From left: Chime, Tony, Shelter, Ivory at a small town 4th of July parade. I’ve known Tony for 60 years, twins Shelter and Ivory since the day they were born.  Not many people know that Tony was a star high school athlete (Lincoln H.S., San Francisco, 1949-’52). Fullback on the football team, he also passed and punted, and he excelled at baseball and basketball. No one does that nowadays, what with sports specialization.

Tony is one of my oldest friends (60 years). We both lived in the Fiji house at Stanford. A fraternity, yes, but a highly unusual one. A lot of unique, non-traditional, and/or eccentric boys. Tony was into philosophy —  Socrates, Plato, Hume, Spinoza, etc. — partying, and howling at every full moon. He at first had a football scholarship, and later worked his way through college.

   Upon graduation (’56), he and his wife Judy took a 4-month Vespa trip all over Europe, and he wrote me a bunch of letters. The one that got me was about taking a  boat from Barcelona to Ibiza, and the dolphins swimming in front of the boat in the moonlight.

   I graduated in ’57, and, along with my wife Sarah, took a boat from NYC to France, hitch-hiked to Milano, bought a new Lambretta, and toured Europe youth-hostel-style for 3 months, California kids out of their country (and state) for the first time, an experience with life-long memories. All because of Tony’s influence.

   In the early 60s he had his law degree and was working for the Alameda county DAs office. I was an insurance broker in San Francisco. We took a trip to Baja, went camping in Mendocino, and would go out to hear music in SF.

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“It’s pretty rare for a psychologist to permanently change how we think about history, but Harvard’s Steven Pinker has done that with his book, The Better Angels of Our Nature. 

The tragic view of history, he proves, is wrong; it has always been wrong.
A close examination of the data shows that in every millennium, century, and decade, humans have been drastically reducing violence, cruelty, and injustice—right down to the present year.  A trend that consistent is not luck; it has to be structural.
Real ethical progress, Pinker found, has come from a sequence of institutions, norms, cultural practices, and mental tricks employed by whole societies to change their collective mind and behavior in a peaceful direction.

   Humanity’s great project of civilizing itself is far from complete, but Pinker’s survey of how far we have come builds confidence that the task will be completed, and he illuminates how to get there.

   “The Decline of Violence,” Steven Pinker, Herbst Theater, Civic Center, San Francisco, 7pm, Monday, October 8.” – Stewart Brand

https://longnow.org/seminars/02012/oct/08/decline-violence/