Speaking of hope for humanity, the subtitle of the Transforming Leadership curriculum —The Promise of Our Better Angels — echoes a relevant phrase from Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address in 1861. In a desperate and ultimately futile attempt to stave off civil war over the ancient institution of slavery, Lincoln closed that address as follows:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory . . . will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Seven score and ten years later, psychologist Steven Pinker borrowed that phrase for the title of his monumental 2011 study, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Pinker marshaled an enormous array of historical and psychological evidence chronicling the human struggle to emerge from savagery, barbarism, and a blinkered focus on survival and security to enlightened civilization, democratic social organization, and global concern for all of humanity.

Both Lincoln and Pinker invoked the notion of our better angels not only to remind us of our most humane and generous instincts, but also to imply that human progress has always followed the lead of those humane and generous instincts as if they came from some higher power rather than from within our own animal and human nature. The persuasive insights and sheer volume of Pinker’s evidence overwhelms the popular but shallow notion that people in general are now more selfish, more corrupt, and more violent than ever before.

This popular but misguided notion has been fed by a constant and increasingly alarming stream of imagery, sound, and fury in the 24-hour cable television news cycle and in popular entertainment media, both of which exploit the human mind’s instinctive tendency to focus on violence, danger, and dramatic action – all in the pursuit of corporate profits. Meanwhile, the reality of everyday human behavior in virtually all walks of life nowadays is that most people, most of the time, under reasonably favorable conditions, trust each other and cooperate with each other day in and day out.

The parade of violence and mayhem displayed on television news and the descent of our political discourse into a partisan food fight showcases the spectacular exceptions to the norm (that’s why it’s called “news”) – yet watching this parade for very long creates an illusion that it represents the current norm of human behavior. Meanwhile, filling one’s brain circuits with crime dramas, violent video games, and images that glorify conflict, spectacular explosions, and various forms of destructive and dysfunctional behavior tends to overwhelm appreciation for what Lincoln and Pinker both called “the better angels of our nature.” In some cynical circles, in fact, faith in human virtue itself has come to be mocked as the province of naïve idealists, bleeding hearts, do-gooders, goody two-shoes, and “snowflakes.” (Lest we forget, airports can be shut down by blizzards and villages can be buried by avalanches made up of fragile little snowflakes.)

Pinker, however, demonstrates that human behavior before the twentieth century was much more marked by homicide, rape, murderous sports, gruesome entertainment, beheadings, witch burnings, torture, and cruelty to animals that we can barely imagine nowadays, let alone tolerate or seek to emulate. According to Pinker, among the most important developments that have led to the decline of violence and the growth of civility within the human family over several millennia are:

• The intervention of ancient states that monopolized legitimate violenceand thus curtailed it among private individuals and families. The Roman Empire was a slave state that celebrated routine violence in gruesome competitions for huge audiences, but the Pax Romana was a big improvement over the chaos that gripped much of the ancient world.

• The rise of trade and commerce, which required cooperation among merchants from distant locations and different ethnic and religious communities. In turn, trade and commerce required travel, communication, and security provided largely by the states that monopolized the legitimate application of violence. The need to respect the lives and fortunes of merchants and travelers also generated norms of hospitality toward strangers and wayfarers from elsewhere, especially as more and more people became travelers, strangers, and wayfarers themselves. Contemporary hotel chains and cruise lines owe their profits to the rise of trade and commerce in the ancient world.

• The rise of large-scale religions based on sacred texts. All the world’s major religions include basic moral principles applicable to all members, and potentially to all human beings. Philosophers and moral prophets from the early days of the Axial Age inspired followers to improve their lives through the practice of compassion and justice. Written language facilitated consistent moral codes and shared stories in sacred texts over large expanses of time and place. Though most religions initially stressed compassion exclusively for their own members (“us” but not “them”), their recognition of compassion and justice as principles of behavior laid the foundation for universal compassion and justice as the distant past eventually became this month.

• The rise of democratic forms of social organization, based on widespread literacy, education, and the rise of scientific observation and analysis in the seventeenth and eighteenth century Enlightenment. The more we know about people and things, the less we rely on instinctive fear, anger, superstition, and ideology as coping mechanisms. And the more we rely on each other to govern our communities and collaborate for mutual benefit, the more we learn to appreciate and respect each other.

• The widening circle of empathy. The progress of human awareness from self-centered egoism to family-centered tribalism to other-centered altruism has characterized all postmodern cultures and societies. The most dramatic and far-reaching example of the emerging global circle of empathy is in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948. The UN itself is a supreme example of collaborative leadership within a network of sovereign states.

• The escalator of reason, another product of the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, and the spread of literacy and higher education. Once we learn how to deal with experience through reason and verifiable evidence rather than through traditional superstitions and inherited ideologies, we are almost automatically lifted to higher and higher levels of understanding and wisdom as if by an escalator.

In this context, the metaphorical promise of our better angels expresses the pull of a better, more enlightened, more collaborative future through courage, compassion, continuous learning, and the practice of service to the larger community. From the Axial Age through the Enlightenment and well into the Information Age, the promise of our better angels has motivated and animated all the most effective and most significant leaders in human history.