Blacks Lives Really Matter: Heather MacDonald, Daniel Moynihan

One of the paradoxes for a naturalized American is the strange dance around the astonishing rate of black on black crime. Any sane person might think that black Americans might be asking for more police and more policing to protect their lives and neighborhoods from gang shootings and violence where over 90 percent of the victimaries and victims are black.

And this is not the case in every survey taken to white and non-white Americans.

There are huge differences in trust towards police between whites and non-whites:

Is this difference in perception a cause or a consequence of the attitudes towards policing? It certainly seems that there are extremists -racists even- who blame each other race for the problem. Those stereotypes work on both sides: police officers and white neighbors fear unknown black people and black residents in poor neighborhoods fear police will treat them as criminals. A cycle of "self-fulfilling prophecies" escalates the problem. 

But not only non-black people hesitate in crossing black neighborhoods at certain hours or at all: so do black residents and visitors as well, because they are 6 times more likely to be shot by gangs than non-blacks. Police officers usually act rougher or less respectfully with black people, and peaceful black neighbors -especially the very young- are afraid of being confused with gang members.

The mix of need and fear of policing among non-whites, and particularly black citizens compounds the root problems of of gang violence and the revenge homicides and shootings in predominantly black neighborhoods.

The most active black leaders in America, however, seem to be heading in a one-sided direction: while everyday black-on-black homicides accumulate at a frightening pace, marches and protests prioritize those cases when a white police person kills a black person, turning a much more serious problem into a simplistic -and unsolvable- "systemic racism" mantra that prevents further analysis from becoming politicized. 

Black leaders certainly denounce and address very actively other frightening problems such as the racial bias, excessive use of deadly force and incarceration for minor offenses,  but not the incivility and violence that suffer black communities in large cities from gangs and among community members. 

Incivility towards neighbors - dumbly celebrated as "attitude" and "coolness" - is the gateway to violence, escalated and compounded by drugs and lack of trust in the basic institutions of civil life: school, work, police.

The "Ferguson effect" -as the police restraint from policing caused by that incident is called- is actually increasing the casualties. Pew polls on police members reveal the stress  and internal division these clashes cause.

Police inaction, which is much more lethal and hard to detect than police abuse, compounds the systemic violence problem giving gangs and criminals the control of streets and terrorized neighborhoods. 

Police inaction creates "safe zones" for crime that turns neighbors into hostages, imprisoned in invisible "red lines" violently enforced "gang districts".

Where police doesn't police, gangs do. And they have no accountability to cameras and no witnesses willing to take the risk of denouncing or protesting against them. 

MacDonald -who advocates both for more policing and for police accountability with data- has been targeted by violent activists trying to prevent her from speaking on campuses.

While overall violent crime has been trending down for the past 30 years in the entire US (1980-2008), black homicide rates are 6 times higher than white

Of those already high rates, 90-91 percent of the black homicides are committed by black people, not police:

The trend is also visible comparing cities with large black population 

Since the famous Moynihan report issued in March 1965 -and even then received with strong resistance by a radical segment of the black leadership -the one that followed the ideas of Malcom X and radicals like Franz Fanon, and the Black Panther Party- that considered Moynihan description of the root of black problems prejudiced and even racist.

Moynihan found the disintegration of negro family as the root cause of systemic poverty and behavior deterioration. He attributed the tendency of black men to grow without their fathers to a combination of the heritage of racism and slavery -when the black families were divided to sell as slaves separately- and the cycle of crime and incarceration that was already starting with the drug trade as the main source of income in segregated and poor neighborhoods.

Since the topic of black on black crime became politicized, we could say that the Moynihan report ended having an unexpected reverse effect to the one his author sought:

While the political leadership -across the racial spectrum- continues to shut down unpleasant facts, black citizens vote with their feet to solve their problem, fleeing away ghettos for more integrated cities and neighborhoods. Given the choice, black citizens vote for integration and civility first.

