Mismatch: How Our Stone-Age Brain Deceives Us Every Day And What We Can Do About It

Book review

On January 3, 2021, gunmen singled out 11 Hazara coal miners and shot them dead in Baluchistan, Pakistan. Islamic State (Daesh), an anti-Shiite terrorist group originating from Iraq after the US invasion, claimed responsibility. At first glance, a sectarian explanation for such killings of a small minority with zero influence in Pakistani politics that pose no threats to other religious groups in the region seems insufficient, but it’s not. Such violence has always existed throughout human history. However, the question is, has human progress been able to mitigate and reduce political violence? The linguist Steven Pinker has an astounding “yes.” Pinker believes enlightenment values have helped us mitigate political violence significantly, and post-enlightenment prosperity has been unprecedented. He provocatively suggests that if each of us has been given a choice to live in a historical period, we will choose “now.” Because the condition for a comfortable life has never been better, and the monopolization of political violence by the state has reduced it. However, another linguist Noam Chomsky, contradicts Pinker saying the most destructive wars have been fought in post-enlightenment eras. Though Chomsky does not say there were no wars during the long period of hunter-gatherers, he asserts…