For many years, Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker has infuriated negative-thinkers across the globe with his perky positivism.
The world, Pinker argues, is incredibly safe today and getting safer. The author in 2011 of "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined " insists that 2014 was the best year in history, at least in terms of global calm.
Pinker contends the historical evidence of violence through the ages — the prevalence of skeletons from a given era with bashed-in skulls, for example — allows us to quantify the levels of violence through the years.
While there have been periods of relative peace like the Pax Romana and Pax Brittanica — long periods devoid of devastating war thanks to the overwhelming power of empire — none compare with now, which Pinker describes as the post-World War II "Long Peace."
Our current era, what Pinker called the "New Peace," is so pervasive it has spawned the "rights revolution" that is transforming the world before our eyes, whether we realize it or not. The phenomenal growth in societal acceptance of children's, women's and gay rights is a direct consequence of the plummeting habit of humans butchering each other, he says.
All this, Pinker contends, was peaking in 2014. The depravity of the Islamic State and the spread of the Ebola virus notwithstanding, Pinker insists that 2014 penciled out as humanity's best year ever.
Sound naive?
Well, perhaps a bit. But Pinker is not alone in his positive-minded judgments.
A study published in the British science journal The Lancet finds that life expectancy worldwide is up six years since 1990, an astonishing leap forward for health-care and lifestyle improvements.
Is all this becoming too much for our nattering nabobs of negativism to bear? Well, get a grip, because there's even more good news.
Despite the recent, tragic AirAsia crash, the Aviation Safety Network concluded that 2014 was the safest flying year in history .
Worldwide, there were 20 fatal airliner incidents last year, the fewest since the network began keeping records in 1942. While the total number of deaths last year, 1,007, constitutes a spike over the past few years, it nevertheless remains historically low.
None of this historically extraordinary good fortune is having much impact on our communal sense of optimism, alas. According to an especially dreary Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll in August, 76 percent of Americans express no confidence that "life for our children's generation will be better than it has been for us."
No doubt the distance of time saps much of the joy from comparisons of our current, relatively carefree existence with the hard-scrabble, short lives of our forebears. In 15th century Italy, the annual murder rate ran close to 70 victims per 100,000 population. That's big-time slaughter. The Italian homicide rate was scraping below 1 per 100,000 by the late 20th century.
But no one, even in Italy, compares their lot today with the awfulness of life in the Middle Ages.
Historian Barbara Tuchman wrote about the horror of everyday life in 14th century Europe in her brilliant "A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century" But Tuchman wasn't contrasting then with now. She was comparing the industrial slaughter of the World War I and II eras with the 14th century. She found plenty of dismal similarities.
Pinker finds life far different now since the end of those world wars. He offers a wide array of contributing factors. The end of Soviet Communism, he contends, didn't hurt. Nor has the explosion of wealth-creating global trade.
But in the end, he suggests we just savor it, and "cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible."