Thanks for the response. My response is not based upon the 'relative violence' objection which some other writers have used. Put simply they have stated that v

Thanks for the response. My response is not based upon the 'relative violence' objection which some other writers have used. Put simply they have stated that violence does not scale linearly with population size, and that the types and methods of violence across different scopes looks different, but Pinker's argument ignores this level of abstraction - I think there's some merit to this position, but my critique comes from a different angle. My argument is that rates of violence themselves are not a good metric to determine if society is progressing and humans are becoming better. I support this by stating that there are confounding variables which lower rates of violence, but also represent a regression in progress, none of which are controlled for by Pinker's analysis. Violence is not an uncaused cause. First order in this respect refers to how far down the causal chain violence is. I am stating that at a social level, violence does not spontaneously manifest itself- there are contributory factors which function as the cause of violence. The primary factor which I identify is conflict. Reduction and resolution of conflict by peaceful means is a more valuable method of analyzing the progress of society. From there, I indicate that at the micro level, access to justice is in peril - some countries have largely lost the ability for their middle class to access their official forum for conflict resolution. Elsewhere, I've indicated that citizen-state and state-state dispute resolution are impacted by surveillance and nuclear armaments. Accordingly, from the perspective of conflict resolution the full story is more complicated and whether or not any of these trends are positive is highly debatable.