Are we living in the least violent times in history?

That is incorrect. If you want to talk about personal conflicts, the murder rate in 15th century Western cities was about twenty times larger than it is today, and as I pointed out earlier, in the Mesolithic Era that some of you get so misty-eyed about, more adults were killed by other people than by all other causes of death combined. If you want to talk about territorial conflicts, what our history books euphemistically call "the Age of Exploration" was the Age of Conquest and Occupation for the people of three entire continents. As for international conflicts, as I also noted earlier, Genghis Khan arguably set the world record several centuries ago. If it wasn't him, the city-states of the first millennium BCE would get the title.

I understand that life looks pretty scary (but why, since the Cold War is over and terrorists kill about as many people as bees and lightning combined???), but really dude you have no idea how scary it has been in the past.

The measure I choose is the death rate. Sure it's a bummer if people are getting in each other's faces and trying to abridge each other's freedom and change their way of life. But it's a whole lot bigger bummer when they're killing each other. I suspect your problem may be that you watch too much news and all they show is bad news, because frightened people consume more news. It's self-serving. The fact is that the rate of death at the hands of another human being (or organization thereof) continues to decline. Not steadily and not even monotonically, but over the centuries the trend is clear.

Ten thousand years ago, sixty percent of humans were killed by other humans. In the darkest years of my lifetime, WWII, that figure had fallen to less than three percent.

Today... well I haven't got the numbers in front of me but we can all do the math. There are more than six billion people on this planet. Even in the hours you apparently spend every day listening to the doom and gloom mongers on CNN, do you see any evidence that sixty million people are killed by war and other human-on-human violence each year? That's what it would take to make the rate a mere one percent.

We cry over conflicts that go on for years and don't quite kill a million people. I am sincerely sorry for them and I'm sincerely glad that my fellow humans are weeping for them too, but geeze you guys, sixty million died in WWII. Don't you think we have a right to actually see the sunny side of all this? Auto accidents and heart disease each kill more people than deliberate human violence. And we can fix those!

 

I work with numbers and they're a lot more useful in the decision making process if they're normalized. Your numbers are not normalized. The odds of a randomly selected individual inhabitant of this planet being killed by a megalomaniac today are roughly one thousand times lower than they were in Genghis Khan's era. That's a far more important and useful number than saying Genghis "only" killed ten million people because he lived in a time when the population was lower.

Max, you're being disingenuous again and that makes you a good candidate for this week's S.A.M. Award. I've seen you let your guard down and talk like a proper scientist. What matters to me, and I'm sure what matters to you and everybody else, is not how many people die of a certain cause, but what my chances (or yours or theirs) are of being one of those people. My chances of being one of the small number of people who will be killed by despots and bullies this year is far lower than it would be if I lived in the twelfth century with Mongols running rampant. So that makes me quite happy to be living now instead of then.

Besides, it wasn't exactly a small number that Genghis killed. The first website I found that looked halfway authoritative listed about eight million, just counting the Muslims in five major cities he sacked.

Okay, now you're talking sense. That's three million people a year. Of course, by your reasoning, since that particular cause of death doesn't apply to Texas in 2008, you don't have to feel bad about it, right?

I feel rather optimistic about Africa because its European colonial era seems poised to end and its colonization by China is about to begin. China has learned how to feed its own people in two generations, so maybe it can do the same for the African people.

Huh? You're being disingenuous again. The death rate per mile in America fell by more than ten percent from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, due to improvements in auto safety, and cars were already full of safety improvements back then. The decrease since I first learned to drive in the 1950s is phenomenal, with seat belts, radial tires, disc brakes, better steering, bumpers without steel bullets, impact-absorption, crumple zones, ABS and air bags in the cars, and limited access and Botts Dots on the highways.

As for heart disease, we've got the most draconian anti-smoking campaign since prewar Germany, persecution of transfats, a health food and exercise industry, and bypass surgery for people who manage to get it anyway.

You can't seriously suggest that you're more likely to die in an auto accident or of a heart attack than a man your age would have fifty years ago.

Yeah, more people may be dying of any one cause today than 3000 years ago because there are a hundred times as many people today. But the odds of any one person dying from it are much lower, as shown in the life expectancy statistics.

And many of those causes of death really are on the wane, such as violence, starvation, childbirth and childhood disease.

 

Modern instruments make it possible to examine the bones of prehistoric people in much greater detail than was possible even a couple of decades ago. They are broken, splintered and hacked in ways that cannot be the results of struggles with animals or other natural events. They are perfect artifacts of blows from clubs, cuts from flint blades and punctures from spearpoints. The sixty percent is just a round number but it was definitely more than half.

Malthus's theories were from Malthus's era. The birth rate is falling everywhere due to increased prosperity, and in the Western countries populations are growing (and supporting their social security systems) only because of immigration. The second derivative of the global population has been extrapolated and by some models it is predicted to peak somewhere below ten billion around the end of this century, and then start falling.

 

That was the original premise of this thread. Since World War II, the earth has experienced an enormous trend toward peace and non-violence. Of course it's tempting to extrapolate this into the future and we're all optimistic.

