The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon. You can see it over millennia, over centuries, over decades and over years.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that the reduction of violence can be observed across different time scales, from long-term trends to immediate events.
Steven Pinker's quote highlights the idea that the decline of violence is not a linear progression; rather, it exhibits a fractal nature, meaning that patterns of reduced violence can be recognized across various time framesβfrom millennia down to individual years. This perspective encourages us to understand that improvements in societal behavior regarding violence are not isolated but are interconnected across different periods of human history.
In practice
In a discussion on the progress of human civilization, you might quote Pinker to emphasize the positive trend toward peace.
The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.
The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age in the price we pay for the vigor of youth.
If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false.
We adults protect ourselves with laws, police, workplace regulations and social norms and there is no conceivable reason why children should be left more vulnerable, other that laziness or callousness in considering what life is like from their point of view.
The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child's peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration.
Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're using reason to make your case. ... We don't "believe" in reason.
Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly color. I'm so glad I'm a Beta.
You can't keep a juvenile moral institution alive on two displays of its sash per year.
Belgrade is the ugliest city in the world in the most beautiful place in the world.
Heaven is a state of mind, not a location, since Spirit is everywhere and in everything.
Obscenity is a moral concept in the verbal arsenal of the establishment, which abuses the term by applying it, not to expressions of its own morality but to those of another.
Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob's fear. It is piped into central factories, and there it is flavoured and colored and put into cans.
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