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The Theory That Religion Is A Force For Peace, Often Heard Among The Religious Right And Its Allies Today, Does Not Fit The Facts Of History.
-Steven Pinker
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The Theory That Religion

Steven Pinker
...
The Theory That Religion Is A Force For Peace, Often Heard Among The Religious Right And Its Allies Today, Does Not Fit The Facts Of History.

Understanding the Quote: "the theory that religion is a force for peace, often heard among..."

This quote by Steven Pinker reflects deeply on the theme of religious. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Religious, Allies, Doe, the quote offers insight, emotional clarity, and intellectual inspiration to readers worldwide.

Whether you’re a student exploring new ideas, a leader trying to motivate your team, or someone seeking direction in life — this quote provides value. It resonates because it’s more than words — it’s a bridge between experience and wisdom. It shows how Steven Pinker interprets life's core challenges and triumphs.

Lessons From the Quote

This quote teaches resilience and focus. It reminds readers that no matter where they stand in life, reflection and self-awareness lead to growth. Each word has meaning, and when studied, it becomes clear how impactful thoughtful language can be.

About Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker is celebrated for insightful thoughts on religious and allies. Their legacy lives on through writings that guide, comfort, and inspire. Discover more on their profile page.

Actionable Takeaways

  • Reflect on how this quote applies to your current life path.
  • Share the message with someone who needs inspiration.
  • Write your thoughts on this quote in a journal or blog post.
  • Use it as a daily affirmation or reminder.

Closing Thoughts

Quotes like this endure because they capture universal truths. They comfort us in solitude and empower us in groups. Carry this quote forward — live by its wisdom, share its message, and keep its essence alive.

