>> it's not that long. >> are you working on another book at this point? >> no. no, no, no. this was a lot of work, this book. it took a lot of research. i mean i sort of knew about the french revolution but like most americans, i didn't know a lot about it, and there was just so much research and so little talking to other humans so know i think it is going to be about a year now. weighty time to percolate to think about the next theme of the book but also i'm just tired. [laughter] >> along book to her? >> yes, the book to her ended up being fun. i usually hate the first two weeks but as my publicist makes me get up early. that's the only thing i hate about it. but then, i outsmart her by going to california and she is not going to get me up at 4:00 in the morning and i can stay on east coast time so it's like i'm sleeping and. >> in two sentences, what is

demonic about? >> demonic is about the mob mentality and how it is a part of liberalism beginning with the french revolution, the american revolution which i contrast and explaining 200 years of the history of liberalism basically, how they rely on bob's and a lot of what you see it occupy wall street is stunningly consistent with what i talk about in this book. >> chris christie has endorsed mitt romney? >> yeah. i hang on everything chris christie says so i guess i'm a romney girl now. no, really am. i think it's going to be romney. in fact of my column i have had it with these upstarts. look is not ronald reagan. we know ronald reagan isn't running. he is fantastic in the debates and best of all, he hasn't -- has said demonstrated ability to trick liberals into voting for him.

>> next on booktv, steven pinker argues we are living in the most peaceable air of human existence and that through the spread of government, literacy, trade and cosmopolitanism, humans have been able to increasingly control the inner demons that lead us to violence. this is about an hour and 15 minutes. >> believe it or not, and i know most people do not, has been in decline for long stretches of time and we today are probably living in the most peaceful time in our species existence. the decline of violence has not been steady. it is not brought violence down to zero and it is not guaranteed to continue. nonetheless, it's a persistent historical development, visible on scales from millennia to be years, from wars and genocides, to the spanking of children in the treatment of animals. this evening i'm going to

discuss six major historical declines of violence, their immediate causes in terms of particular historical era that a historian would single out but also their ultimate causes in terms of general historical forces interacting with human nature. the first major declined i call the pacification process. and tell about 5000 years ago, humans everywhere lived in anarchy without central government. what was life like in this state of nature? this is a question which people have had opinions for many centuries. thomas hobbes, 1651, families he said in a state of nature the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. 100 years later john jacques cousteau of countered that in the state of nature nothing can be more gentle than man in his

primitive state. both of these men were pontificating from the armchair. neither of them knew anything about what life was like was like half the state of nature and today we can do better. there are two methods to measure death rates in nonstate societies. one of them is forensic archaeology, a kind of csi. namely what proportion of prehistoric skeletons have found violent trauma such as bastions goals, decapitated skeletons, arrowheads embedded in femurs, fractures on older bones, the kind of fracture you get when you hold up your arm to ward off a blow, and mummies found with rope tied around their necks. well unfortunately, this space will not accommodate visuals but i have a graph of 20 prehistoric archaeological sites in which archaeologists have tried to estimate the proportion of

skeletons with signs of violent trauma. they range from 0% to 60% and the average is about 15%. let's compare the 15% figure with those of some state societies. example, the united states in europe through the 20th century, the comparable rate of death from warfare was about 1%. if we try to get the worst possible figure i throwing and all the war deaths, although deaths from genocides and all the deaths from man-made famines throughout the world during the 20th century, the year is about 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's about 3/10 of, 3/10 of 1%. the second way of estimating the

rate of violent death in state societies is by examining ethnographic vital statistics. that is, what percentage of people living in accident or recent nonstate societies, hunter gatherer, hunter horticultural and other tribal societies die at the hands of their fellow humans? again, the graph that i would display if i was displaying graphs shows 27 societies for which such figures are available. here i have plotted them using the conventional criminologists scale of violent deaths per 100,000 people per year. the death rate ranges from zero to 1500 but the average is about 500 deaths per 100,000 people per year. that is -1/2 of 1%. again, let's compare that figure, that more than 500, with

the corresponding figure for some states and again we will stack the deck against the 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 is about 150. that is a similar figure to what we have for russia in the 20th century, which went through two world wars, revolution and the civil war. 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 a third of a deaths per 100,000 per year. sorry, that's the world in the first decade of the 21st century. the world in the 20th century, throwing and all of the world wars, genocides and man-made famines, is about 60 per 100,000 per year, far less than the 524 per 100,000 per year that we

find it on state peoples. what was the immediate cause of this change in rate of violent death? the most likely one is the rising expansion of states. students of history are familiar with the various taxes, that his pieces imposed by an empire or hegemon, pax britannica, pax seneca and so one. when a state imposes control over a territory it tends to try to stamp out tribal feuding. it's not because this comes from a benevolent interest in the welfare of the subject peoples, but rather all of this feuding is a nuisance to the overlords because it just settle scores among them and shuffles resources around at a net loss to the overlords who would just as soon keep the people alive to provide them with taxes and tributes and slaves and serfs.

