TED Talks (2013) Gary Slutkin: Let’s treat violence like a contagious disease (VOST)

Physician Gary Slutkin spent a decade fighting tuberculosis, cholera and AIDS epidemics in Africa. When he returned to the United States, he thought he’d escape brutal epidemic deaths. But then he began to look more carefully at gun violence, noting that its spread followed the patterns of infectious diseases. A mind-flipping look at a problem that too many communities have accepted as a given. We’ve reversed the impact of so many diseases, says Slutkin, and we can do the same with violence. (Filmed at TEDMED.)

Gary Slutkin (Epidemiologist) Could our culture have misdiagnosed violence? As the director of the initiative Cure Violence, Gary Slutkin approaches gunfire on neighborhood streets as a contagious disease, looking to science and public health for strategies to stop it.

Steven Pinker montre la baisse de violence, depuis les temps bibliques jusqu’à nos jours, et soutient que, même si cela semble illogique voire obscène quand on pense à l’Iraq ou au Darfour, nous vivons dans l’époque la plus paisible depuis que notre espèce existe.

Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist and one of the world’s foremost writers on language, mind, and human nature. Currently Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, Pinker has also taught at Stanford and MIT.

Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think we live in the most violent age ever seen. Yet as New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true: violence has been diminishing for millennia and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species existence. For most of history, war, slavery, infanticide, child abuse, assassinations, pogroms, gruesome punishments, deadly quarrels, and genocide were ordinary features of life. But today, Pinker shows (with the help of more than a hundred graphs and maps) all these forms of violence have dwindled and are widely condemned. How has this happened?

Voir aussi TED (2007) Steven Pinker parle du mythe de la violence