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Tagged with “book:title=the better angels of our nature” (2) activity chart

  1. RSA - The Better Angels of our Nature

    A radical re-assessment of human progress from one of the world’s most exciting public thinkers.

    In his latest work, Steven Pinker explores the ways in which modernity and its cultural institutions are actually making us better people.

    In ‘The Better Angels of our Nature’, Pinker traces a history of progress that reveals the historical circumstances and “civilising forces”, from commerce to cosmopolitanism, that have brought us to the most peaceful era humankind has yet experienced. Join Steven Pinker at the RSA for a fascinating insight into the conditions, norms and policies that combine to engage the "better angels" of human nature - our capacity for co-operation, empathy and altruism.

    Speaker: Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University and author of ‘The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes’ (Allen Lane, 2011).

    http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/2011/the-better-angels-of-our-nature

    —Huffduffed by adactio one year ago

  2. Steve Pinker’s “Better Angels”: Dodging Our Own Bullet? | Radio Open Source with Christopher Lydon

    Steven Pinker has written a game-changer on the little matter of how quickly humanity is headed for hell or redemption. The short form of The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined is that we’re on the verge of Liebniz‘s (and Candide‘s) “best of all possible worlds.” Much more than that, Better Angels is a tour de force in 700 pages of dense, witty prose, distilling and explaining the ever-steeper downward trends in battle-deaths, state executions, murder, rape, wife-beating and child-spanking, among others things. “Interesting if true” was my instinctive newspaper-guy response. After a month’s immersion, and this conversation, I’m staggered and stunned, avid for the new Enlightenment.

    http://www.radioopensource.org/steve-pinkers-better-angels-dodging-our-own-bullet/

    —Huffduffed by adactio one year ago