know those kinds of me by troubling figures and i

was wondering if you'd could give any thought to that and if you have any ideas why putnam's results might be going in a different direction from your results on crime in this country? >> it's a good question because their other data sets that would seem to suggest that the rate of violent crime depends on the degree of social interconnectedness and trust in institutions that when i referred to the civilizing process that is a decline from about 100,000 per year to about 10 per 100,000 per year and that occurs everywhere the government extends its tentacles. the further decline that we see in europe and parts of the united states went from about 10 down to the low single digits seems to depend not on the presence of government but some more nebulous process of accepting the legitimacy of the social order but indeed as you suggest you would expect to correlate with the health of the

institutions. but as you point out, don't. the embarrassing, dirty little fact is that no statistical criminologist has been successful in accounting for either the increase in crime rate in the 1960s through the 1980s nor the plunging from the 1990s to the present. everyone isn't doing catch up. all the numbers you plug into the usual models, you throw them in and turn the crank and they don't predict why the curves go up and down. so that is the embarrassing secret. i didn't my best to in the book talk about changes in cultural attitudes that could filter down to law enforcement and push these up or down but we are all retelling stories posts talking. >> last question. >> i can't wait to read this book. it's a fascinating subject.

i am talking -- interested in why is the perception that we live in such a dangerous and violent era, why is that so pervasive? it is amazing how discordant that is. >> it is a indeed an intriguing question. i think one reason is what the media report, what they are getting better and better at reporting. not only is there programming policy, media programmers know just like people, just as people just enjoy violent entertainment they enjoyed violent new so that is number one. we are better and better at finding violence. anyone on the planet with a cell phone can beam video footage of violence all over the world. and cognitive psychologists know that the human mind estimates risks and likelihood by the ease with which we can recall examples. if you can think of an example,

you think it must be dangerous. we are not as good as calculating denominators and the media of course don't report denominators. if you have got millions of people dying of alzheimer's and cancer and heart attacks. vladimir in lithuania keeled over from a heart attack, there is the camera crew filming it but if vladimir gets shot by a deranged postal worker and it will be on the evening news. the final reason is that we care more about violence now so a lot of things that just didn't even count as violence now we consider to be heinous crimes. the most -- genocide which before the century people didn't think there was particularly wrong with genocide. all throughout the new testament there didn't seem to be a problem. they were colonial ministers and politicians who thank god for waiting out the indians. there's a change of sensibility that has gone further and further down the scale to isolate behaviors that before

were okay. my favorite example being -- being the target of bullying. no less than the president of the united states gave a policy address on what we are going to do about bullying on the playground. 25 years ago this would have been an episode of "the simpsons." it would have been absurd. boys will be boys. how a kid is going to grow up tough. he will turn them into sissies but now we think from the point of a few of the bullied child. there is many many accounts of the suffering of victims of bullying and now there's a new category of violence that wasn't even counted as violence before. [applause] >> for more on steven pinker and his work, visit steven pinker.com.

>> all eight of your books are -- is that fair to say? >> yes. i mean the first book was on the grounds for impeachment if billr clinton, slanderous ways that cn

liberals lies..slanr actually the one, theon column talk to a liberal if you must, that covers everything under the sun including dating tips in washington. including dating tips in washington. >> host: "slander," treason, god less, guilty, demonic, are those fighting words? >> guest: zip by titles, aren't they? [laughter] like i said, i was thinking of calling this book "legion" or "my name is legion." but a small slice of christians would understand what i was talking about and, yeah, i want people to read my books. i put a lot of work in them, i think you'll learn things, i think you'll sigh the world in a -- see the world in a different way so, yeah, we give them zippy titles. we put me on the cover in the black cocktail dress usually because it annoys liberals. >> host: from if democrats had

any brains, they'd be republicans? could be the best of ann coulter according according to you? >> guest: it's more of a quote book, yeah. >> host: here's one quote: >> host: steven in south jordan, utah, you're on "in depth." good afternoon. >> caller: hi, ann. i'd like to thank you for all that you've done. i don't really have a question, but i have some comments about religion between the conservative and the liberals. there are principles, conservative principles that have applied and acted upon that are conduct today the social, spiritual and economic well being of individuals as well as nations. and these principles came from god himself, and they formed a foundation of civilized society, and they're commonly referred to as the ten commandment pes. what the liberals have done in probably the last 50 years is turn these into the ten inconvenient truths.