just as a farmer has an interest in preventing his cattle from killing each other which is a net loss to him, so an emperor or warlord will try to keep his subject peoples from killing each other at a loss to himself. the second historical transition in violence has been called the civilizing process and it refers to the transition between life in the middle ages and i have a lovely woodcut here of knights coach a link, stabbing and putting daggers through presence and the early modern period. it turns out that in many parts of europe homicide statistics go back hundreds of years to the 14th and often the 13th century. if you plot the 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, a declined by a factor of 35. this was one of many graphs that i would ask you to imagine which consists of a 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 homicide in europe. the immediate cause of the european homicide declined was identified by the german sociologist, norbert ilias in this book called the civilizing process, namely during the transition from the middle ages to modernity there was a consolidation of central states and kingdoms out of the european patchwork of principalities and

thieves. as a result, criminal justice was nationalized and a life of feuding warlords -- they were called nights but today we call them warlords, was replaced by the kinks justice where some genius had the idea that if instead of the family of a victim collecting blood money from the family of a killer, if it was the state collected that money, it would be a constant revenue stream. and 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 coroner, which is why we still call the official who assesses causes of death the coroner. aside from the consolidation of states, the transitions from middle middle ages to modernity

saw a growing infrastructure of commerce, institutions such as money and finance and contracts that could be enforced and recognized within the boundaries of these newly consolidated states, and technologies that lubricated trade such as transportation, better roads, better bridles for horses, instruments of timekeeping and other technologies. the result was that zero-sum blunder where the plunderers gained was the victim's loss, was increasingly replaced by positive-sum trade, where does parties through a voluntary exchange can benefit. the third major transition can be illustrated vice some of the methods that the early states used to impose peace on their kingdoms. such as breaking on the field where the victim would be tied to a wagon wheel and the executioner would smash his or

her bones, her arms and legs with a sledgehammer at which point the victim would be hoisted up on the wagon wheel and left to die of exposure and shock. burning at the stake, sawing you in half from the up. and clawing flesh with hooks. however, in a remarkably narrow slice of time, centered in the 18th century, torture as a form of punishment was abolished by every major country, including the united states in the coalition against cruel and unusual punishment in the eighth amendment to the constitution. this was part of a global movement to abolish judicial torture. the 18th century also saw the abolition of other institutionalized forms of violence that we now consider

barbaric, such as the frivolous application of the death penalty. people in 18th century had 225 capital offenses on the books, including poaching, counterfeiting, robbing a rabbit warren, being in the company of gypsies and quote strong evidence of malice in a child aged seven to 14 years of age. this was not just a theoretical possibility, but was carried out with relish. samuel in his diary speaks about a 7-year-old girl who was hanged first dealing a petticoat. by 1861, a list of capital crimes was down to four, basically high treason, murder and some of its variations. in the united states too there was an enormous list of capital crimes and the colonial and early independent period. i have a graph showing the percentage of american executions for crimes other than murder and it meanders from close to 100% in the colonial

period down to pretty much 0%. nowadays, the only crimes against people that are punishable by execution other than 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 a precipitous wave of appellations of capital punishment. nowadays, the united states is the only western to block receipt that even has the death penalty and even then, only in two-thirds of the states. and even bend to say that the united states has the death penalty is a bit of a fiction. ..

and of course, slavery where the end of the 18th century saw the beginning of a tidal wave of abolition of slavery. again, states began to climb the curve, not doing it until the 1860s. but today for the first time in history, no slavery is not legal anywhere in the world. he used to be slavery was legal that there is a world ending seed endorsed as part of the natural order of things by teaching techniques, by the bible and just about everyone else. >> but with the media cost for humanitarian revolution?

at the edit couple of candidates in the most possible in terms of something to happen before the humanitarian revolution was advances in printing it would receive. printing was the only industry that showed an increase in productivity prior to the industrial revolution in the 19th century and the cost of printing a book plunged 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 people who could read them in the 18th century for the first time a majority of englishmen were illiterate. well, why should let her say matter? the causes are those that we abbreviate with the turn the enlightenment. for one thing, knowledge replaces superstition and it reads. as voltaire said, those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. as your society become smart

enough to debunk various forms of hogwash, such as heretics go to, which has caused crop failures. children are possessed, africans and kings ruled by divine right and someone is bound to undermine many traditional rationales for violent. also, literacy can be part of a general current towards cosmopolitanism, also encouraged by tape now achieve such as chips that allow the easy movement and mixing of people as. and it is possible that as people spend more of their waking life reading fiction in history and journalism, they start to inhabit other people's minds come to see the world from their point of view. therefore come developing more and get the most cruelty. if you're reflexively try to imagine what it's like to be some other person, maybe you're a little less likely to in

joycean disemboweled. the fourth historical transition had to wait another 150 years or so. and it is they develop at the wiring from the political scientists i called the long peace. and it speaks to the common conception that the 20th century was the most violent in history. interestingly, people who repeat that claim never back it up with any numbers for many century other than the 20th century. and it's highly likely that that claim is fallacious. it certainly history the second world war was the deadliest event in human history in terms of the absolute number of people who were killed. on the other hand, the world had a whole lot more people in the 20th century than having a centuries. and we record and care about more deaths on lap one in the

