Alexander Stille, in Did Knives and Forks Cut Murders?, writes,

...murder was much more common in the Middle Ages than it is now and that it dropped precipitately in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Something very important changed in Western behavior and attitudes, and it stood much prevailing social theory on its head. "It was very surprising because social theory told us that the opposite was supposed to happen: that crime was supposed to go up as family and community bonds in rural society broke up and industrialization and urbanization took hold," said Eric H. Monkkonen, a professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles and the author of several works on the history of criminality. "The notion that crime and cities go together made emotional sense, particularly in America, where at least recently crime is higher in cities."...

Randall Roth, a historian at Ohio State University who has recalculated murder rates for the 15th and 16th centuries in many countries. "The data we are getting doesn't line up with most theories of either liberals or conservatives about crime. The theory that crime is determined by deterrence and law enforcement, by income inequality, by a high proportion of young men in a population, by the availability of weapons, by cities, most of those theories end up being wrong."

Which is interesting. First of all, it shows how intellectuals tend to theorize based on their personal experience. It also suggests that the quest for what is "natural" can go too far, especially in human behavior. If we want to live as our ancestors did for most of human history, we'll have to treat each other pretty brutally. Speaking of the intellos' personal prejudice, one has to take what they--we--say with a grain of salt, especially after the journalists get ahold of it. Emily Eakin, in Writing as a Block for Asians, discusses William C. Hannas' "polemical" The Writing on the Wall: How Asian Orthography Curbs Creativity:

Mr. Hannas's logic goes like this: because East Asian writing systems lack the abstract features of alphabets, they hamper the kind of analytical and abstract thought necessary for scientific creativity.

Although she quotes J. Marshall Unger, a professor of Japanese, who argues

how can you be sure writing � and not some other cultural feature � is responsible?

, she gets some things wrong: few Chinese linguists would call written Chinese a "syllabary". Anyway, Unger's right: correlation is not causation. This book only got published because it might make a little stir.