Why is There Peace?
[Link: greatergood.berkeley.edu...]
Although the website where this is published has a bit of a “Kumbaya” theme to it, the article by Stephen Pinker is worthwhile as a reminder to those who do not understand what life used to be like when the “noble savages” populated the earth.
Snip***********
…The doctrine of the noble savage—the idea that humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions—pops up frequently in the writing of public intellectuals…
But now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward…
When the archeologist Lawrence Keeley examined casualty rates among contemporary hunter-gatherers—which is the best picture we have of how people might have lived 10,000 years ago—he discovered that the likelihood that a man would die at the hands of another man ranged from a high of 60 percent in one tribe to 15 percent at the most peaceable end.
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Frank says: