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Inspiring and full of hope despite recounting nothing but instance after instance of (now) deplorable cruelty and wastefully destructive conflict. An analytical book to pierce the nebulous moralistic clouds of opinion and give root to an optimism not grounded in faith but fact.

Re misplaced nostalgia, reminds me of Midnight in Paris

The five developments that Pinker singles out as most important in his conclusion are 1)The Leviathan 2) Gentle Commerce 3) Feminization 4) The Expanding Circle (Empathy) 5) The Escalator of Reason

The Escalator of Reason takes you up to the View from Nowhere

Final chapter is going through a game theory Pacifist's Game to illustrate how each of five developments have made the world more peaceful.

Reason is the better archangel of our nature, allowing us to make judicious use of the other angels of empathy, self-control, and moral systems. "Reason is up to these demands because it is an open-ended combinatorial system, an engine for generating an unlimited number of new ideas."

Intelligence yields Classical Liberalism. "Smarter people are more liberal." "...the causal arrow goes from intelligence to classical liberalism."

Abstract reasoning parallels moral reasoning for reasons related to perspective-taking, and thus the scientific thinking that has spurred increase in intelligence has concurrently spurred expansion of morality.

People are getting signifanctly smarter over a matter of decades in abstract reasoning skills (The Flynn Effect), leading to average IQs rising about 3 points per decade since at least 1950. Critically the increase in abstract reasoning ability is environmentally induced because of paradigms like scientific thinking.

Each of the 4 Relational Models that underlie morality comes with a reasoning style, can be matched to a mathematical scale and ;cognitive intuitions. Communality is all-or-none (nominal scale); intuitive bio. Authority is linear dominance hierarchy (ordinal); intuitive physics. Eq Matching is comparison w/out proportioning (interval); concrete reckoning. Ratio-Legal is proportional; non-intuitive symbolic math.