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Religious
Allies
Doe
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Overcoming Naive Impressions To Figure Out How Things Really Work Is One Of Humanity's Highest Callings.
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We Often Feel That A Clever Aphorism Captures A Truth That Would Require Pages To Defend In Any Other Way.
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Feminism As A Movement For Political And Social Equity Is Important, But Feminism As An Academic Clique Committed To Eccentric Doctrines About Human Nature Is Not. Eliminating Discrimination Against Women Is Important, But Believing That Women And Men Are Born With Indistinguishable Minds Is Not. Freedom Of Choice Is Important, But Ensuring That Women Make Up Exactly 50 Percent Of All Professions Is Not. And Eliminating Sexual Assaults Is Important, But Advancing The Theory That Rapists Are Doing Their Part In A Vast Male Conspiracy Is Not.
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Evolutionary Psychologists Seem To Want To Unmask Our Noblest Motives As Ultimately Self-interested - To Show That Our Love For Children, Compassion For The Unfortunate And Sense Of Justice Are Just Tactics In A Darwinian Struggle To Perpetuate Our Genes.
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I Spent 20 Years Doing Research On Regular And Irregular Verbs, Not Because I'm An Obsessive Language Lover But Because It Seemed To Me That They Tapped Into A Fundamental Distinction In Language Processing, Indeed In Cognitive Processing, Between Memory Lookup And Rule-driven Computation.
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People
Feelings
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Principles
Groups
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Law
Keys
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Human Nature
Scholar
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Mean
Kids
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Turns
Related
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Mean
Self
Practice
Plants Can't Very Well Defend Themselves By Their Behavior, So They Resort To Chemical Warfare, And Plants Are Saturated With Toxins And Irritants To Deter Creatures Like Us Who Want To Eat Them.
Toxins
Warfare
Want
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Psychological Disorders
Brain
Genius
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Revenge
War
Water
My Politics Were Pretty Anarchistic Until 1969 When The Montreal Police Went On Strike. Within Hours, Mayhem And Rioting Broke Out And The Mounties Had To Be Called In To Restore Order. It Instilled In Me That One's Convictions Can Be Subjected To Empirical Test.
Order
Police
Tests
People Are Under The Impression That Dictionaries Legislate Language. What A Dictionary Does Is Keep Track Of Usages Over Time.
Track
People
Doe
I Get Drawn In When I Feel There Is Something Deep And Mysterious Going On Beneath The Surface Of Something.
Mysterious
Beneath The Surface
Surface
Theories Of Art Carry The Seeds Of Their Own Destruction.
Art
Destruction
Theory
Statisticians Tell Us That People Underestimate The Sheer Number Of Coincidences That Are Bound To Happen In A World Governed By Chance.
Numbers
People
World
The Brain Is Not A Bag Of Traits. It's Startlingly Complex. There Are Few Or No Single Genes With A Consistent Effect On The Mind.
Brain
Mind
Bags
There's A Misconception That Survival Of The Fittest Means Survival Of The Most Aggressive. The Adjective 'darwinian' Used To Refer To Ruthless Competition; You Used To Read That In Business Journals. But That's Not What Darwinian Means To A Biologist; It's Whatever Leads To Reproductive Success.
Mean
Competition
Survival
The Supposedly Immaterial Soul, We Now Know, Can Be Bisected With A Knife, Altered By Chemicals, Started Or Stopped By Electricity, And Extinguished By A Sharp Blow Or By Insufficient Oxygen.
Blow
Oxygen
Knives
Some People Think That Evolutionary Psychology Claims To Have Discovered That Human Nature Is Selfish And Wicked. But They Are Flattering The Researchers And Anyone Who Would Claim To Have Discovered The Opposite. No One Needs A Scientist To Measure Whether Humans Are Prone To Knavery. The Question Has Been Answered In The History Books, The Newspapers, The Ethnographic Record, And The Letters To Ann Landers. But People Treat It Like An Open Question, As If Someday Science Might Discover That It's All A Bad Dream And We Will Wake Up To Find That It Is Human Nature To Love One Another.
Dream
Selfish
Book
