May 12, 2019 Sunday
Bedtime Story
"Better Angels of our Nature"
Lincoln was actually beseeching to the
Southern Confederate States who were on the brink of secession making an
emotional plea for reconciliation that ended with these lines:
“I am loath to close.
We are not enemies, but friends.
We must not be enemies.
Though passion may have strained it must
not break our bonds of affection.
The mystic chords of memory, stretching
from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone
all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again
touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
Pinker in this work presented a large
amount of data and statistical analysis of the same to back his claim that
violence has continuously been on decline and even greater and non-intuitive
claim that we are currently living in the most peaceful time in the history of
human species.
While the book came for a lot of praise and
was one of the New York Times Notable Books for the year 2011 it also received
its fare share of criticism and skepticism with the author accused of
cherry-picking historical data and portraying a mythological present.
I will not go into the details of all those
criticisms but suffice to say that many anthropologists and thinkers not only
disagreed with Pinker’s conclusion but went on to make the opposite claim –
that violence has been increasing.
One of the glaring mistakes or rather
suppression of data that he was accused in his work came from the American
journalist and author Elizabeth Kolbert who accused Pinker of “being virtually
silent about Europe’s bloody colonial adventures” of the likes that we have
been reading about in the past bedtime stories.
Kolbert ends her argument with this telling
sentence, “Name a force, a trend, or a ‘better angel’ that has tended to reduce
the threat, and someone else can name a force, a trend, or an ‘inner demon’
pushing back the other way.”
This book had found a wide appeal among the
people – especially in the Western world – since the citizens of the West,
particularly the two large countries of North America, lead unbelievably
peaceful lives attaining high level of social order and rule of law governing
all aspects of their societies.
Another notable response/criticism came
from a group of far serious academicians through a journal titled ‘Historical
Reflections’.
The journal came out with an issue in March
2018 where twelve historians in their twelve respective essays gave their own
perspective and opinions on the thesis of Pinker.
The two editors of the journal and both
professors of history (one at the University of Illinois and the other at the
Newcastle University) in the first introductory essay of the issue wrote:
“Not all of the scholars included in this
journal agree on everything, but the overall verdict is that Pinker’s thesis,
for all the stimulus it may have given to the discussions around violence, is
seriously, if not fatally flawed.”
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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