For more on “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” visit the Penguin Press website|Joshua Goldstein’s Winning the War on War: believe it or not, war is in decline all over the world|The Old Testament is filled with genocides commanded by God; the lives of the saints are filled with scenes of gory torture; the medieval knights were bloodthirsty warlords; and until recently people brought the whole family out to see heretics burned, broken on the wheel, or disemboweled|I wasn’t surprised that we no longer keep slaves or disembowel heretics–I already knew that|But I never expected to learn that homicide in the US, war in Africa, rape, spousal abuse, child abuse, spanking, hate crimes–you name it–have all been in decline since records were first kept}