20th century than people did in previous centuries. if you try to estimate literally retrospectively the death toll from atrocities in past centuries and you scaled down by the size of the worlds population at the time, it's not simply the 20th century was the worst. i've taken acres from several petronas towers just as they call themselves, such as matthew white premise for the coming book, the great big book of horrible things, where he placed the 100 worst things that people have ever done to each other that we know us. i divided them to estimates of the worlds population at the time. and what happens is world war ii comes in in ninth place in world war i doesn't even make the top 10. the other atrocities such as the mongol invasions, the african slave trade, the annihilation of native americans and 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 atrocity throughout human history plotted over time, the english form and even cloud 42,500 years. if you've been zoom in on the last 500 years, where we could do a little bit better instead of just plotting the atrocities, we cannot them up for the centuries. the political scientists to leave you have done that for a particular category of mass violence, namely great power wars. wars that began to pound gorillas of the day comes the largest state in the one and in fact do far more damage to make it into a war and all the little worth dying. if you plot the proportion of years between 1,802,000 which the great powers said that they fought each other, you see a curb and which for the early

centuries, the great powers are pretty much always the lord. they are many points that have 100% of the years and a quarter century. in other great powers are virtually never were. the last great power war with the korean war that ended in 1953. if you plot the duration of wars involving the great power on at least one side, the duration goes down, we used that things like the 30 years war, the 80 years war, the 100 years war and the 20th century we have the six-day war. if you plot the frequency of wars involving a great power, that is how many new wars are started every here. again, you have a card that works its way downward from 1500 to the president. however, one curve goes in the opposite direction. if you look for most of its history, if you plot the deadliness of wars involved in

great power, that is not how many wars are started, but how many people are killed once a war does begin. that goes in the other direction. baucus upward. that is nations cup veteran better at killing larger and larger numbers of soldiers until 1945 in which that curb is an abrupt u-turn. since 1945, worse for the first time in history has become both less numerous and less deadly pronation airport. if you then combine these two figures, you multiply the number of wars by the deadliness of each war, you can't is exactly curve. the crucial point is the last one on that curve representing the last 25 years -- in fact, the last two points come in the last 50 years are hitting all-time lows over the last 500 years. this is the phenomenon called the long peace.

namely, that in the last two thirds of a century, since 1945, is then an historically unprecedented decline in interstate or. wars between countries. to be exact, and here are some statistics that are easy to convey. they don't intergraph because they all with the number zero. there were no wars between the soviet union and then the united states, which may spell unexceptional today, but every expert predicted that world war iii was inevitable. many people in the room grew up with the experts assure a nice that it was only a matter of time before the u.s. and ussr to doubt. no nuclear weapons have been used since nagasaki in wartime, again compounding every expert prediction. there have been no wars between great powers in 1953. probably the longest span of time without a great power war

as the roman empire. there have been no wars between western european countries. again, your first reaction might be to say ho-hum horse there hasn't. no one expects france and germany to go to war. what a concept. for sweden and russia. but any student of european history knows this was the rule, not the exception and tell 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 appeared but about the rest of the world? well, they are safe if major decline of violence that i called the new piece, that refers to the rest of the world. so what happens -- we've set aside the great powers of the western european countries. the rich countries. what was the rest of the world

doing? there was a worldwide decline in the number of interstate wars for one country declares war against another. however, that has been a huge increase in civil wars. it makes postern in the 1960s the newly independent states and governments were challenged by insurgent movements on both sides were armed and financed to make down by the cold war superpowers. however, since 1991, even the number of civil wars has declined with the end of the cold war. and now one has to ask is the number of wars went down come the number of civil wars for not, which was killed by people? the answer is very clear. interstate were still far more people are least they have since the late 1940s. at least there is a pair of grape powers checking artillery shells at each other, on each

other's cities, sending a massive number of tanks to do battle, to rack up high body counts in a very. in comparison, some teenagers armed with ak-47 can surely make life miserable in the local areas in which they were. but they simply don't do the same amount of nationwide damage. and again, i have a graph showing the deadliness of interstate and civil wars over the last 55 years. the number of deaths of interstate war per year of her has plummeted for civil wars. it's just a slight increase followed by a decrease. if you then add up the deaths from all sorts of work, that is interstate and civil wars, what you find is a bump the decline with peaks for the korean war, the vietnam war, the rain in iraq were. but in the last 10 years, the

figures have the floor that basically a narrow little stripe, you can see the picture i'll describe it in a numbers. during the worst years of world war ii, the death rate from war was about 300 per hundred thousand per year. jerry late 1940s and 1950s that it all into about 22 per hundred thousand per year. and this past decade it has been upon their death per hundred thousand people per year, using a constant yardstick. and this is the fama non-admin calling the new piece. it would be a bit of an exaggeration, but not too much to say that treating of the 1960 folksingers is almost coming true. that is the world is almost putting an end to war. what are the immediate causes of the peace?