But those caught in "poverty traps'" face grim options: joining gangs to escape from another gangs, get in jail -where at least survival rates are higher- and live between unemployment, violence and incarceration periods while political leaders spend billions funding "politically correct" initiatives that window-dress the problem until the neighborhood is ready for redevelopment and gentrification.

If we don't know the solution to this problem, we certainly have tried and know what doesn't work.

Some additional interesting reading:

• BSJ (Bureau of Justice Statistic) Homicide Trends in the US since 1976
• Flaherty & Sethi (2010) Homicide in Black and White . University of Columbia
• Moynihan, P. (1965) The Negro Family (full report

Cicero's warning

In Richard Westall's Sword of Damocles, 1812, the boys of Cicero's anecdote have been changed to maidens for a neoclassical patron, Thomas Hope. he

The Great Books and Greek mythology used to be the foundations of a classical education in sciences or humanities.  Greek philosophers used  myths and parables to bring a point across. Most of Greek myths were actually parables meant for warning those involved in governing the polis (from where Aristotle created the concept of Politics) "Sword of Damocles" is used as expression for imminent danger, but seldom explained in full. It might be worth the effort. According to the story, Damocles was pandering to Dionysius, his king, and exclaimed to him that Dionysius was truly fortunate as a great man of power and authority, surrounded by magnificence. In response, Dionysius offered to switch places with Damocles for one day so that Damocles could taste that very fortune firsthand.  Damocles quickly and eagerly accepted the king's proposal. Damocles sat down in the king's throne surrounded by every luxury, but Dionysius arranged that a huge sword should hang above the throne, held at the pommel only by a single hair of a horse's tail.  Damocles finally begged the king that he be allowed to depart because he no longer wanted to be so fortunate, realizing that with great fortune and power comes also great danger. King Dionysius effectively conveyed the sense of constant fear in which a person with great power may live. Cicero used this story as the last in a series of contrasting examples for reaching the conclusion he had been moving towards in this fifth Disputation, in which the theme is that virtue is sufficient for living a happy life. Cicero asks, "Does not Dionysius seem to have made it sufficiently clear that there can be nothing happy for the person over whom some fear always loom?" Presidents learn -sooner or later- that power hangs from a horse's hair. In the US constitutional system, they tend to forget that that thread is not their bad behavior, but trying to hide it. The only two cases of impeachment in modern times were not about crimes, but hiding facts and obstructing investigations. The thread is now as strong as the next Congress majorities.  Perhaps it would be a good idea to hang a copy of Westfall's painting in the Oval Office.

Rude Democracy?

In her book "Rude Democracy: Civility and Incivility in American Politics" professor Susan Herbst makes the case against the lack of civility that is overpopulating public speech, electoral politics and new cycles.

An admirer of the United States republic like Alexis De Tocqueville noticed the tendency of majorities to abuse minorities back on the early days 

Doctor Robert Watson, from Lynn  University warns about a rise of lack of civility in this particular era:

And even experienced pollsters like Frank Luntz find incivility in focus groups of angry voters that copy the behavior of anchormans like Keith Olberman or Sean Hannity (this clip from his show)

Once again, newscasters and pollsters tend to blame voters for exhibiting behaviors extracted from their shows.

The best way of reverting this vicious cycle -attacks and name-calling beget the same back- is displaying civility in written, spoken and visual speech.

There are, however, respectable dissenters, like Christopher Hutchins, who advocated for the license to offend as part of the First Amendment rights:

 Although his concept of "offense" was not the same as that exhibited by Luntz's voters panel or our 2016 Republican and general election debates.

Nor was Hitchens in charge of managing anything else but his own pen or mouth instead of a 350 million-strong nation with a Civil War in its recent past not entirely resolved. Or a public university handling a Milos Yanopoulos or Anne Coulter event.

What is the right point? Here I might add for consideration this remarkable panel on controlling hate speech on campus among law professors from Universities of Chicago, Princeton and Harvard.:

As I myself I'm making up my mind about this topic, I found these sources to be very helpful.

