Rhetorical Analysis Of Violence Vanquished

For many years, there has been a lot of controversy centering on the rate at which crime and violence is happening in society. Steven Pinker, the author of “Violence Vanquished” states, “We believe our world is riddled with terror and war, but we may be living in the most peaceable era in the human existence.” This quote from the article proves to many people that our world isn’t as bad as it is made out to be. In the article “Violence Vanquished” Pinker uses Logos, and an argument of fact to support the article 's central message which stands to prove violence is at an all-time low in today’s society.
Pinker uses an argument of fact to prove how much more violent the primitive world society was in comparison to modern society. The author

Before the enlightenment, “Governments and churches maintained order by punishing non conformists with mutilation, torture and gruesome forms of execution, such as burning, breaking, disembowelment, impalement, and sawing in half.” The author also uses the “Rights Revolution” to show how in modern society has given people the right to take matters into their own hands when they feel they haven’t been treated fairly. Some of the main protests the “Rights Revolution” consisted of were the “civil rights movement”, “gay rights movement” and even the “movement for children’s rights”. All of these movements happened because Americans felt the need to test those who were in charge and show them that if they didn’t do anything about the current state they were in they’d take matters into their own hands. Pinker uses these facts in his article to argue that violence has pretty much been substantially decreased in order to maintain a more peaceful society. Another fact Pinker uses to illustrate how the violence started and how we are where we stand today in society is “Forensic archaeology – a kind of “Csi : Paleolithic” can estimate rates of violence from the proportion of skeletons in an ancient site with bashed in skulls, decapitations or arrowheads embedded in bones.” With this evidence from the text the reader may also conclude that not only was the era of primitive society barbaric, but those who committed the crimes didn’t value human life. In contrast to this Pinker’s uses the fact, “On average 15% of people in pre-state eras died violently compared to about 3% of the earliest states”. This evidence from the article illustrates to the readers that before the earliest states were made more than one fifth of people died from violent deaths in the world’s