well, one influential hypothesis came from immanuel kant in 1795 in his essay, perpetual peace in which he proposed that democracy come interstate trade and the international community all would drive down the likelihood of war. recently, a pair of political scientists, rous brathwaite and john o'neill measured these factors and showing first of all that all of them have increased in the second half of the 20th century and all of them are statistical or zip use. the number of democracies exceeded the number of top proceeds around 1990. and have shown an increase at the amount of international trade skyrocketed after they had of the second world war. the membership and intergovernmental organizations have steadily increased throughout the 20th century and especially since 1990, there is in a huge increase the number

of international peacekeepers that his soldiers with blue helmets and other neutral parties to get in the way between opposing forces. they don't always prevent a weird ending of hostilities and to war, but they do far more often than when there are no peacekeepers. finally, the sixth historical decline of violent at all the rights revolutions come which refers to targeting of violent at smaller scales against vulnerable minorities such as racial minorities, women, children, and animals. during the postwar period, the civil war -- the civil rights movement put an end to lynchings, which used to tape place at a rate of about 150 per year. that went down by the 1950s to zero per year. hate crime murders, blacks have been in the single digits since they were first recorded in

hudson then plunged to about one per year. nonlethal hate crimes against blacks such as intimidation and assault has declined since they were first measured. the kinds of racist attitudes that in the past with life bursts of violence such as jonas died and programs have been in steady decline. in the united states if you ask white people, which you move up a black family moved in next door? do believe black and white student should go to separate schools? to think the income between blacks and whites is due to lower ability or lower motivation? all of those racist attitudes have been in steady decline. many have fallen so low that they are in the realm of crank opinion and the pollsters have dropped them from their surveys. the women's rights movements have seen in 80% decline since the early 70s when the statistics were first kept.

also, a precipitous decline in domestic violence. a strong decline in the most extreme forms of domestic violence, namely ox or his site and read his site. that is the killing of whisenhunt ends. although hearing must add the decline has been far deeper. the women's movement has been very, very good for man. the children's rights movement has seen a steady decline in the number of american states said of corporal punishment were paddling. a decline in every western country in the degree of approval is thinking. a decline in physical abuse and abuse of children since statistics were first kept. and a decline in school violence such as fighting and nonfatal crimes. the movement has seen an increase in the number of states that have decriminalized homosexuality, those states

worldwide and american states. a decline in anti-attitudes whether it should be made illegal or whether gay people should be gained opportunity and a decline in one category as anti-gay hate crimes. the animal movement has seen a decline in hunt income rising vegetarianism in a declining percentage of motion pictures in which animals were harmed. last night while come all this raises the questions. why have all these graphs meandered downwards over the course of history? why have there been so many different declines in violence at different scales of magnitude and time? well, one possibility is human nature has changed in him how people of last inclinations towards violence. i consider this an unlikely explanation. for one thing, top leaders continue to hit, kicked and i

appeared little boys continue to play fight. grown-up boys and many girls enjoyed various forms of accurate stars such as murder mysteries, greek tragedies, shakespearian job thomas, videocams, ice hockey -- [laughter] and movie starring a certain ex-governor of california. and a number of social psychologists have assessed the prevalence of homicidal fantasies. they asked people to question, have you ever fantasized about killing someone you don't like? while come to terms about 15% of women and a third of men frequently fantasize about killing people they don't like. more than 60% of women and three quarters of men at least occasionally fantasize about killing people they don't like. and the rest of them are lying. [laughter] and more likely possibility is human nature is extraordinarily calm xma comprises both inclinations toward violence and

inclinations that counteract them. what abraham lincoln called, the better angels of our nature, from which it is title of my own book. and the historical circumstances have increasingly favored her piece of inclinations, are better angels. while what are these forces in conflict, fighting it out inside? i think violence is not a single psychological category. we have a number of psychologically and even neurobiological a very distinct motives that can result in violence. their sheer exploitation coming use of violence would mean to an end with some living thing as an obstacle on the path of something you want, which we see played out in violence such as, plunder, conquest and the elimination of rivals. different from that is the quest for dominance, the drive for

individuals to claim the pecking order and be alpha male and analogous is to drive among groups for ethnic racial national or religious supremacy. the very large category of revenge and moralistic violence, which results in the net has come to just as cruel punishments and perhaps the biggest category are violence pursued in quest of an ideology, such as militant religions, nationalism, fascism, nokia seven communism, which can license vast outweighs the violence because of a pernicious utopian cost-benefit analysis. if your ideology holds out the prospect of a future world that is infinitely good forever, well, what are you entitled to do in order to attain the world? will come you can commit as much balance as you want and you'll still be making the world a