Hope they are for you as well.

Chickens and eggs: Polarized Parties, Moderate Voters and the other way around

Lack of civility and partisanship in COTUS and POTUS is the cause, not the consequences of "voters' polarization". 

Profesor Morris P. Fiorina, from Stanford University recent research indicates that voters are more moderate and flowing towards the center across the country , but political parties -and donors- are vastly more polarized.

This creates an interesting hypothesis for the current political scenario: voters in the center are increasingly dissatisfied with the available two-parties political options and forced to stay home or vote for a candidate that does not represent their views entirely.

In a recent Wall Street Journal interview with James Taranto, Fiorina explains his findings in a way that might resonate to many moderates:

He arrives with a PowerPoint presentation that visualizes the data behind his theory. A pair of bar graphs show the ideological distribution of lawmakers in the 87th Congress (1961-63) and the 111th (2009-11). In both eras Democrats were the liberal party and Republicans the conservative one. But the pattern is markedly different: In 1961-63, both parties’ lawmakers tended to cluster in the middle. In 2009-11, there were two clusters—Democrats to the left, Republicans to the right. “There’s no longer any overlap at all,” Mr. Fiorina says. “The center is empty. That hasn’t happened in the electorate.”

A line graph illustrates the electorate’s continuity. The share of Americans identifying as politically moderate has remained fairly constant—around 40%, and usually a plurality—since at least 1974. In the same period, another chart shows, independents overtook Democrats as the biggest partisan grouping. As the parties drifted from the ideological middle, centrist voters disaffiliated from the parties. 

That creates what Mr. Fiorina calls “the ping pong pattern” of unstable majorities. One party manages “to win, narrowly, and then they immediately respond to their base. So Bush says we’re going to have personal Social Security accounts, and voters—some say, ‘I didn’t vote for that.’ Or Obama says we’re going to do government health care, and a lot of them say, ‘I didn’t vote for that.’ ” Lawmakers from the party in power “suffer for it in the next election, when they lose the marginal voters,” as Republicans did in 2006 and Democrats in 2010."

The cause of this phenomenon, argues Fiorina, is that political parties have nation-wide platforms with increasingly extreme positions, which play very differently in different states and districts, "sorting out" (emphasis in "out")  moderates that must vote for "a package" or stay home, leaving the district "red" or "blue". That creates also a pattern of swinging majorities, that change the composition and balance of power in both directions, creating a stalemate in most critical issues.

Frustrated voters in turn, blame "Washington" or COTUS for all the laws that they "didn't vote for" (Obamacare as an example) and "repeal and replace" them every 4 or 8 years, creating more uncertainty in critical issues such as healthcare, retirement and investment.

Fiorina expected Trump to break both parties and "re-sort" them closer to more moderate, middle-of-the road voters in spite of his ultra-partisan and divisive political speaking. 

For this column, it's hard to imagine why Fiorina came to have such expectation, other than the non-partisan attitude of a true political scientist. He proves himself an  example of the disappointed moderates that turn off the news in despair after Obamas or Trumps.

Fiorina provides a more compelling explanation in the extreme polarization of the donors class. Here, I think, he touches -although very briefly- some part of the elephant that irrupted in the US political room with Citizens United.

If the Trump White House portrayed by Michael Wolff and the Breitbart politics reported in "Devils Bargain" show something is that the Adelsons, Mercers, Murdochs, Ailes, Kochs, Soros and their "foundations" are the real king-makers in US politics. They not only elect the candidate and fund it; they create a willing voter that buys in what is washed on them by radio, cable news networks and even at the supermarket (let's not underestimate the Enquirer's role in the past election)

I would add gerrymandering to the mix to explain the phenomenon of minority-elected Presidents (like Bush 43 and Trump) and minority party-dominated COTUS that we have been experiencing since 2000.

Politicians -and their clients, their donors- blame voters for the polarization they force to get elected. 

