Liz Else, associate opinion editor
IDEAS, like most things, are subject to fashion. Right now, we are revisiting our contemporary notions about human violence.
In The Better Angels of our Nature, published last month, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker argues that we have misread the evidence, which in fact shows we are becoming less violent as time moves on, due largely to the forces of modernity, or civilisation.
In The End of War, science writer John Horgan also challenges our views on violence. Unlike Pinker, though, he narrows the lens mostly to war, and the possibility of eradicating it. This is a furrow Horgan has ploughed for a while, in informal seminars and magazine articles, and now a book - a quarter of the size of Pinker's. Yet where Pinker is looking at an overall fall in violence with time, Horgan argues that there is no persuasive evidence for warlike activity being either ancient or hardwired into humanity in the first place.
He lays into the anthropology which allowed Barack Obama to observe that war "appeared with the first man". We are, he writes, as likely to be peaceful as violent, and the evidence is better for war being cultural, or situational. As such, his hopeful argument is that war is best seen as a problem amenable both to scientific analysis and solution.
The End of War is a concise read with a great title - until you remember that Horgan was also behind a book called The End of Science. At least this time you hope he's right.
Book Information
The End of War
by John Horgan
Published by: McSweeney's
?14.99/$22
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