I've read Pinker's book and found it fascinating. Your chances of dying a violent death were many times higher in the past than they are today and Pinker does an admirable job of analyzing the convergence of a range of contributing factors, including the influence of the Englightenment and diminishment of religious thinking.
One question to get someone thinking is--if you could be transported to some other time period to spend the rest of your life, what would you choose? Oh, and by the way, there's a caveat: You'll also be transformed into a woman, a person with a physical disability, someone of a minority ethnicity or someone who's gay. NOW--when would you like to live??? It's easy to forget that for someone in one of those categories, the vast majority of time periods have been horrible. For example, to get a glimpse of what life was like for women, you only have to check mortality rates in medically unserved countries like Afghanistan and Yemen (and probably others) and find that as many as 20% of women die from childbirth-related causes and as many as 50% of children under the age of five die. Up until relatively recently, that was the norm everywhere.