better place by this cost-benefit analysis. also, imagine that you have been saved 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 up and they reject it. well, how evil at bay? you do the math. arbitrarily evil. and that is why the tails of the distribution of massive violence tend to be pushed outward by utopian ideologies. well, what we have on the other side to counteract these motives for violence? what are our battle angels? ersatz control, ability to anticipate consequences of behavior and inhibit bad impulses. there's empathy, the ability to feel others' pain. there is the moral sense, which

is a family of intuitions, some of which lay tribalism, authoritarianism can actually increase violence, but at least one flavor of the moral sense, they try for fairness can counteract violence. and then there is reason to the cognitive faculties that allow us to engage an object did detached analysis. well, if we have been these inclinations towards violence on the one hand, these inhibitions against violence on the other, what has tipped the balance over the course of history? what is brought out our better angels? the first possibility was proposed by hubs in his book called the leviathan. a leviathan to restate and judicial system with a monopoly on legitimate use of violence can eliminate the incentives were exploited attacks by punishing a comic and thereby reduce the need for deterrence

and vengeance. can circumvent the self-serving biases by which both sides to a dispute always believed that they are in the side of the angels and that the other side is weak or or stubborn. there exaggerate adversaries benevolent. this can stoke cycles of revenge unless you have a disinterested third party deciding who is to blame in beating out the penalties. some historical evidence that do you do violence had been passing for it consists of the first to transition that i discussed this evening. the pacifying and civilizing effects of state and the fact we can watch these movies in reverse and sounds of anarchy, where indeed, violence can rewrapped, such as the american wild west with a cushy cowboy movies is that the nearest chair was 90 miles away.

in failed states, collapsed empires and mafias and street gangs who deal in contraband and therefore cannot settle disputes by calling in the state. they can't file a lawsuit, cantonal 9-1-1 because the nature of the work they do. so they have to enforce their interests with their own with just days, resulting in the corleone is, sopranos and those kinds of vendettas. other evidence included the international scale the effectiveness of international peacekeepers. the second historical force guys out better angels and i suggest a gentle commerce and the plunder is a zero-sum game, that a positive sum game in which everyone can win. over the course of history, estate elegy improves, allows the trade of goods and ideas over longer distances, among

larger groups of people, more and more of the rest of humanity becomes more valuable. a concrete example maybe there isn't a lack of affection between the united states and china these days, but it's not terribly likely to go to war. among other things, they make too much of our staff and we have too much money. historical evidence for the period gentle commerce consists of historical -- i'm sorry, statistical analyses show in countries that open economies in greater amounts of international trade, get embroiled in fewer words, host fewer civil wars and host fewer genocides. the third historical force has been called the expanding circle. anything by peter singer is first endorsed by charles darwin. the idea is that abolition bequeathed us with empathy. unfortunately by default we

apply to a narrow circle of friends and family. over the course of history, you can see these expanding to embrace not just the family, but the village in the clan and tribe in the nation that's extended to other races, both sexes to children and eventually to other species. this just ask the question of what expanded circle and as i hinted earlier, technologies and increased cosmopolitanism they have that effect. the growing appreciation of history, of literature, a media, journalism growing eternities for travel. and we know from the social psychology laboratory that if we get a person to adopt the perspective of some other real effort dishes%, 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 the 17th and 18th century there was an expansion of literacy and travel for 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 the long peace and the rights revolutions was also the era of electronic global village. and it's often been speculated that the rise of internet and social media has assisted the revolution in the arab spring. the final historical force is the escalator of region. the possibility that the growth of literacy, education and public discourse has encouraged people to think more abstractly and more universe early. they get into the habit of rising above their parochial vantage point, which makes it harder to prove that your own interests over the interests of others. it encourages you to replace a morality based on tribalism,

authority in. if some with melody based on fairness and universal rules. it encourages people to recognize futility of cycles of violence and increasingly 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 abstract reasoning abilities as measured by i.q. tests believe it or not increased over the course of the 20th century. throughout the 20th century and all over the world, i.q. increased by three points a decade, the so-called flynn effect. how could this have affected violence? other studies have shown that people in societies with higher levels of education and measured intelligence with higher levels of education and measured intelligence with higher levels of education and measured intelligence almost equal to have fewer violent crimes on average, cooperate or in experimental games, how more classically liberal attitudes such as opposition to racism and

sexism and are more reset due to democracy. well, why do -- why have i ended up with this list of four very different -- seemingly different forces? why they are pushing towards less violence? the closest we can come to an overarching theory of violence is that it here is called a social dilemma. that is it is always tempting to an aggressor to engage in predatory were exploited of violence. it's quite ruinous to the town. in the long run, all parties are better off if violence is awarded and our dilemma as humans, is how to get the other guy should refrain from violence at the same time as you do. if you are the only went to your source into plowshares, then you

are sitting for invasion by the bad guys. everyone's got to decide to beat this. one can see these forces as cases in which human experience and human ingenuity gradually solves this problem, just like other scourges of nature that pestilence and hunger we still with and all of these forces have increased the material, emotional and cognitive incentives of all parties to avoid violent simultaneously. well, regardless of the correct explanations for the decline of violent, i think its implications for understanding the condition are profound. for one thing they call for a re-irritation of efforts towards violence reduction from a moralistic mindset to an era clement said. instead of asking, why is their war? we might be better at asking, why is there peace?

