Steven Pinker vient de faire paraître
son nouvel opus : The Better
Angels of our Nature (oct 2011, chez Viking). En voici l'abstract:
We’ve all had the experience of reading about a bloody war or shocking crime
and asking, “What is the world coming to?” But we seldom ask, “How bad was the
world in the past?” In this startling new book, the bestselling cognitive
scientist Steven Pinker shows that the world of the past was much worse. With
the help of more than a hundred graphs and maps, Pinker presents some
astonishing numbers. Tribal warfare was nine times as deadly as war and
genocide in the 20th century. The murder rate of Medieval Europe was more than
thirty times what it is today. Slavery, sadistic punishments, and frivolous
executions were unexceptionable features of life for millennia, then suddenly
were targeted for abolition. Wars between developed countries have vanished,
and even in the developing world, wars kill a fraction of the people they did a
few decades ago. Rape, battering, hate crimes, deadly riots, child abuse,
cruelty to animals—all substantially down. How could this have happened, if
human nature has not changed? What led people to stop sacrificing children,
stabbing each other at the dinner table, or burning cats and disemboweling
criminals as forms of popular entertainment? The key to explaining the decline
of violence, Pinker argues, is to understand the inner demons that incline us
toward violence (such as revenge, sadism, and tribalism) and the better angels
that steer us away. Thanks to the spread of government, literacy, trade, and
cosmopolitanism, we increasingly control our impulses, empathize with others,
bargain rather than plunder, debunk toxic ideologies, and deploy our powers of
reason to reduce the temptations of violence. With the panache and intellectual
zeal that have made his earlier books international bestsellers and literary
classics, Pinker will force you to rethink your deepest beliefs about progress,
modernity, and human nature. This gripping book is sure to be among the most
debated of the century so far.
Déjà en 2007, il avait produit lors d'un Ted Talks une conférence
sur le déclin de la violence qui avait fait sensation sur la toile. (Notez
qu'une bonne partie de ses recherches s'appuient sur les travaux de Lawrence Keeley,
spécialistes des guerres préhistoriques.) Il vient de faire une nouvelle
conférence sur ce sujet, disponible ici (avec les
graphiques et une version écrite de la conférence). Cette conférence fait
partie d'un Master Class intitulé
The Science of Human Nature, piloté par Edge en juillet 2011, qui sera
progressivement entièrement accessible en vidéo et par écrit sur le site.