Fiorina's study (and many others) show that it is the other way around. Here are some extra facts (and books)

"Alternative Facts" II: From Dr. Faust to Dr. Strangelove

"Put your sword back in its place," Jesus said to him, "for all who draw the sword will die by the sword.  Matthew 26:52

In an almost perfect parable, Donald Trump faces his own political and business weapons on the loose turning against his presidency.

For someone who has mastered the art of riding the news cycles and using tabloid news and obscure websites to spread "alternative facts" and conspiracy theories about his circumstantial rivals -from his own wives to his own party- the turn of events couldn't have been more paradoxical.

Just when a special prosecutor investigates his financial deals in money laundering schemes -from casinos to empty towers from Punta del Este to Azerbaijan-, Michael Wolff, a journalist invited to full access to the campaign and the White House published "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House" , a bombshell of a book and made public a troubling storm of taped statements from his campaign strategist and nationalist-populist guru pointing to money laundering as the most likely cause for impeachment.

Civility -the restraint from personal attack or slander- has been absent in Trump's rise to power and from his presidency so far. Moreover, civility of the kind candidate McCain exhibited in 2008 

and candidate Romney did in 2012 

Or as the ex-presidents have been doing after hard-fought opposition at The President's Club

rejecting personal attacks on his opponent, has been lambasted by Trump and his entourage of Far Right firebrands as "political correctness", the kind of "weakness" that made McCain and Romney lose their elections. 

On the contrary, it was electing uncivil team mates -like Sara Palin- or not showing their care for people and family -like Romney- 

that they lost their chances.

Incivility, argues Bannon publicly, is the way to wage "war" against a laundry list of enemies lumped into vaguely menacing concepts such as "elites (for college-educated, "Davos" and "Wall Street" types), "establishment" (for the Republican party and its majority leaders in Congress) , "deep state" (for the FBI, CIA and all the career personnel in government) and -more generally "Washington" -for the entirety of the checks and balances established in the Constitution to limit Executive power-.

The book doesn't show anything new about Trump's long-time associates, like Roger Stone or Paul Manafort:

Vulgarity and scandal are not new to this administration. Chaos and backstabbing in public are the norm, as we can recall from the brief summary provided a year ago for the short-serving Secretary of Press Scaramucci:

Whose description of the characters matches very closely those they provide of each other in the book.

The book -and the 200+ hours of tape his author had almost two years to collect in the campaign and the White House- is out as a national best-seller and those named have corroborated the facts and scenes of a dramatically dysfunctional set of staffers, ready for the special prosecution to corroborate. There seem to be no boundaries, no ethical reservations, no friendship to restrain the Bannons and the members of the Trump family -Trump included- to insult their looks, intelligence and accuse each other behind their backs.

Trump's reaction to the book has been also self-damaging: instead of questioning its author, Trump tweeted his fury against Steve Bannon, "ex facto" confirming that he believed Bannon's extensive comments and quotes about Trump, his family and his entire team are true, at least for him. True to form, Trump's tweeting didn't wait for his lawyers or "communication" experts to articulate a defense, much less an offensive.

A day later, they started, trying to prevent the publication of the book (too late; it's already at the top of the book-selling records list) and to attack Wolff's credibility (too late as well, since several of the witnesses of the facts the book describes confirmed the facts and conversations described in the book).

The Mercers, financiers of Bannon and Breitbart, parted ways immediately and Fox News launched Trump's "surrogates" to try to change the subject, then deny its relevance in full evasive mood.

The entire scene described by the book looks like if the Watergate scandal had started by Haldeman and Ehrlichamn publishing the tapes. What Nixon kept out of sight -invective, insults and personal attacks- is precisely what Trump tweets out every day. While Nixon was justifiably paranoid in keeping out of sight, Trump believes and proclaims as good and healthy for his presidency and the country. Or not, as he use to say in mid-sentences after hurling a menace, giving "knowing" wink to the cheers of his unconditional followers. 

Emmanuel Kant explained that the key for judging if an act was moral or not was if it was good to make it universal -in other words, if it is self-destructive or not-. Unfortunately, Trump doesn't seem familiar with Kant.

