It’s about a half century since I did an essay for a national magazine under the title “Are we getting better or worse?” It was an optimistic article written in an optimistic era — the 1960s. Today, it’s sometimes not that easy to look on our world with optimism. TV screens are ablaze with uprisings; front pages carry stories of tension, conflict, abuse, criminality. In Toronto, where I live, tension rises between drivers, cyclists and pedestrians, each group blaming the other when, in fact, there’s enough blame to go all around.

All this contributes to making us feel pessimistic, believing we’re headed from bad to badder. Yet in truth — in terms of the proverbial big picture — things aren’t getting that bad. The evidence is in. And it pretty well proves that the answer to the question my old article raised is positive: at home and aboard, society is getting more humane, more decent.

To me, at least in part, it’s helped by the growing numbers of people who travel. That’s good for everyone. It fosters a lot of positive things. “Travel,” Mark Twain once said, “is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness.” He obviously meant that meeting people of other cultures liberalizes the mind, expands our better nature.

In my life as a journalist I travel, but I also track travel’s growth and changing nature. I’m pleased that in 2010, experts report that 940 million travellers arrived at a destination beyond their country of origin — up 6 per cent over the previous year. But still better, many are pursuing new and very constructive forms of travel: ecotourism, medical tourism, cultural tourism, educational tourism, volunteer tourism. My wife Barbara just returned from Africa, where she and several friends not only learned a lot but gave a lot, including suitcases crammed with helpful items.

In my view, this is but one of many reasons why the world is becoming a better place. Another reason is the growing sense that we are making the human family more inclusive. Nothing illustrates this better than the expanding role of women. Just two weeks ago, a study done for Harvard Business School revealed that “what’s good for women is also good for society as a whole: between 1997 and 2007 companies with more women board directors and corporate officers contributed significantly more charitable funds, on average, than companies with fewer or no women in senior roles.”

As I write, The Globe and Mail’s Report on Business Magazine chose a woman, Christine Day, as CEO of the year. In its profile the magazine observes she’s a reflection of the communitarian sentiments of her firm, which, among its principles, promotes the view that “Friends are more important than money.” The women’s movement is helping us, here and abroad, to a more humane culture. So while much is wrong, more is better, including possibilities we hope flow from the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement.

The most promising testament to better days ahead is a new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature. (The title, a nice phrase, comes from Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address in 1861.) It’s 800 pages and written by one of the world’s leading scholars, Montreal-born Steven Pinker. He’s a Harvard psychologist, included in a respected list of the world’s top 100 thinkers. His book, says The Economist’s reviewer, may be one of the greatest of our time. In early pages Pinker writes: “Violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today, we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence. The decline, to be sure, has not been smooth … and it is not guaranteed to continue. But it is an unmistakable development, visible on scales from millennia to years, from the waging of wars to the spanking of children. No aspect of life is untouched by the retreat from violence.”

Given his scholarship, it’s impossible not to be hopeful that the life Pinker sees today will be the life of tomorrow, the life the great novelist Thomas Wolfe envisioned shortly before his too-early death, one “whereon the pillars of this earth are founded, toward which the conscience of the world is tending….”

Kenneth Bagnell, an occasional contributor to The Hamilton Spectator, is a veteran journalist.