The world isn't really that bad. Steven Pinker made some observations recently in the Wall Street Journal that I found confirmed some intuitions I've had about historical trends, especially with respect to violence. The fact is that in terms of overall trend, violence is steadily decreasing in the world, despite increasing population. This graph, in particular, shows his point very clearly.
[broken link! FIXME]
If someone would like to try to refute the point being made by the article and emphasized by the graph above, I'm open to argument – but I really think that all the doom-and-gloom people have got it so very wrong about the world, about history, about where we're at and where our world is going.
The title of this post comes from Abraham Lincoln, whom Pinker quotes in his article.