Trumpism -defined as a style - one based on reality show-like personal attacks and muck racking- rather than a political or government philosophy- demonstrates by way of absurd that it is not, harming itself at a moment of economic and domestic triumph.

Echoes of 1974's Nixon returning from China and winning reelection by a landslide come to mind. 

Civility -paraphrasing Freud's dictum about reason- has a very tiny voice, but very persistent.

Trump may survive this crisis as he did so many others -his entire career is a collection of them-.

Partisan logic narrows the problem to whether Trump can be impeached or not. Either way, partisans on both sides of the question show their typical disdain for civility and care for institutions that must survive electoral terms and supersede political agendas.

Civility will take more time to recover than the economy, domestic or foreign affairs, because what this (and many other) reports show is flagrant and concurrent  disrespect for the Constitution and the spirit of the laws of our republic.

The press -partisan or not- is not "the enemy of the people". Bad behavior in office is. 

"Fire and Fury" is a good title for the kind of country Steven Bannon and the Far Right nationalists live in.

In Alabama, Republican voters couldn't take it anymore. Now, it was Trump's turn to learn the cost of ignoring the old lesson:

"A house divided against itself cannot stand."

Can Trump be impeached or indicted?

From the moment of his inauguration, President Trump has been under the shadow of impeachment. It's not only that his partisan enemies, the Democrats are sworn to get him -which some of them proclaim publicly, with even a billionaire funding an campaign and websites to do so- but his own declarations and actions in office, such as firing his FBI director, berating his DOJ and tweeting about conspiracies to take him involving the press ("enemies of the people") and his own party.

The country has been living under a Watergate-like suspense for almost a year and it doesn't seem to get any better. Trump has insinuated that he would fire the Special Prosecutor he appointed if he "crosses a line" -namely investigating his financial ties to Russian oligarchs and money laundering- and his cable and Internet supporting press -Fox channel and Breitbart the most prominent- keep attacking Mueller preemptively every day.

What are the chances for that to really happen?

The grounds for impeachment mentioned in the US Constitution are rather vague:

The Constitution sets specific grounds for impeachment. They are “treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors.” To be impeached and removed from office, the House and Senate must find that the official committed one of these acts.

The Constitutional Rights Foundation explains in more detail the definition and reach of each one of the three causes for impeachment.  It also describes the case of the three US Presidents impeached: Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton.

Jurists and scholars differ in how likely is impeachment to happen: from quite likely -like the video at the beginning of this article to very unlikely:

Even Democrats implied in anti-Trump conspiracy theories like former Clinton's campaign director John Podesta consider impeachment unlikely

The "collusion" argument has been revived by Steve Bannon's recent statements in a coming book about Donald Trump Jr meeting with Russians involved in anti-Clinton campaign, but it still seems at this point a long shot.

A shorter path can be the obvious but curiously underestimated case for money laundering that can be made about Trump's long chain of dubious real estate sales to notorious Russian money-launderers and the string of sold-out empty towers that he has from Punta del Este to Azerbaijan. Steve Bannon has been the latest to suggest that money laundering will be the central path to Trump's indictment or impeachment.

For those who also ponder the impact that a year-long (at least) impeachment like Clinton's in 1998 or Nixon's 2-year Watergate saga would have in US economy and its quasi-secessionist partisan politics, impeachment procedures are not to be treated as sports.

But that precisely the partisan agitation that started with the Tea Party reaction to Obama's presidency and ended electing Trump with a minority government through the Electoral College.

Impeachment is a political procedure, and it hangs in 2018 midterm elections whether the anti-Trump votes (Democrats plus a growing number of Republicans) add up to impeach Trump. The good economy -which started in Obama's years without any merit to either presidency- is Trump's best ally. We may add to that patriotic support if he starts a war of choice with North Korea -although that could work in the opposite direction as well, especially if 2 million Seoul residents are killed by NK's artillery and the country is devastated, requiring extra billion dollars from US-..