and you can go back to lyndon johnson's great society, his welfare program. he turned honor thy father and mother into honor thai mother and big government. and we can see what that's done to the black families and a lot of families. i don't know, have you ever read the keynote address given by obama? >> guest: um, no, but i think you need to read my book, "godless," where this point is made more pithily, i think. that is not an inconvenient truth. no, the platform of the democratic party is breaking each one of the ten commandments one by one by one. thou shalt not murder. what is the most important issue to the democratic party? yes, that's right, abortion. sticking a fork in the head of little babies sleeping peacefully in their mothers' wombs. thousand shalt not steal, their entire tax policy is to generate class envy and steal money, redistribute worth.

certainly put no gods before me, they put every god before the real god. um, i don't think there's a living liberal who wouldn't give up his eternal soul to attend the carters' "vanity fair" party to be cited favorably in in the "new york times." the worshiping of idols is sport for, it's more than sport. it is religion of the left. their religion is breaking each one of the ten commandments one by one. >> host: and from "godless" you write: these pro-choicers treat abortion the way muslims treat mohamed. it's so sacred, it must not be mentioned. the only other practice that was both defended and unspeakable in america like this was slavery. >> guest: uh-huh. that's true. and interestingly, even, um, even in places where slavery was accepted, and it wasn't in many parts of the world, people would

not let their children play with slave traders the way i imagine people wouldn't today let their kids -- it's one thing to say, oh, i'm pro-choice and let a woman decide. it's a different thing to let your kids play with a child of a local abortionist of which there are not very many. it's a repellant practice. but it is peculiar that they'd elevate this and pretend it's a constitutional right, and yet we can't use the word. you don't have, you know, gun rights groups refusing to use the word "gun." it shows you what a hideous thing it is and what a hideous thing they know it is. >> host: now, another recent tweet from ann coulter, why doesn't barack obama tape the same speech and have them run it every night? new berlin, wisconsin, you're on. >> caller: okay. good afternoon, ann. it's wonderful to talk to you. i just finished, i have finished reading your book, and be i love it. >> guest: thank you. >> caller: and, basically, i'm here from the home of joe

mccarthy, scott walker, paul ryan and also bass teague days -- bastille days. i just read your book at that time. i asked people why are we celebrating bastille days? so we had a lot of fun with that. but i want to know one of my main questions, because i do watch all this back and forth and all this stuff. so many times that if we would just follow our constitution, we wouldn't be in this mess. and one of these main things is article i, section 11 of the constitution. you know, basically, all the powers are vested in congress. they are not vested in the bureaucrats. they are not vest candidated. and what are we going to do, to me, to bring back that and make people understand? to get our power back for we, the people -- >> guest: i'm so glad you ask. um, no, this is, this is a very important point. democrat policies are so unpopular that democrats have had to stop promoting them themselves. releasing violent and, you know,

child molesting, murdering criminals, for example. so instead they just nominate judges and then assure us that the judges are very moderate and centrist, and they get up to the supreme court and suddenly discover, look, in this 2 200-year-old document, we found one. there's a right to gay marriage and abortion, and we must release 36,000 criminals from the california prisons. a recent united states supreme court ruling, by the way. so now they get the courts to do their dirty work for them and tell us it's a constitutional right. and i think the only way to rein this in, i mean, obviously, we have the method we've been trying for the last 20 years, quarter century, elect a republican president, um, wait for vacancies on the supreme court, get a supreme court nominee who doesn't hallucinate when reading the constitution. um, that really didn't work out so well. we had three, you know, three republican appointees -- sandra day o'connor, david hackett

souder, justice kennedy who all voted to uphold the heart of roe v. wade though not the reice holding. as and ally ya said, i don't know how that's fouling precedent. -- following precedent. in any event, we need to get five at large supreme court justices. this is one of my plans, just for a laugh to start engaging in if conservative activism and to hallucinate the sort of rights equivalent to the rights being hallucinated by the liberal justices so that we'll suddenly have a right to a flat tax, we'll have a right to own a rocket-propelled grenade, we'll have a right to free champagne for blonds. um, all kinds of fantastic rights i can think of. oh, i think we'll declare the withholding tax unconstitutional. and then our justices can all admit it was just a joke because liberals can never understand how heinous their policies are until it's done to them.

