The most succinct rebuttal to Pinker’s thesis was provided by Yale University historian Timothy Snyder in Foreign Affairs.[41] Snyder notes that it simply may not be true that the violent instinct in man has declined. It is only that in relative terms the carrying capacity of the earth to support large populations through fertilizers and antibiotics is winning the race against machine guns. Snyder explains that modernity and education have not pacified man as Pinker claims—for it is impossible to imagine the religious wars in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries without the advent of the
...more
