I’ve been fascinated lately by writings and research about how the naturally evolved pre-societal human was innately more cooperative and “moral” than people today (Darcia Narvaez has a lot of writing and research on this topic). I’m trying to suss out how much there may or may not be “rose tinted glasses” for the past in these conclusions I ended up reading your analysis of Better Angels’ assertions for decreasing violent death and particularly the comparisons between nomadic and sedentary rates (which are obviously very rough estimates). I wondered though, given that there are still hunter gatherer societies around in some places, are there contemporary comparisons there that might be valuable beyond locating a trajectory, but in examining different ways of living compared to the “Western” World.

(The other thing that struck me in the numbers that are there was how wildly divergent they were, which does make sense if we’re talking about local groups developing their own ways of living, but also makes sense if the data is just pretty rough itself)

And gosh I’m still thinking about Western Europe being 6x safer from violence than the IS.