Still, it's only been three generations since World War II and that's not a long enough sample space to be certain. Christendom, in particular, erupts into paroxysms of genocidal violence at very long intervals. It's been less than seventy years since they tried to kill off ALL of the Jews and it's too soon to say that they've repented and won't do something like this again in the 21st century. The Christians of America are certainly ready to exterminate all the world's Muslims, and they're fighting with the Jews instead of against them for the first time in history!

I don't think we'll every be able to predict world peace with confidence until our species outgrows religion.

 

Of course! Haven't the religionists spent thousands of years demonstrating to us that intolerance is invariably worse than the alternative? It's all right to enforce laws that encroach on their "god-given" right to encroach on other people's rights, and to make information readily available to raise doubts in their minds, and to protect their apostates from punishment. But it's very difficult to legislate morality and it's impossible to legislate private beliefs.

Belief in a supernatural universe populated by creatures who capriciously intervene in our affairs is what Jung calls an archetype, an instinct passed down from our distant ancestors. It may be a survival trait from an era whose dangers we can't imagine, or it may simply be the random result of a genetic bottleneck or genetic drift. But religions, which are collections of archetypes, occur in all societies in all eras, and are part of the collective unconscious.

Nonetheless, it is possible for humans to overcome our instincts. Our uniquely massive forebrains give us the unique ability to replace instinctive behavior with reasoned and learned behavior on a large scale, compared to other animals.

We've done exactly that in our evolution from a pack-social species of hunter-gatherers, living in harmony and cooperation with an extended family unit of people we've cared for and depended on since birth... into a somewhat more tolerantly social creature, living in harmony and cooperation with people we don't know quite as well... into a nearly herd-social species, living in harmony and cooperation with total strangers. Yet the evidence is all around us that that caveman instinct is still there, and every day thousands of people regress and treat strangers intolerantly and uncooperatively, often violently so. It takes a tremendous force of will and habituation to keep our pack-social instinct constantly repressed. Or... perhaps to bargain with it and teach it that expanding the "pack" results in a better life for everyone through division of labor, economy of scale, and mutual willingness to swear off violence.

Just as we're able to completely turn off our instinct to be afraid of animals with both eyes in front of their heads (even our children don't run away from dogs and cats), perhaps we're able to at least modify our pack-social instinct to add a lot of zeroes to the number of people we count as "pack mates."

Still, we've had ten thousand years to overcome our pack-social instinct, and the newspaper headlines tell us every day that the transcendence is far from complete. Entire nations regard each other with suspicion and hostility, like two Stone Age tribes competing for the scarce resources of a hunting and gathering territory during a famine.

So how many millennia will it take for Homo sapiens to overcome our instinct to believe in religion? We're going to have to be extremely patient.

It's encouraging to find that there are already some of us who don't have it. I like to point out that I am one of those people, because it gives hope to the atheist community. My parents and even most of my grandparents were atheists, and I was never told about religion until I was about seven and another child casually mentioned it. Eventually I was subject to the intense pressure to become a churchgoer and "accept Jesus" that was ubiquitous during the 1950s. I am happy to say that I never once felt a twinge of instinct saying, "Wow, this is what's been missing from my life. I was born to worship God and live up to his principles and now I see the light." All I could do was laugh, scratch my head, and wonder how otherwise rational people could believe in something so extraordinary for which there was no respectable evidence, much less extraordinary evidence. It was many years before I learned about instincts and archetypes, during which I was far less indulgent of religion than I am today, and as most of you know that must have been a rather confrontational period in my life.

To condense that into a sound bite, religion is a bad thing but freedom of religion is a good thing.

 

Of course not! In the first place, I'm both a libertarian and a pacifist. The only valid reason to use deadly force is if another person is already threatening you with deadly force and you don't have any other less lethal way to defend yourself... such as running away and getting help.

But moreover, to exterminate an entire people over the issue of religion is what Christians and Muslims do. (And other religions have been guilty of this too.) That would simply lower me to their level. There's no point in killing off your enemy if, in so doing, you become as evil as he was.

No, the only way to free the world of religion is to wait several thousand years until it goes away naturally, like any other uncivilized instinct.

 

Oh sure, don't be nitpicky. But if you're planning to slowly expand the domain of "loved ones" until you get me to say I ever approve of war, don't hold your breath.

If one guy is coming after you with a gun (or your wife or your best friend or your gardener), to steal your stuff or to take vengeance for some perceived insult, he has already opted out of civilization by initiating the use of force or fraud. Killing him is regrettable and we should provide ourselves with non-lethal means of self-defense, but if it's unavoidable at least you can take solace in having defended civilization against the depredation of a throwback.

But if an army that claims to represent its entire nation is bombing your cities and killing people who have not taken up arms, and you respond by enlisting in an army and bombing their cities and killing people who have not taken up arms, how exactly does this preserve civilization? You end up being a corrupted people, who have sacrificed your morality for self-preservation, who have decided that the lives of someone else's wives and children and artists and teachers and musicians are worth less than the lives of your own non-combatants.

As I've pointed out before, World War II was a perfect illustration of the fallacy of war. By so many nations choosing to take sides instead of remaining neutral, we probably tripled the death toll, which was primarily civilians with the usual proportion of children and peaceful citizens. And what did we get for it? Replacing Hitler with Stalin, replacing Tojo with Mao, and setting the stage for World War III in the Middle East.