It's The Old Idea That The Process Of Evolution Is Some Push In The Direction Of Greater Complexity--in Particular Greater Intellectual Complexity. In One Twig Of The Tree Of Life, Namely Ours, Having A Big Brain Happened To Have Advantages. But That's Just What Worked For A Particular Species Of Primate 5 To 7 Million Years Ago.
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Years
Tree
Much Of What Is Today Called "social Criticism" Consists Of Members Of The Upper Classes Denouncing The Tastes Of The Lower Classes (bawdy Entertainment, Fast Food, Plentiful Consumer Goods) While Considering Themselves Egalitarians.
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Criticism
Entertainment
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Culture
May
Superstitions
Most Intellectuals Today Have A Phobia Of Any Explanation Of The Mind That Invokes Genetics.
Mind
Today
Genetics
One Of The Perks Of Being A Psychologist Is Access To Tools That Allow You To Carry Out The Injunction To Know Thyself.
Tools
Psychologist
Know Thyself
I Like Ice Hockey. No One Is Ever Going To Ask Me To Write About That As A Metaphor For Life.
Writing
Hockey
Ice
The World Has Far Too Much Morality.
World
Too Much
Morality
M.i.t. Has A Reputation For Turning Out Dilberts. They May Be Brilliant In What They Do, But No One Can Understand What They Say.
May
Brilliant
Reputation
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.
Faith
Believe
People
Evolution Is An Indispensable Component Of Any Satisfying Explanation Of Our Psychology.
Psychology
Evolution
Indispensable
Fiction Is Empathy Technology.
Technology
Empathy
Fiction
One Can Choose To Obsess Over Prescriptive Rules, But They Have No More To Do With Human Language Than The Criteria For Judging Cats At A Cat Show Have To Do With Mammalian Biology.
Cat
Judging
Language
Tom Hanks, Who Starred In 'the Da Vinci Code,' Turns Out To Be Related To A Number Of The Historic Characters That Feature In 'the Da Vinci Code,' Including William The Conqueror And Shakespeare.
Character
Numbers
Historic
Consistent Style Prevents Presentation From Getting In The Way Of Content.
Style
Way
Consistent
Galileo Wrote That 'the Book Of Nature Is Written In The Language Of Mathematics; Without Its Help It Is Impossible To Comprehend A Single Word Of It.'
Book
Helping
Impossible
As Many Political Writers Have Pointed Out, Commitment To Political Equality Is Not An Empirical Claim That People Are Clones.
Commitment
Equality
People
Regardless Of Its Causes, Thoughtlessly Blaming The Present Is A Weakness Which, Even If It Is Never Outlawed, Ought To Be Resisted. Though Commonly Flaunted As A Sign Of Sophistication, It Can Be An Opportunity For One-upmanship And An Excuse For Misanthropy, Especially Against The Young.
Opportunity
Weakness
Causes
The More You Think About And Interact With Other People, The More You Realize That It Is Untenable To Privilege Your Interests Over Theirs.
Thinking
People
Privilege
My Opinions About Human Nature Are Shared By Many Psychologists, Linguists, And Biologists, Not To Mention Philosophers And Scholars Going Back Centuries.
Opinion
Philosopher
Human Nature
Evolutionarily Speaking, There Is Seldom Any Mystery In Why We Seek The Goals We Seek — Why, For Example, People Would Rather Make Love With An Attractive Partner Than Get A Slap On The Belly With A Wet Fish.
People
Goal
Making Love
Personality And Socialization Aren't The Same Thing.
Personality
Socialization
Heritability Pertains To The Entirety Of The Genome, Not To A Single Gene.
Genes
Entirety
Genome
Academics Lack Perspective. In A Debate On Whether The World Is Round, They Would Argue, 'no,' Because It's An Oblate Spheroid. They Suffer From 'the Curse Of Knowledge': The Inability To Imagine What It's Like Not To Know Something That They Know.
Perspective
Suffering
Inability
The Connections I Draw Between Human Nature And Political Systems In My New Book, For Example, Were Prefigured In The Debates During The Enlightenment And During The Framing Of The American Constitution.
Book
Political
Enlightenment
There's Guilt About Our Treatment Of Native Peoples In Modern Intellectual Life, And An Unwillingness To Acknowledge There Could Be Anything Good About Western Culture.
Intellectual
Guilt
Western Culture
Language Is A Window Into Human Nature, But It Is Also A Fistula, An Open Wound Through Which We're Exposed To An Infectious World.
World
Language
Human Nature
People Have Long Assumed That Violence Is Necessary For Political Change. Rulers Never Cede Power Voluntarily, The Argument Goes, So Progressives Have No Choice But To Contemplate The Use Of Force To Bring About A Better World, Mindful Of The Trade-off Between A Small Amount Of Violence Now And Acceptance Of An Unjust Status Quo Indefinitely.
Acceptance
Long
People