said of what are what are we doing what company might ask what we've been doing right? we have been doing something right and it sure would be good to find out exactly what it is. thank you very much. clap not >> thank you very much, "the better angels of our nature." this has been a fantastic presentation. already people are lining up for the questions. i am going to ask a question. i'm not successful, but i'm still going to keep trying. i'd like you to keep your questions really brief. and so everyone gets a chance and stephen, i'd like you to keep your answers brief. so it works both ways. and if you're comfortable, please say your name. >> my question is germany. it was the most cosmopolitan, the most highly educated society arguably in europe.

and they did the most horrible crime. >> well, it's a little misleading to say it because there were sectors of germany that were indeed cosmopolitan and educated. there is also sectors of germany that were more tried to live to live their mindset, deeply anti-semitic. even among the german elite, there was a widespread rejection of the enlightenment, which dismissed the french business. and rather than an acceptance of the idea of universal right and emphasis on flourishing individuals, there is a better permanent embrace of the light of the soul soil, tribalism. granted you are certainly right. there is a flourishing of cosmopolitan sentiments among some sectors of the population. the problem was they were on

murder. so the general answer is that it was -- that when it comes to an entire society, it is portend to see how dynamics can lead to competition among the various areas. and it's only if you have a robust democracy for which the cosmopolitan people are not murdered that it can affect their course of the society as a whole. >> first a comment and then a question. the great spanish filmmaker as he was dying sadness autobiography. only every 10 years can you get up out of the grave and get a newspaper and get in touch with what's going on. your presentation in terms of overt violence was extraordinarily impressive. on the other hand, there is a containment in one sense and the proliferation of violent games

starting with kids as young as two and three and tremendous compulsive preoccupation with violence and all the media and football and so forth. i would call it a kind of externalization, not a sub donation, but contained. and part of it i think is for a spoke of the pervasive the violent and his aggressive drive. and you can kind of identify with people who were suffering and say, thank god it isn't me. but even more important, murder mysteries. somebody i can fantasize that i've done this murder, but somebody else is going to be discovered and i can go conscious free. >> i agree that pleasure taken

in violent entertainment is a great constant of human experience. i don't believe that violent entertainment causes violent. the huge expansion of violent video games has been accompanied by the great american crime declines since the early 1990s. i'm also not convinced by a kind of hydraulic model but if you get your violent urges out to violent entertainment communis likely to be commended in real life. they think it's a guilty pleasure the people of all areas have had. if you look at tigress andronicus, the need to polls. as you look at the old testament. if you look at the lives of the saints, there's a lot of really gruesome stuff in there. people enjoy for interesting reasons, including the ones you mentioned a tenuous connection

to life violence. feedback i think people watch towards an accusation undertrained execution not a large part of the propositions. >> well, people got up family to watch really stomach turning public executions, burnings, break-ins, strangulations, disembowelment sprayed some in the past it is possible for an entire population to be overcome by a click to status them. >> i noticed there was laughter and twitter when you talked about disembowelment -- >> folks, we have a long line. i would like everyone to get the chance. >> good evening and happy new year. if anyone wanted to give me and leave it to the imagination to figure out. anyways, by the way is very much in press i your presentation. i've always wanted to meet you.

no precise fantasy here. [laughter] but i'm no more involved. i'm very passive. but the question is this. do you think some people are actually biological have a tendency to really must be inherently evil is sometimes the clouds in a dark and awake as though maybe there is a fear of clouds could arouse evil? little children, you know, pretty little girls want to play, want to play. and if you get too close, watch out. the scissors are going to be a nice dagger in your gut. and no matter how you raise them, even if they are adopted by the most nicest, kindest people, most intellectually brilliant, there is some in about them that they like to see others suffer.

>> the answer is that there is a substantial heritage component to antisocial tendencies at the extreme and violent antisocial tendencies. it is not obviously completely heritable. within a population, the troublemakers, the more callous, more impulsive people get that way in part before genetic reasons because thanks to the real-life research that carries out the experience you mentioned, mainly compare adopted children to their biological parents and adoptive parents. so there is some statistical tendency. the most extreme are psychopaths. a few percentage points of the population seem to be without the ability to develop a conscience that accounts for the interest of others. so among individual is fair, nothing to seek some heritability. >> i think we need to move on. i think it's only fair that everyone get a chance.

