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On top of all the benefits that modernity has brought us in health, experience, and knowledge, we can add its role in the reduction of violence.

Believe it or not -- and most people do not -- violence has declined historically, and we may be living today in the most peaceable era in our specie's existence. This decline in violence has certainly not been smooth, nor is it guaranteed to continue. But it is an unmistakable and empirically demonstrable development. Adapted from the source document.

In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker, one of the world's leading experts on language and the mind, explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings. With characteristic wit, lucidity, and insight, Pinker argues that the dogma that the mind has no innate traits-a doctrine held by many intellectuals during the past century-denies our common humanity and our individual preferences, replaces objective analyses of social problems with feel-good slogans, and distorts our understanding of politics, violence, parenting, and the arts. Injecting calm and rationality into debates that are notorious for ax-grinding and mud-slinging, Pinker shows the importance of an honest acknowledgment of human nature based on science and common sense.

Foreword / by Steven Pinker -- Introduction: Tree of life, seeds of death -- Beyond critical thinking : why existing approaches are failing us -- The cognitive immunology toolbox : naming the problem -- The widening gyre : why mental immune systems collapse -- Six immune-disruptive ideas : ... and their antidotes -- Fighting monsters : ... without becoming one yourself -- The ethics of faith : what is responsible belief? -- Thought police need not apply : how (not) to regulate belief -- Reason's fulcrum : the peculiar magic of reasons -- Reason unhinged : how thinking becomes ideological -- Mind upgrade : can we update the brain's operating system? -- Seductive misconceptions : how rationalism lost its way -- The mind vaccine : rethinking reason's requirements -- Conclusion. Propagating enlightenment : how to bend the arc of history.