But In Most Cases Even The Possibility That The Correlations Reflect Shared Genes Is Taboo.
Possibility
Genes
Cases
The Likelihood That Inborn Differences Are One Contributor To Social Status Does Not Mean That It Is The Only Contributor.
Mean
Equality
Differences
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.
Children
Ideas
Achievement
What Is True For The Emotions May Also Be True For The Intellect. Some Of Our Perplexities May Come From A Mismatch Between The Purposes For Which Our Cognitive Faculties Evolved And The Purposes To Which We Put Them Today.
Purpose
May
Today
Astrology Had An Important Role In The Ancient World. You Can't Understand Many Things Unless You Know Something About Astrology - The Plays Of Shakespeare And So On.
Play
Astrology
Important
Genetically Influenced Behavior Is Not Necessarily Good And Not Necessarily Unchangeable. Explanations Of Bad Behavior That Appeal To Genes Do Not Absolve A Person Any More Than Do Explanations That Appeal To Upbringing.
Evolution
Behavior
Genes
As An Experimental Psychologist, I Have Been Trained Not To Believe Anything Unless It Can Be Demonstrated In The Laboratory On Rats Or Sophomores.
Believe
Rats
Sophomore
Broadly Speaking, The Southern And Western Desert And Mountain States Will Vote For The Candidate Who Endorses An Aggressive Military, A Role For Religion In Public Life, Laissez-faire Economic Policies, Private Ownership Of Guns And Relaxed Conditions For Using Them, Less Regulation And Taxation, And A Valorization Of The Traditional Family.
Military
Gun
Southern
Thinking Is A Physical Process, The Human Brain Is Not Exempt From Evolution
Thinking
Brain
Evolution
Climate Change Could Produce A Lot Of Misery And Waste Without Necessarily Leading To Large-scale Armed Conflict, Which Depends More On Ideology And Bad Governance Than On Resource Scarcity.
Climate
Scarcity
Waste
Morality Is Not Just Any Old Topic In Psychology But Close To Our Conception Of The Meaning Of Life. Moral Goodness Is What Gives Each Of Us The Sense That We Are Worthy Human Beings.
Giving
Psychology
Meaning Of Life
Consciousness Surely Does Not Depend On Language. Babies, Many Animals, And Patients Robbed Of Speech By Brain Damage Are Not Insensate Robots; They Have Reactions Like Ours That Indicate That Someone's Home.
Baby
Home
Animal
The 9/11 Strikes Left An Indelible Impact On Our Minds, But In Relative Terms, The Scale Of Casualties Actually Wasn't All That High.
Impact
Mind
Scales
I Would Argue That Nothing Gives Life More Purpose Than The Realization That Every Moment Of Consciousness Is A Precious And Fragile Gift.
Giving
Purpose
Realization
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.
Rights
People
Desire
The European Wars Of Religion Were More Deadly Than The First World War, Proportionally Speaking, And In The Range Of The Second World War In Europe. The Inquisition, The Persecution Of Heretics And Infidels And Witches, They Racked Up Pretty High Death Tolls.
War
Europe
Tolls
We Are Visual Creatures. Visual Things Stay Put, Whereas Sounds Fade.
Sound
Visuals
Creatures
When It Comes To Explaining Human Thought And Behavior, The Possibility That Heredity Plays Any Role At All Still Has The Power To Shock. To Acknowledge Human Nature, Many Think, Is To Endorse Racism, Sexism, War, Greed, Genocide, Nihilism, Reactionary Politics, And Neglect Of Children And The Disadvantaged. Any Claim That The Mind Has An Innate Organization Strikes People Not As A Hypothesis That Might Be Incorrect But As A Thought It Is Immoral To Think.
Children
War
Thinking
Without Goals The Very Concept Of Intelligence Is Meaningless
Goal
Concepts
Meaningless
According To A Recent Study Of The Brains Of Identical And Fraternal Twins, Differences In The Amount Of Gray Matter In The Frontal Lobes Are Not Only Genetically Influenced But Are Significantly Correlated With Differences In Intelligence.
Gray Matter
Differences
Brain
You Know That When Irving Puts The Dog In The Car, It Is No Longer In The Yard. When Edna Goes To Church, Her Head Goes With Her. If Doug Is In The House, He Must Have Gone Through Some Opening Unless He Was Born There And Never Left. If Sheila Is Alive At 9 A.m. And Is Alive At 5 P.m., She Was Also Alive At Noon. Zebras In The Wild Never Wear Underwear. Opening A Jar Of A New Brand Of Peanut Butter Will Not Vaporize The House. People Never Shove Meat Thermometers In Their Ears. A Gerbil Is Smaller Than Mt. Kilimanjaro.
Dog
Zebras
People
When People Talk, They Lay Lines On Each Other, Do A Lot Of Role Playing, Sidestep, Shilly-shally And Engage In All Manner Of Vagueness And Innuendo. We Do This And Expect Others To Do It, Yet At The Same Time We Profess To Long For The Plain Truth, For People To Say What They Mean, Simple As That. Such Hypocrisy Is A Human Universal.
