单选题 Steven Pinker is the very model of a modern intellectual. Since the 1994 publication of his first bestseller, The Language Instinct, he"s been known for his ability to boil down complex ideas into accessible, often-funny, cocktail-party-chatter-worthy sound bites.
The Better Angels of Our Nature (the phrase comes from Abraham Lincoln) is a huge book, 696 pages of text plus 74 pages of notes and references. But "it has to be," Pinker writes. First he has to convince his readers violence has gone down in the face of all their incredulity—then he needs to explain how it happened. Pinker"s magic is done with numbers, starting with the hunter-gatherer societies of 10,000 years ago when life was, as philosopher Thomas Hobbes put it, "nasty, brutish, and short." Data shows that back then the likelihood of a man dying at the hands of another was as high as 60 percent in some regions, more than 50 times the same calculation for the United States and Europe in the 20th century—and that includes two world wars. "If the death rate in tribal warfare had prevailed during the 20th century," Pinker says, "there would have been 2 billion deaths from wars and homicide, rather than 100 million."
Pinker looks for explanations for these advances within the individual. Human nature consists of a constant pull of good and evil. He identifies five "innerdemons" —sadism, revenge, dominance, violence in pursuit of a practical benefit, violence in pursuit of an ideology—that struggle with four "better angels", self-control, empathy, morality, and reason. Over the years the forces of civilization have increasingly given the good in us the upper hand. Strong centralized governments, international trade, the empowerment of women all help make us kinder, gentler beings, cultures that empower women...are less likely to breed dangerous subcultures of rootless young men. Also important is what Pinker calls "the escalator of reason," in which people reframe conflict as a problem to be solved through brain instead of muscles.
Pinker realizes his message could encourage complacency, since people might not feel like working to make the world a better place if they find out that the world is actually pretty good already. But he"s an optimist by temperament, and he thinks that his message will lead not to complacency but to action: "I think it will embolden people to work harder, if they see that the stuff that people do has made a difference."
Starry-eyed? Maybe. But the hopefulness is an outgrowth not only of Pinker"s temperament but of his larger worldview. He calls himself a scientist and a humanist who "sees reason and science and knowledge as progressive forces, as the source of the flourishing of individuals". Let us hope his faith in the human race holds up against those devils on our shoulders.

单选题 In his book Pinker"s argument is primarily based on ______

单选题 In our era of wars, genocide, and terrorism, Steven Pinker says ______

单选题 The "angels" could defeat the "demons" because ______

单选题 The author"s attitude to Pinker"s idea is one ______

单选题 The text is most likely to be ______