QUOTE : Steven Pinker does not, of course, deny the magnitude of these crimes; he scruples at their relative importance. “If I were one of the people who were alive in a particular era,” he asks, “what would be the chances that I would be a victim of violence?”73 The question provides its own answer. There is safety in numbers. Is there? Is there really? An individual x selected at random is a commonplace in the theory of probability, where x is who he is and S is the population in which he is embedded. In the twentieth century, just what risk was he running to—or fleeing from? It was, Pinker affirms, the risk of being “a victim of violence.” This comes close to cant. If the victims of violence are left undefined, they tend to multiply uncontrollably, the more so if violence is treated as a sinister, but shapeless, force. The Holocaust, the Nuremburg court affirmed, was a crime against humanity. The judgment was morally correct because morally unavoidable, but if the entire human race has, for this reason, been a victim of violence, there are no statistical distinctions left to draw.