Mean
Simple
Long
Knowing There Is A World That Will Outlive You, There Are People Whose Well-being Depends On How You Live Your Life, Affects The Way You Live Your Life, Whether Or Not You Directly Experience Those Effects. You Want To Be The Kind Of Person Who Has The Larger View, Who Takes Other People's Interests Into Account, Who's Dedicated To The Principles That You Can Justify, Like Justice, Knowledge, Truth, Beauty And Morality.
Atheist
Knowing
Views
People Consider The Harms They Inflict To Be Justified And Forgettable, And The Harms They Suffer To Be Unprovoked And Grievous.
People
Suffering
Religion
The Great Appeal Of The Doctrine That The Mind Is A Blank Slate Is The Simple Mathematical Fact That Zero Equals Zero.
Zero
Simple
Mind
The Rights Revolutions Too Have Given Us Ideals That Educated People Today Take For Granted But That Are Virtually Unprecedented In Human History, Such As That People Of All Races And Creeds Have Equal Rights, That Women Should Be Free From All Forms Of Coercion, That Children Should Never, Ever Be Spanked, That Students Should Be Protected From Bullying, And That There’s Nothing Wrong With Being Gay. I Don’t Find It At All Implausible That These Are Gifts, In Part, Of A Refined And Widening Application Of Reason.
Bullying
Children
Gay
Conventions Are Unstated Agreements Within A Community To Abide By A Single Way Of Doing Things - Not Because There Is Any Inherent Advantage To The Choice, But Because There Is An Advantage To Everyone Making The Same Choice.
Agreement
Choices
Community
America Had, For One Thing, Lived In Anarchy For - Until Much More Recently Than Europe. We Had The Wild West, Where The Cliche Of The Cowboy Movies Was The Nearest Sheriff Is 90 Miles Away, And So You Had To Pack A Gun And Defend Yourself.
Gun
Cowboy
Europe
Cognitive Psychology Has Shown That The Mind Best Understands Facts When They Are Woven Into A Conceptual Fabric, Such As A Narrative, Mental Map, Or Intuitive Theory. Disconnected Facts In The Mind Are Like Unlinked Pages On The Web: They Might As Well Not Exist.
Psychology
Mind
Woven
Evolutionary Psychology Is One Of Four Sciences That Are Bringing Human Nature Back Into The Picture.
Psychology
Four
Human Nature
There Has To Be Innate Circuitry That Does The Learning, That Creates The Culture, That Acquires The Culture, And That Responds To Socialization.
Culture
Doe
Acquire
With Violence, As With So Many Other Concerns, Human Nature Is The Problem, But Human Nature Is Also The Solution.
Violence
Problem
Human Nature
Northeastern And Most Coastal States Will Vote For The Candidate Who Is More Closely Aligned With International Cooperation And Engagement, Secularism And Science, Gun Control, Individual Freedom In Culture And Sexuality, And A Greater Role For The Government In Protecting The Environment And Ensuring Economic Equality.
Gun
Government
Culture
Cognitive Psychology Tells Us That The Unaided Human Mind Is Vulnerable To Many Fallacies And Illusions Because Of Its Reliance On Its Memory For Vivid Anecdotes Rather Than Systematic Statistics.
Memories
Psychology
Mind
In Societies No Less Than Individuals, Acknowledging Our Limitations May Ultimately Be More Humane Than Denying Them.
May
Individual
Humane
A Successful Learner, . . . Must Be Constrained To Draw Some Conclusions From The Input And Not Others.
Successful
Input
Conclusion
Why Do People Believe That There Are Dangerous Implications Of The Idea That The Mind Is A Product Of The Brain, That The Brain Is Organized In Part By The Genome, And That The Genome Was Shaped By Natural Selection?
Believe
Ideas
People
Of Course The Theory Of Evolution Would Be Vacuous If It Offered A Glib Explanation For Every Inexplicable Act.
Theory Of Evolution
Atheism
Would Be
The Reason The United States Is Not So Likely To Invade Iran Is Precisely Because Of The Lessons Learned From Iraq. And Conversely, The Iranian Push Towards Nuclear Capability Is Calculated To Deter Invasions Like The Kind Deposing Saddam Husain.
Iran
Iraq
Lesson Learned
You Could Think Of An Ecosystem As A Bunch Of Antagonistic Arms Races, Almost: Everything That An Animal Depends Upon For Food Is The Body Part Of Some Other Animal Or Plant Who Would Just As Soon Keep That Body Part For Itself.
Animal
Thinking
Race
It's Natural To Think That Living Things Must Be The Handiwork Of A Designer. But It Was Also Natural To Think That The Sun Went Around The Earth. Overcoming Naive Impressions To Figure Out How Things Really Work Is One Of Humanity's Highest Callings.
Science
Thinking
Humanity
Solving A Problem In A Hundred Years Is, Practically Speaking, The Same As Not Solving It At All.
