Steven Pinker, docente al dipartimento di psicologia all’università di Harvard, intervenendo alla TED Conference, ha presentato la sua History of Violence. In cui presenta – a dispetto della percezione che si ha quotidianamente attraverso i media – una teoria in controtendenza:

In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion.

Partendo con lo sfatare quanto sostenuto in passato, e cioè che la natura umana tenderebbe alla pace e che verrebbe corrotta dall’ambiente circostante e dalle istituzioni, sostiene invece che quelle stesse istituzioni hanno contribuito a ridurre la dose di violenza che pervade la società. A sostegno della sua tesi, dice per esempio:

The criminologist Manuel Eisner has assembled hundreds of homicide estimates from Western European localities that kept records at some point between 1200 and the mid-1990s. In every country he analyzed, murder rates declined steeply—for example, from 24 homicides per 100,000 Englishmen in the fourteenth century to 0.6 per 100,000 by the early 1960s […].

According to the Human Security Brief 2006, the number of battle deaths in interstate wars has declined from more than 65,000 per year in the 1950s to less than 2,000 per year in this decade. In Western Europe and the Americas, the second half of the century saw a steep decline in the number of wars, military coups, and deadly ethnic riots.

Però – aggiunge Pinker – questa tendenza non deve portare all’autocompiacimento perché:

the phenomenon does force us to rethink our understanding of violence […]. With the knowledge that something has driven it dramatically down, we can also treat it as a matter of cause and effect. Instead of asking, “Why is there war?” we might ask, “Why is there peace?” From the likelihood that states will commit genocide to the way that people treat cats, we must have been doing something right. And it would be nice to know what, exactly, it is.