Books, (1)

Hey, Happy New Year.

I hope you're all well and had a good holiday week and now you're rested and ready to make this year, 2012, the best ever.  Of course, we have one more day off tomorrow before we have to put in all that effort.

But this is it.  This can be the best year ever.  We know how to do it; we just don't agree.

Anyway, over the holiday I have not worked too much.  Part of what I have been doing is reading, and two of the books are long, heavy, academic kind of things that interest me.  I started one mystery and it was really well written, with good characters and a clever plot, but by the middle of it the events became either predictable or ridiculous.  I'm not good at letting those things slide, so I went back to these somewhat ponderous academic books.

The first, which I will deal with briefly here, is Steven Pinker's  "The Better Angels of Our Nature."  He takes about 700 pages to make the point that we, humans, have become more caring and less violent over the last few centuries.  In order to make his point he fills hundreds of pages of descriptions of the kinds of torture and gore, rape and slavery that were common for centuries. Most of that, he maintains, is either being eliminated or is at least frowned upon, when forever it was just part of human life. 

The point he makes, which is a different stance for him, is that we are not genetically programmed to be violent and murderous.  He shows how the growth of civilizations around the world have really served to civilize people.  We now care about things that were never even considered as possible, such as equal right s for women, a punishment being too cruel and inhuman, not hanging people for robbery, racial equality, the right to a fair trial, democracy, and the big one, which really has just begun to take hold in the last fifty years, that wars are not worth the trouble, and that they can be avoided.

This is a major new idea, and for most people it just became even a discussion in the 1960s when a lot of soft, educated, rich Americans, like me, were willing to put reason ahead of patriotism to not get hurt. This had always been unheard of, and often resulted in executions.

Certainly, there are still many people who feel that anyone who is of a different race, and women and anyone who is different in any way: gay, foreign, Muslim, etc, is still basically inferior, and because of that they can be easily slaughtered.  But that way of thinking, which was once so unquestioned, is now questioned almost all the time.

The biggest example I think, of Pinker's point, is that right now most of the developed world is in a big economic slump, and jobs and money are scarce all over the world.  But no one is threatening to go to war over it.  In the history of the world, that is something really new.

So, enjoy that idea, and Happy New Year.  Let's work together to make it the best yet.