Years
Problem
Hundred
There Is No Society Ever Discovered In The Remotest Corner Of The World That Has Not Had Something That We Would Consider The Arts. Visual Arts - Decoration Of Surfaces And Bodies - Appears To Be A Human Universal.
Art
World
Body
As Long As Your Ideology Identifies The Main Source Of The World's Ills As A Definable Group, It Opens The World Up To Genocide.
Long
Groups
World
In Culture After Culture, People Believe That The Soul Lives On After Death, That Rituals Can Change The Physical World And Divine The Truth, And That Illness And Misfortune Are Caused And Alleviated By Spirits, Ghosts, Saints ... And Gods.
Believe
People
Soul
Nature Is A Hanging Judge," Goes An Old Saying. Many Tragedies Come From Our Physical And Cognitive Makeup. Our Bodies Are Extraordinarily Improbable Arrangements Of Matter, With Many Ways For Things To Go Wrong And Only A Few Ways For Things To Go Right. We Are Certain To Die, And Smart Enough To Know It. Our Minds Are Adapted To A World That No Longer Exists, Prone To Misunderstandings Correctable Only By Arduous Education, And Condemned To Perplexity About The Deepest Questions We Can Ascertain.
Smart
Makeup
Judging
In The Speech Sound Wave, One Word Runs Into The Next Seamlessly; There Are No Little Silences Between Spoken Words The Way There Are White Spaces Between Written Words. We Simply Hallucinate Word Boundaries When We Reach The End Of A Stretch Of Sound That Matches Some Entry In Our Mental Dictionary.
Running
White
Space
Probably Hobbes Got It Right When He Said That A Leviathan, A Third Party With A Monopoly On The Use Of Legitimate Use Of Force In A Territory, Might Be Among The Biggest Violence Reduction Techniques Ever Invented.
Party
Technique
Use
All Over The World, Belief In The Supernatural Has Authorised The Sacrifice Of People To Propitiate Bloodthirsty Gods, And The Murder Of Witches For Their Malevolent Powers.
Sacrifice
People
Religion
Morality, Then, Is Not A Set Of Arbitrary Regulations Dictated By A Vengeful Deity And Written Down In A Book; Nor Is It The Custom Of A Particular Culture Or Tribe. It Is A Consequence Of The Interchangeability Of Perspectives And The Opportunity The World Provides For Positive-sum Games.
Book
Opportunity
Games
We Really Are Creatures Of A Violent World, Biologically Speaking - Watching Violence And Learning About It Is One Of Our Cognitive Drives.
Violence
World
Violent
Democracy Is An Imperfect Way Of Steering Between The Violence Of Anarchy And The Violence Of Tyranny, With The Least Violence You Can Get Away With.
Democracy
Way
Anarchy
The Stirrings Of Morality Emerge Early In Childhood. Toddlers Spontaneously Offer Toys And Help To Others And Try To Comfort People They See In Distress.
People
Childhood
Trying
We Can Shape Events In Each Other's Brains With Exquisite Precision.
Vocabulary
Brain
Events
Reading Is A Technology For Perspective-taking. When Someone Else's Thoughts Are In Your Head, You Are Observing The World From That Person's Vantage Point.
Reading
Technology
Perspective
A Word Is An Arbitrary Label - That's The Foundation Of Linguistics. But Many People Think Otherwise. They Believe In Word Magic: That Uttering A Spell, Incantation, Curse, Or Prayer Can Change The World. Don't Snicker: Would You Ever Say, 'nothing Has Gone Wrong Yet' Without Looking For Wood To Knock?
Prayer
Believe
Thinking
If Crime Is Going Down, You Shouldn't Be Increasing Resources For Crime Prevention. Or You Should Be Taking Note Of What Has Worked And Concentrate The Crime-prevention Methods On Policies That Have A Track Record Of Success.
Track
Records
Prevention
In A High Tech World The Cure For The Tragic Shortcomings And Perilous Fallacies Of Human Intuition Is Education, But Education In Economics, Evolutionary Biology, Probability And Statistics - Unfortunately Most High School And College Curricula Have Barely Changed Since Medieval Times!
School
College
Intuition
As Women Are Empowered, Violence Can Come Down, For A Number Of Reasons. By All Measures, Men Are The More Violent Gender.
Men
Numbers
Violence
People Do Not Think In English Or Chinese Or Apache; They Think In A Language Of Thought. This Language Of Thought Probably Looks A Bit Like All These Languagesbut Compared With Any Given Language, Mentalese Must Be Richer In Some Ways And Simpler In Others.
Thinking
People
Chinese
The Typical Imperative From Biology Is Not "thou Shalt... ," But "if ... Then ... Else.
Typical
Biology
If Then
However Much We Might Deplore The Profit Motive, Or Consumerist Values, If Everyone Just Wants I-pods We Would Probably Be Better Off Than If They Wanted Class Revolution.
Class
Want
Might
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