For one thing, before the 20th century, there were plenty of genocides. We tend to forget about them, partly because they weren't as well documented and partly because, until recently, people didn't care. We used euphemisms like 'sackings' and 'sieges' instead of calling them 'genocides.'
Interpretation
This quote highlights how historical atrocities like genocides were downplayed and misnamed, leading to a lack of awareness and accountability.
Steven Pinker's quote reflects on the tendency of society to overlook or sanitize the discussion of historical genocides, suggesting that the lack of documentation and public concern has contributed to a collective amnesia about these tragic events. He points out that euphemisms have often been used to mask the reality of genocide, making it easier for people to forget or ignore the severity of such occurrences in human history.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the importance of accurately documenting historical events.
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.
The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.
For a long time, I've been interested in cultural memory and historical erasure.
I was 10 years old when my father was assassinated in 1968. Then, I had some sense of the sacrifices and hardships required of the families of a leader who was constantly in the news.
We lost the American colonies because we lacked the statesmanship to know the right time and the manner of yielding what is impossible to keep.
For historians ought to be precise, truthful, and quite unprejudiced, and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor affection, should cause them to swerve from the path of truth, whose mother is history, the rival of time, the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instruction of the present, the monitor of the future.
In many ways, the North won the Civil War militarily and then lost the peace. You know, a group of writers, included many Confederate generals, began a school of thought called the Lost Cause in which they began to romanticize the Confederacy.
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