- Title
- Whitewashing History: Pinker's (Mis)Representation of the Enlightenment and Violence
- Creator
- Dwyer, Philip
- Relation
- On Violence in History p. 54-65
- Relation
- https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy.newcastle.edu.au/lib/newcastle/reader.action?docID=5984433&ppg=1
- Publisher
- Berghahn Books
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2020
- Description
- One of the cornerstones of Pinker’s thesis explaining why violence has declined in the West is to be found in chapter 4, titled “The Humanitarian Revolution.” There are two threads to Pinker’s argument. The first is that people began to question the validity of “institutionalized violence”— by which he means human sacrifice, torture, and the persecution of heretics and witches—and to demand that that kind of violence be abolished. The second strand is that this thinking was “propelled by a change in sensibilities,” by which he means that people (or at least Westerners) began to sympathize (his italics) with others, and were “no longer indifferent to their suffering.”1 This change in sensibilities took place from 1700 onward, and coincided with the advent of what Pinker calls the age of reason, a dated term for the Enlightenment, a movement that placed “life and happiness at the center of values,” and that had “a sudden impact on Western life” in the second half of the eighteenth century.
- Subject
- violence; human sacrifice; heretics & witches; suffering
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1463593
- Identifier
- uon:46778
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781789204643
- Language
- eng
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