The most formidable enemy of Trump in this is... Trump. And also his bizarre inner circle , starting with now despondent and outspoken Steven Bannon.

If history teaches something, it is that the road to impeachment starts with fatal mistakes committed at the sugar-high of triumph and small bunch of tenacious reporters building up the case from the back pages of the news, those that only a few read.

US political parties: Rumors of their Dead are Greatly Exaggerated

"Washington" - used as a semantic place holder for "corruption", "incompetence" and "mainstream elites" is just another of a series of populist  code words used in election years for the new elites that want to be elected and the old elites that want to keep their seats there.

Political parties have been declared dead and irredeemable in the United States for the last 250 years. Those who announce "a new paradigm" fail to explain what that "paradigm" means, and for good reasons. The same that kept the US Constitution and its institutions in its place all that time.

"All parties are corrupt" speech is the most typical form of extreme, intolerant partisanship -opening the door to moral equivalence justifications of anti-constitutional behavior-

Lobbies regularly denounce other lobbies for ... lobbying, which is a legal activity with thousands of registered  and audited firms installed in Washington, the West and the East coasts and around the country. Just look for the Mercer's family Foundation and its Government Accountability Institute, that proclaims to be "non-partisan" save for its funding of anti-Clinton books such as "Clinton's cash" and its support for Steve Bannon and Breitbart.

The "death" of the "establishment" parties is as old as the American Republic. And there have been third parties in many elections -from the days of the Republic-Democrats that was the name of Jefferson and Madison's anti-Federalist party 

to Teddy Roosevelt's Bull Moose, 

Or the populist-nativist Right-wing parties of William Jennings Bryant

Ross Perot's (and later Pat Buchanan's) Reform party -both of which made +20 percent of the vote and gave the presidency to the Democrat candidate they professed to like least- or the perennial Ralph Nader spoiler.

The truth is , as usual, far from those claims and more complex and nuanced.

Books like Scott Christmas "Washington's Nightmare: A Brief History of American Political Parties" and Kurt Andersen's "Fantasyland: How America Went Hawywaire: a 500-year history" may provide a good start.

Third parties are not a bad idea -Europe has plenty of examples of them- but far from a solution

In the case of contemporary US politics. we are witnessing a fight inside both traditional parties in which Left wing (socialist Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren) and Far Right (Bannon) are trying to take over by replacing moderates with more extreme, populist and belligerent candidates to impose their respective agendas (impeach Trump, prevent impeachment and remove obstacles to executive power, respectively).

There are many parallels between Donald Trump and Andrew Jackson populist platforms

Recognized by Trump himself and other Right wing political pundits like Dick Morris (a former Clinton's advisor turner enemy)

Make no mistakes. Those seeking to take over the two traditional parties make no little plans.

Their common element is populism 

It will hinge on the economy whether COTUS changes are significant in one direction or another.

But the "system" -as those who want to change it call the Constitution- is not the real problem.

If it were,  banning gerrymandering and reversing Citizens United would be the priority.

Apocalypse Not Now.

"Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it." George Orwell

Just take a break from your moaning and groaning about all the things you didn't like about 2017. You can be sure that there will be more of that in 2018, but you might be wrong at betting on the extinction of the human race, your country or civilization. You might consider delaying the construction of your nuclear bunker or your tree house for another year. 

Perhaps there is something else going on, as Orwell's quote insinuates. Apocalyptic vision could come with aging, but unfortunately this kind of problem can't can be solved with optometrists or lasik surgery. 