>> hi, my name is noah pree ali. my question is about the backroom boys. it is a phrase that used to refer to the chemist at dupont to developed via napalm that was used to great effect in the vietnam war. so in murdering the record of the backroom boys, professor norm chomsky, remarks that davis and activity of distance from the effects of their actions at the background voicepad and every type of logical occupations. and he traded it to the 30 years were. i mention that this institutionalized that a objective and rational and reasonable people wiley tech logical means had its roots in those prolonged genocidal conflicts that you mention have

debated and that time maybe it's 30% of what is now the czech republic just perished at the effects of that war. and if you mention the percentage of the genocidal conflict killed by these kind of wars have declined precipitously. but the institution seems to remain with us and this passionate, reasonable extreme violence particularly logical are backroom boys in the 1950s did all of the very effective killing agents. >> well, what i've really been concerned with is when these agents have been deployed. it's interesting as manly as we develop high-tech pushbutton forms of warfare, won't that

circumvent the innovations we have against hand on, bloody, gory violence and therefore we expect us to go way up. i don't think that is consistent with the process of history. he mentioned that 30 years war with horrific death rates. those who cared about pac-man and weapons and bayonets and so on. i think people can very easily overcome their resistance to hands-on violent. and in fact, it is almost the most high-tech forms of violence that are deployed most gingerly. nuclear weapons been an example, which have not been used since nagasaki. so the correlation is much less than evil thing because it is so easy to commit handgun violence. >> you're talking about historical link between technology of violence in that particular, you know, pattern and northern europe is technologically very rich and devoted to cultural violence.

>> how clear is that connection? >> yeah, nice technology is typically applied to weapons aboard. to the mongolian horseback had amazingly well -- competent those that could be vast amounts of damage very quickly. that is something that seems to bring out people's ingenuity. >> and paul steinberg, a psychiatrist here in town. i am wondering if you could just comment that she may be dismissing a change in human nature, a little too quickly in the sense fence that genes are always in it and quit the environment. and i know you cite a book in a new site great cartoonist research is remarkable and looking at what happened started

a 13th century with the royals just being much more fertile than the lower castes is. and bush was the created the alignment, but it took 500, 600 years for the industrial revolution to happen. we admire people in england to have what it haworth cause attention surplus disorder. and your people but the attention deficit disorder, less impulsivity, greater concentration, greater self-control. as society moves in the direction you reach a critical mass that may actually change the way -- it certainly feels just a change in the culture. >> yes. i discuss that possibility and the book. i am not not embrace the net,

though not rejecting it for one thing, lack of evidence. it makes the prediction that englishmen, regardless of their culture comes to be genetically less prone to impulsivity and violence than people from other cultures and races. this isn't a possibility maker to test any time soon or anyone else. but moreover, it may be necessary. it is fairly early in the biological evolution. but given some elements that i discuss occur far too rapidly to the boat into genetic evolution such as punching a crime rates from 1882 with the rates revolutions. the something must've happened that was not genetic that could account for that. congrats of parsimony, i figure we don't have any need for the hypothesis, but there's also been a genetic change while not doing it now. >> i'm a terrible public speaker, but a huge fan areas i'm going to ask you a question. i'm curious about people's

representative in the civilian line for spent. it's really interesting to hear about the kind rates of violence, but at the same time didn't think paramilitary police were seen in s.w.a.t teams have gone way beyond their original intention from hostage situations and even famously last year someone -- breaking into homes over college loans, et cetera. so with rates of violence are we declining amongst the people, why are the civilian line voice that seemed to be flexing muscles in a way that doesn't correlate with the decline of violence? >> well, we have to look at figures over time of government violence perpetrated against its own civilians. and i suspect there hasn't been

much at all if an increase to earlier decades and centuries. in bringing in the leviathan to keep people from each other's throats, then introduce a second problem of keeping leviathan from people's throats. the first transition was a tough bargain because it did lower the rate of violence, but then it gave you these lead thirsty despots studio with. the democratic revolution and indeed the continuing battle for democracy and civil liberties in an attempt to find the sweet spot where the government is powerful enough to deter predation by one citizen over another, but not so powerful that it becomes a menace to his own citizen. that is something i suspect were always going to muddle through.

>> thank you. >> i'm going to make sure everyone in line just to ask a question and that will be our limit today. >> hi, my name is gregory walsh. i want to say i've been really looking forward to reading this book ever since seeing a speech he gave three or four years ago at the ted conference on the same topic. i was however wondering if you could comment on some allegations made in a book i recently read called -- i've got a blink of an income of sex at dawn, the prehistoric origins of modern sexuality in which this author as well as some of the data you present about rates of violence among hunter gatherer cultures, which are called on state peoples tonight is erroneous. they allege, for example, that the data at the time i was collect it had had contact with modern society for many decades, that they are not in fact a mandate.

