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blue bits. red rocks.
Wednesday 31 October 2007

It is certainly much less violent now than it was three centuries ago. In most hunter-gatherer societies, the number-one cause of death is murder. In Canada, it is fourteenth (at a rate half of that of accidental falls). Public violence, in the form of torture and execution, was a stable of European life right through the middle of the 19th century. Imagine watching someone being burned alive. Or considered what it means to be “drawn and quartered.” Yet not two hundred years ago, parents used to bring their children to observe such spectacles. The guillotine, when first introduced during the French Revolution, was a symbol of enlightenment and progress. Previously, the executioner would often have to chop away four or five times in order to sever a convict’s neck. The guillotine was quite humane by comparison. The decline of violence

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