In his book  "The Sense of Style", professor Steve Pinker describes a typical case of apocalyptic vision among old English scholars 

"As people age, they confuse changes in themselves with changes in the world, and changes in the world with moral decline—the illusion of the good old days.4 And so every generation believes that the kids today are degrading the language and taking civilization down with it"

Pinker doesn't just pass judgment. He provides historical evidence such as this about how each generation of scholars berates the previous and predicts the extinction for the next:

"The common language is disappearing. It is slowly being crushed to death under the weight of verbal conglomerate, a pseudospeech at once both pretentious and feeble, that is created daily by millions of blunders and inaccuracies in grammar, syntax, idiom, metaphor, logic, and common sense. . . . In the history of modern English there is no period in which such victory over thought-in-speech has been so widespread.—1978

Recent graduates, including those with university degrees, seem to have no mastery of the language at all. They cannot construct a simple declarative sentence, either orally or in writing. They cannot spell common, everyday words. Punctuation is apparently no longer taught. Grammar is a complete mystery to almost all recent graduates.—1961 

From every college in the country goes up the cry, “Our freshmen can’t spell, can’t punctuate.” Every high school is in disrepair because its pupils are so ignorant of the merest rudiments.—1917 

The vocabularies of the majority of high-school pupils are amazingly small. I always try to use simple English, and yet I have talked to classes when quite a minority of the pupils did not comprehend more than half of what I said.—1889 Unless the present progress of change [is] arrested . . . there can be no doubt that, in another century, the dialect of the Americans will become utterly unintelligible to an Englishman.—1833

Our language (I mean the English) is degenerating very fast. . . . I begin to fear that it will be impossible to check it.— 1785 

Complaints about the decline of language go at least as far back as the invention of the printing press. Soon after William Caxton set up the first one in England in 1478, he lamented, “And certaynly our langage now vsed veryeth ferre from what whiche was vsed and spoken when I was borne.” 

How about some new glasses?

Professor Steven Pinker in his book "The Better Angels of our Nature" shows with a detailed analysis of facts that -against those who think and speak otherwise- the world is becoming more peaceful, tolerant and less violent.

Pinker compares the modern horrors of terrorist brutality and genocidal violence with precedents since prehistorical times -from the Paleolithic to the Bible to the times of George Washington to the present day.

Here are some samples of what Pinker explains:

HUMAN PREHISTORY 

In 1991 two hikers stumbled upon a corpse poking out of a melting glacier in the Tyrolean Alps. Thinking that it was the victim of a skiing accident, rescue workers jackhammered the body out of the ice, damaging his thigh and his backpack in the process. Only when an archaeologist spotted a Neolithic copper ax did people realize that the man was five thousand years old.2 Ötzi the Iceman, as he is now called, became a celebrity. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine and has been the subject of many books, documentaries, and articles. Not since Mel Brooks’s 2000 Year Old Man (“I have more than 42,000 children and not one comes to visit me”) has a kilogenarian had so much to tell us about the past. 

Ötzi lived during the crucial transition in human prehistory when agriculture was replacing hunting and gathering, and tools were first made of metal rather than stone. Together with his ax and backpack, he carried a quiver of fletched arrows, a wood-handled dagger, and an ember wrapped in bark, part of an elaborate fire-starting kit. He wore a bearskin cap with a leather chinstrap, leggings sewn from animal hide, and waterproof snowshoes made from leather and twine and insulated with grass. He had tattoos on his arthritic joints, possibly a sign of acupuncture, and carried mushrooms with medicinal properties. Ten years after the Iceman was discovered, a team of radiologists made a startling discovery: Ötzi had an arrowhead embedded in his shoulder. He had not fallen in a crevasse and frozen to death, as scientists had originally surmised; he had been murdered. As his body was examined by the CSI Neolithic team, the outlines of the crime came into view. Ötzi had unhealed cuts on his hands and wounds on his head and chest. DNA analyses found traces of blood from two other people on one of his arrowheads, blood from a third on his dagger, and blood from a fourth on his cape. According to one reconstruction, Ötzi belonged to a raiding party that clashed with a neighboring tribe. He killed a man with an arrow, retrieved it, killed another man, retrieved the arrow again, and carried a wounded comrade on his back before fending off an attack and being felled by an arrow himself. Ötzi is not the only millennia-old man who became a scientific celebrity at the end of the 20th century. Many other bog men and women from northern Europe show signs of having been strangled, bludgeoned, stabbed, or tortured. "

And how about looking at the state of affairs of Man and God back in Biblical times?

