Now, in the decade of Darfur and Iraq, a statement like that might seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. But I'm going to try to convince you that that is the correct picture. The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon. You can see it over millennia, over centuries, over decades and over years, although there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the Age of Reason in the sixteenth century. One sees it
在这个达富尔和伊拉克烽烟四起的年代 说是史上最和平的年代，听上去像天方夜谭 但是我现在就要向你证明 事实就是如此。暴力行为的减少趋势 呈现不规律性。可以以千年、 百年、十年或年为单位观察 尽管在16世纪的理性时代初期 似乎存在过一个最高点。