Are we living in the least violent times in history?

No we're not. That's pure bullshit. Detailed examination of the skeletons of Mesolithic humans using modern instruments has revealed that more than half of adults were killed by other humans. In other words, more people were killed by other people than by all other causes combined. The link was posted here about a year ago.

Fast-forward about eleven thousand years and we find Genghis Khan, who killed ten percent of the human population that could be reasonably reached with the transportation technology of the era. That's a major improvement over fifty percent, but it left a lot of room for improvement....

...which occurred. World War II was the high-water mark in the "modern" era, and it only killed three percent of the the world's population. (Everyone was reachable by then.)

Today war is so passe that it isn't even among the top twenty causes of death. The unreformed curmudgeons have had to give up on war and expand their definition of "violence" to include the foibles of technology. Automobiles are the only technology with a death toll worth tallying, and it comes to a just about one percent of the population.

So they keep expanding their definition and want to count tobacco, which kills off quite a few more of us than road accidents. (I'm not gonna look it up but it's something like 1%-3% depending on who's doing the counting.) But whoops! Tobacco was discovered in the Stone Age; we got it from the native North Americans, who were on the Mesolithic/Neolithic cusp. No way to blame that one on civilization.

Game over. Civilization wins. Curmudgeons lose. These are the least violent times in history. There's no way to predict that we won't backslide again, but there's also no reason to doubt that the eleven-thousand-year trend will continue and in the long run the world will keep being a more peaceful place to live.

 

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/08/europe/greece.php

 

I ordered the book "Blank Slate" from the library...hope it is as good as presented...

 

Sorry I haven't checked this thread in a while. That article seems to reinforce my point. An entire nation (to speak hyperbolically) is angry over the killing of one person, someone who was not even a beloved public figure. What society could have afforded that level of focus on a single murder two hundred, five hundred, one thousand, two thousand, five thousand years ago? Furthermore, although these angry people reacted with violence, it was not deadly violence. The one death did not beget more deaths.

I've regarded this thread as being about deadly violence, since there is some hope of recovery, restitution or other justice in cases of property damage or non-lethal injury. So as far as I'm concerned their ability to limit themselves to breaking windows or roughing up a few people without sending them to the intensive care ward is a quantum improvement over the past.

This article also reminds us that since the Iron Age and probably the Bronze Age if not earlier, the overwhelmingly greatest contributor to the violent death rate--the one agent of violence that we fear the most--has been government. Wars--the epitome of government violence--often kill a two-digit percentage of the population in the region in just a few years. No other forms of human-on-human violence come close to that level. Even the Holocaust is often lumped in with the WWII body count because the Nazis acknowledged that they would not be able to get away with it without the "fog of war."

And the rate of government violence has dropped precipitously since its second-highest water mark in WWII: three percent of the entire planet's population in less than ten years. (Genghis Khan holds the record with ten percent of the population reachable by the transportation technology of the era, and that was half a millennium ago.) Today we can afford to be outraged over six-figure death tolls or even five figures if it's people we like.

Or one. The internet has made Neda the martyr for the whole human race.

Anyway, war is no longer a major risk for people in vast sectors of the planet, and other types of death at the hands of our fellow man like terrorism, soccer riots and drive-by shootings just don't take up the slack.

Sorry, there's no link there now.

Huh??? What's your source for that? All articles I've read over the past ten years that make reference to the growth rate agreed that the second derivative of population has already turned negative. They predicted that the population will reach a peak before the end of this century without needing a tenth digit, and at that point it will start to decline. Credit is given to the fact that even in places where the birth rate far exceeds replacement level, it is still much lower than it was a generation ago. Where families used to have twelve children they now have eight, and where they had eight they have six. Prosperity is the best contraceptive and it's effective at even the meanest level.

If the discourse is limited to deadly violence I think you're wrong. Certainly one-on-one violence is less visible than wars, ethnic cleansing, gulags and slave pens, but it's also less lethal.

We have a good experiment handy to measure that rate of change in innate psychology. Wolves and dogs are a single species, but dogs began living with us about 15,000 years ago and since then have been subject to both natural selection and (since the technology of animal husbandry was discovered) deliberate breeding. Today there is a significant difference between the instincts and behavior of Canis lupus lupus and C. lupus familiaris.

• Dogs are much more gregarious. In a feral setting they form much larger packs than wolves, and in domestication they exhibit a tolerance for the company of anonymous strangers that is more typical of a herd-social species than a pack-social one.
• Dogs extend that social instinct to other species. A typical dog's pack may include more humans than dogs, as well as cats, parrots and the latest fashionable new rodent. You have to catch a wolf pup at a very tender age to get him reliably socialized with humans, and I'm not sure I'd trust him with a chinchilla.
• This is partially explained by the dog's low incidence of the alpha instinct. Wolf packs seldom number ten members because at that size two would be fighting for leadership, whereas in many dog breeds only one in a hundred is determined to get the job.

It is clearly possible for instincts to adapt to the environment, and those of our own species are surely doing so. But judging by the experience of the dogs, it is probably not a rapid process.

Jung calls the expression of instincts archetypes. They may manifest as visual images in art, as faux-historical events retold as legends, as preprogrammed memories in our synapses that feel truer than acquired memories and become religions, or as behaviors.

We have (or perhaps have developed) a modest ability to modify and redirect archetypal behavior. Our tribal instinct (hostility toward outsiders) comes down from the Mesolithic Era when there was no surplus wealth, so during hard times the only way for one tribe to survive was to steal from another, which generally required killing them. The technology of agriculture gave rise to an economy with surplus production, so it became not only feasible but necessary for people to live in harmony and cooperation with people outside their extended family. Civilization took this further and extended that harmony and cooperation to total strangers. Today our nascent global civilization makes possible and necessary harmony and cooperation with people on the other side of the planet who are mere abstractions to us.

Until one shows up on our iPhone with a name. I think it's an indication of how far we've progressed that even though we Americans have been manipulated by propaganda and the occasional unfortunate incident to dislike and distrust Muslims, we all wept for Neda.

But those Stone Age instincts are still there. Every now and then one of us loses his grip on civilization and regresses, committing an "antisocial" act against a stranger or someone outside our extended family. But as statistics show, the murder rate is actually surprisingly low. As unfortunate as any individual murder is, it's not our greatest threat to longevity--far more of us are killed by cars and tobacco, things we love.

It's when a large group of people are exhorted by their political or religious leaders to act on their violent instincts in concert, that we have problems. And if we keep our fingers crossed, it's beginning to look like civilization is finally getting past that.

We have developed other ways of channeling some of our Stone Age instincts. Team sports are such an obvious outlet for the warriors among us. For a couple of hours a huge segment of the population is "at war" with the team who's fighting their team, screaming at the TV and even throwing things... and the next day at the office we're all friends again.