and the alternative plan to, i can state much more quickly, we need a conservative, a republican executive to say in response to an insane supreme court ruling, for example, some of the guantanamo rulings under president bush, um, i wish he had just said thank you for your opinion, the constitution makes me the commander in this chief. i am not, i am not giving, you know, special constitutional rights to terrorists grabbed on a battlefield as happened at guantanamo. thanks, supreme court. >> host: first a tweet and then an e-mail. the tweet by scott wagner: i like the way she flings her hair, can she sell a dvd of that while she reads "demonic"? that's the tweet. e-mail, tim johnson. ms. coulter lays it on the line, and all who disagree are, in her words, stupid and demonic. >> guest: um, no. some are misguided. mostly i think it is the worshiping of false idols, however. i think it is this desire to be

considered cool and in and be not have to think about anything. >> host: her public appearances are an avalanche of gnarl words, and if serious conservatives want to be taken seriously, the first thing they have to do is distance themselves from the likes of glenn beck, rush limbaugh, grover norquist and ann coulter. >> guest: well, i don't know about the other guys, but i would say not at all for me. [laughter] snarl words. i mean, this is like what i said about joe mccarthy. what's your point? what are you disagreeing with? what's the snarl world? was i think that was not -- because i think that was not all sweetness and nights in that e-mail. [laughter] but this is how liberals avoid talking about the issues. i mean, that was the theme of "slander" that they anat metize us. racists, sexist, ugly, mean. don't listen to this person, don't read this american. danger, danger. well, if you could argue with us

on our ideas, i think you'd do so. and if we were despicable and harm? ing, i don't think we'd have -- snarling i don't think we'd have so many fans. .. saints and it's sort of the reverse of what i just said. democrats new technique so it drives them crazy that's conservative have their own media, talk radio and the internet and "fox news" where you can occasionally see a conservative so their approach is to send out sobbing historical women to make their point and you can't respond to them from cindy sheehan to the jersey girl to joe wilson. oh but they had a relative die.

you can't respond. they are allowed to exploit the entire right wing agenda on this. >> guest: the next call from jordan in lexington kentucky. >> caller: hi ann. such a huge fan. i am a former college republican president murray state university and a former reagan fellowship recipient also from the phillips foundation. >> guest: that's great, congratulations. nice to meet you. >> caller: thank you so much. that was in 2007 but really i in had two questions for you.lly i am reading "demonic" right now by the way and i think it's myig favorite of your books. i've literally read everyone. i read it i think when i was in the eighth grade. crimes and misdemeanors" in the 8th grade. >> guust: you are. >> guust: you are a fine american and will go far. >> caller: is it true your mother is from paduca,

kentucky? >> guust: yes she is. i was down there a couple weeks ago almost, we had a family reunion. >> caller: i'm rely wa how to send it to you. >> guest: i'm sure you can get it to me through the phillips foundation. is the phillips foundation? >> guest: phillips bought up regnery books. phill conservative booipk club, varios other publications, but it gives out these very impressive that you won thisve award for a young journalist i guess. i guess it is called the reagan

award. guess it is called the reagan award. i haven't been judge. i'm aware of the various winners and tom phillips, so he oversees this whole complex which i'm a small part. you can definitely get the book to me through the phillips foundation. >> host: next call for ann coulter comes from new york city. hi, mike. >> caller: hello. good afternoon to all of you. i would, like to talk about the recent act of white terrorism in norway. initially this is described by people on the right as muslim terrorism, which was incorrect. then it was described by people on the left as christian terrorism. which is also incorrect. the only way this could have been described is that and drers breivik, is a white racist terrorist who

committed an act of white terrorism in a worldwide system of white supremacy. forget christianity. forget right-wing. for get left-wing. that is the only way this should be looked at. and to do so any other way is, incorrect. >> guest: i agree with part of that. and as luck would have it, i read his mannyfesto. not all of it. it gets a little representative so you can skim right through some parts -- repetitive. i'm unaware of any conservatives who blamed it on islamic terrorism. we didn't know what it was. by the time we heard what happened he was being described in "the new york times" headlines as christian fundamentalist. gun-toting, fox news-viewing i believe. and his mannyfesto makes clear as the caller said, he isn't a