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The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence In History And Its Causes
amazon.com
We can take Pinker as our quintessential modern Hobbesian. In his magnum opus, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2012), and subsequent books like Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018) he argues that today we live in a world which is, overall, far less violent and cruel than anything
... See moreDavid Graeber • The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
Steven Pinker • 1 highlight
amazon.com
words, figures of speech, and playful alliteration.
Steven Pinker • The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
The same goes, of course, for human beings. The distancing effect of language facilitates exploitation, cruelty, murder, and genocide. When the other party to a relationship is a mere member of a generic category, be it “customer,” “terrorist,” or “employee,” exploitation or murder comes much more easily. Racial epithets serve the same purpose: we
... See moreCharles Eisenstein • The Ascent of Humanity: Civilization and the Human Sense of Self
Sapir and Whorf’s rhetoric answered to a contemporary moral panic about the use and abuse of language. The young 20th century saw public discourse perverted by new forms of propaganda, disseminated by such new technologies as radio and film, all of which accompanied and facilitated the catastrophic upheavals of the First World War and the political
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