THE HEBREW BIBLE

The Bible depicts a world that, seen through modern eyes, is staggering in its savagery. People enslave, rape, and murder members of their immediate families. Warlords slaughter civilians indiscriminately, including the children. Women are bought, sold, and plundered like sex toys. And Yahweh tortures and massacres people by the hundreds of thousands for trivial disobedience or for no reason at all. These atrocities are neither isolated nor obscure. They implicate all the major characters of the Old Testament, the ones that Sunday- school children draw with crayons. And they fall into a continuous plotline that stretches for millennia, from Adam and Eve through Noah, the patriarchs, Moses, Joshua, the judges, Saul, David, Solomon, and beyond. According to the biblical scholar Raymund Schwager, the Hebrew Bible “contains over six hundred passages that explicitly talk about nations, kings, or individuals attacking, destroying, and killing others. . . . Aside from the approximately one thousand verses in which Yahweh himself appears as the direct executioner of violent punishments, and the many texts in which the Lord delivers the criminal to the punisher’s sword, in over one hundred other passages Yahweh expressly gives the command to kill people.” 22 Matthew White, a self- described atrocitologist who keeps a database with the estimated death tolls of history’s major wars, massacres, and genocides, counts about 1.2 million deaths from mass killing that are specifically enumerated in the Bible. (He excludes the half million casualties in the war between Judah and Israel described in 2 Chronicles 13 because he considers the body count historically implausible.) The victims of the Noachian flood would add another 20 million or so to the total. 23 The good news, of course, is that most of it never happened. [...]

Modern biblical scholars have established that the Bible is a wiki. It was compiled over half a millennium from writers with different styles, dialects, character names, and conceptions of God, and it was subjected to haphazard editing that left it with many contradictions, duplications, and non sequiturs. The oldest parts of the Hebrew Bible probably originated in the 10th century BCE. [...] 

Though the historical accounts in the Old Testament are fictitious (or at best artistic reconstructions, like Shakespeare’s historical dramas), they offer a window into the lives and values of Near Eastern civilizations in the mid-1st millennium BCE.

Pinker's book continues to show how, along the last millennia and particularly the past decades, the world at large has become more peaceful and tolerant. The atrocities of Syria and Iraq look pretty mild compared to those of the Iliad or the Odyssey and the sexual scandals of the Windsors pale in comparison with those of Henry VIII or Elizabeth I. 

Pinker's provides a comprehensive statistic study of violence since the Stone to our days that shows constant progress in spite of horrific events. Pinker's work helps understand that studying historical facts and data is not a choice, but an indispensable way to understand the present and avoid being manipulated by conspiracy theorists, demagogues and ignoramuses which -like in Biblical times- fill the Internet with "alternative facts".

Here's more from Pinker himself

And an interesting debate with him about the origins of violence:

Serious studies and research are now as available as sneak oil

I suggest to follow a simple rule: go to scholar sources and papers.

I'll keep trying to help by showing sources and authors that meet those standards.

Back to the Basics: The Words that Built America

Filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi produced a documentary in which different public figures -from arts to politics- and young children spell out the words of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, with all its Ammendments:

For those interested in the full film, it's available through HBO. The content is in the small booklet that contains the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence -also known as Bill of Rights- that is given to each new US Citizen in a ceremony that Pelosi also reflected in a previous and touching documentary showing how this happens in each one of the 50 states:

In a special session, recently, the Congress of the United States (COTUS) House of Representatives and Senate member read the Constitution:

As future President John F. Kennedy did as senator for Massachusetts reading the Declaration of Independence:

 

"An informed citizenship" reads the First Amendment protecting the freedom of speech and press, is a requisite for any republican form of government. Citizens must know their laws and value them in order to respect them.

There is always something new to discover in that small booklet.

• Constitution of the United States and Bill of Rights (full version)