they are settled peoples. i've just been curious ever since reading that to hear your response to some of those allegations. >> not necessarily those allegations, but the data i present -- many are from people who definitely had no contact with any europeans, such as skeletons from pre-columbian native americans. many of them are also from hunter gatherer and hunter horticulturist people who also had no contact. so i can't respond to these allegations without knowing what they are. the certainly the sources i've consulted make it very clear when there has there has not been contact. and they span a range. there are some societies they don't have measured rate of homicide were deaths in war, but on average, the rates that are way up there for many, many

societies for different kinds, what they have in common is living under government. and that seems to uniformly give -- i shouldn't say uniformly, but there are some at the tail end of the distribution, bk rights to violence. but i can tell from both the ethnic archaeological literature , that's a solid conclusion. and i say many surveys that have the numbers to back up that claim. >> s. hyatt, thank you for your stimulating presentation. i guess when your listings that various show a decline of violence in our society, everything from paddling to death penalty, i guess one exceptionally stood out in my mind would be incarceration come a very high level of incarceration. of course there are bad people that deserve to be, but also nonviolent crimes that are huge sentences. people thrown into a situation where that prison life is not getting less violent. i was wondering how you fact are

into that larger picture? >> well, in historical terms, mattered presents are much less violent than prisons several hundred years ago when you could have prisoners shackled to the floor are wearing iron spiked collars and her family would have to pay for easement to eyes for this by color to be taken off when there is extremely high rates at us from disease and starvation in the prisons. it does not encourage americans by any means, but historically it would be inaccurate to the current american evidence that nothing has improved. now the american imprisonment holds of the last 20 years earlier by the way of reducing the counter at the indian army's increase street violence and violent crimes of all types that

had overtaken the united states with the 60s to the 1980s. the homicide rate more than doubled in those decades. and so, is a rather clumsy countermeasure, there is an increase in incarceration, which in part was responsible for the fact that the violent crime rates have plunged to earth since the 1990s. not entirely because there were a number of other causes of the violence declined, but most statisticians contribute as part of the crime declined to imprisonment. in the united states, as with many other of the trends i've been mentioning, it's a little misleading. as a country on the best and

intimate as representative of western democracies. but it's really an outlier. a lot of the trends i have mentioned are true for every western democracy but the united states, which is pulling up the rear. it's true of homicide, truth capital punishment. it's true willingness to engage in wars. and it's true of imprisonment, we reiterate disproportionately large proportion of our population and present are two other western democracies. certainly the century scale, there's no comparison between today's present and those of the night team and 18th centuries. >> i name is megan and i was wondering if you could share with us a bit about the methods you use to a ranch of these members he talked about tonight. do you do kind of independent testing statistics, what kind of look at this type of cause? like, does this factor cosmetics, change these things. could you share it as the source of your numbers?

>> it depends on the numbers. for different kinds of violence committed members have different sources. so for the state come announced a contrast, it came from a knocker fees of tribal peoples and from forensic archaeology. for the history of homicide in europe, it came from historical criminology, such as the unearthing corners records for every year any particular parish or town in europe going back to the middle ages. in the case of war, it depends on the. since 1946, there have been meticulous statistics kept on conflict by a couple scandinavian organizations. before 1946, thursday corliss work project, which looked at data rates for the largest wars from 1816 to the present. prior to 1816, it becomes as you can imagine the further back you

go, the fuzzier statistics scat. but there is a line as 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 reasonably good statistics. the least they have since the 1930s for crimes other than homicide like and assault, the best data or victimization surveys, which are contaminated by people's willingness to report a crime to the police. for others like child abuse and domestic violence, they are victimization surveys or other social science methodologies. so it all depends on the kind of violence. >> can you take a new approach with analyzing results from these? >> and generally took the data

set an entire dues from other researchers and never second guess the criteria. either the stargate, stopped a, what gets included, what is excluded because they didn't want to do cherry-picking to try to favor this hypothesis. so the data sets that i use very and quality for sure, but none were you in order to show a decline or manipulate in order to show a decline. i dumped all the data. even when i knew some of the inclusions were dodgy for various reasons i didn't give myself cherry-picking them. >> hi. i am just wondering. cut some fat social capitalism has been declining in the united states. interconnection community. i wouldn't have thought that with the two may be more violence, more crime, but it seems like we've had a declining crime despite those kinds of me

be troubling figures. i was wondering if you could get an teapot and have any ideas why putnam's results might be going at a different direction from your results on crime in this country? >> is a good question because their other data set does seem to suggest that the rate of violent crime depends on the degree of social interconnect minutes and trusted institutions. but when i refer to the civilizing process, that was a decline from about 100 per 100,000 per year to about 10 per hundred thousand a year and that occurs everywhere that government extends its tentacles. but the further decline to we see in europe and parts of the united states from about 10 to

the single digits, the low single digits seems to depend on the presence of government, but i'm somewhat nebulous nebulous process of accepting legitimacy of the social order than t. come as you suggest expect to correlate with the help of communal translations. but you also don't. the embarrassing dirty little for is that no statistical criminologists has been successful in accounting for either the increasing crime rate in the 1960s through the 1980s are more plunging from the 1990s to the president. everyone has been doing catch up. all the numbers you plug into the models you throw them in, turn the crank and rent for the

fiscal models cannot predict where the kurds go and down. so that is the embarrassing secret. i do my best in the book to 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 post out. >> last question. >> my name is rich potter. i can't wait to read this book. it's a fascinating subject. i am interested in what is the perception that we live in such a dangerous and violent era, why is that so pervasive? it's just amazing how discordant that is. >> it is indeed an intriguing question. i