Steven Pinker

They are more sympathetic to immigration, free markets, and free trade, and less sympathetic to protectionism, make-work policies, and government intervention in business. Dean Simonton has developed several historiometric measures that are reliable and valid (in the psychometrician's technical sense) and politically nonpartisan. Morality […] is a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives and the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games. Richard Wrangham has noted that the domestication of animals usually tames them by slowing down components of the developmental timetable to retain juvenile traits into adulthood, a process called pedomorphy or neoteny. But if the natural carnivory of other species counts for something, why not the natural carnivory of Homo sapiens […] ? The Marine Corps has instituted a martial-arts program in which leathernecks are indoctrinated in a new code of honor, the Ethical Marine Warrior. Southerners do not outkill northerners in homicides carried out during robberies, they found, only in those sparked by quarrels. The periaqueductal gray contains circuits that control the sensorimotor components of rage. This flowchart suggested by the neuroanatomy corresponds fairly well with what psychologists see in the clinic and lab. The Origin of Species was published in 1859, long after romantic struggleism had become a popular philosophy, and Darwin himself was a thoroughgoing liberal humanist. Each category of formicide is driven by an utterly distinct motive. But if you were an ant, you might not care about these fine distinctions. The machinery of government is often rubegoldbergian, with complex arrangements of devolution and special status and power-sharing and affirmative action, and the contraption is held together by a few national symbols such as a rugby team. Whereupon an outlandish production number breaks out in which the Marx Brothers play xylophone on the pickelhauben of the assembled soldiers […] . As the number of autocracies in the world began to decline in the late 1980s, the number of anocracies began to increase. Obviously the satirists' deglorification of war and Kant's practical ideas on how to reduce it did not catch on widely enough to spare Western civilization the catastrophes of the next century and a half. Philip Zimbardo set up a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology department, divided the participants at random into ‘prisoners’ and ‘guards,’ and even got the Palo Alto police to arrest the prisoners and haul them to the campus hoosegow. The grandfathering of boundaries has been, on average, a pacifying development […] the death toll from a large number of small civil wars is lower than that from a few big interstate wars, to say nothing of world wars, consistent with the power-law distribution of deadly quarrels. These paradoxical pleasures […] are acquired by controlling one's exposure to the stressor in gradually increasing doses. An aggressor experiences a revulsion to hurting his victim, but the discomfort cannot last forever, and eventually a reassuring, energizing counteremotion resets his equilibrium to neutral. The concept of an Age of Nationalism is a bit procrustean.

Language is not a protocol legislated by an authority but rather a wiki that pools the contributions of millions of writers and speakers, who ceaselessly bend the language to their needs and who inexorably age, die, and get replaced by their children, who adapt the language in their turn.

People have long given thought to the causes of danger and how they might be forfended.