Are we living in the least violent times in history?

Are you seriously suggesting that this causes as much harm to individual humans or to human society as the American Civil War, the murder rate in the 1500s, or the 60% probability of being killed by another human being in the Stone Age??? That's an "extraordinary claim" if I've ever heard one!

Another of your disingenuous arguments, a rhetorical tactic which is beneath a person of your education and articulateness. Our overeating doesn't make a dent in our massive food surplus. We've tried shipping that food to the starving people in the Third World and their despotic leaders intercept it and sell it to buy weapons and luxury cars. If you want to criticize us criticize us for something real, like the USA and the USSR using the Third World nations as pawns during the Cold War and installing some (but not all) of those despotic leaders. Or the First World's colonial era when our ancestors disrupted the natural social evolution of the Third World countries and dragged them kicking and screaming into a level of civilization that their societies were hopelessly unable to cope with. Or the introduction of antibiotics and vaccines to staunch the infant mortality rates that made our people literally cry, but caused their populations to explode so they couldn't feed themselves. We Westerners are perfectly capable of self-flagellation, but please get your history right and don't nag us for something we didn't do.

You don't really want to get me started on the armies of Abraham, who started this in the 16th century by destroying both entire civilizations in the Americas before coffee was even grown here? You, our self-appointed chief apologist for Abrahamic religion? Especially since "violence" has been redefined here to include not only the actual military conquest itself but the importation of European diseases to which the natives had no immunity?

Fair is fair.

To get back to the original topic of "violence" as defined in more conventional terms, the rate of killing has dropped by two orders of magnitude.

In the "peaceful, idyllic" era of hunter-gatherers, every human being stood a 60% chance of being killed by another human. Today the largest contingent of human killers of other humans seems to be drunk drivers. (Statistics are spotty but it's uncontroversial to say they kill at least twice as many people worldwide as purposeful killers like soldiers and terrorists.) In America, where drunk driving is our national pastime, the probability that your death will be caused by one of them is less than one percent.

Okay, here's a cut-and-paste dump of just the first page of results from my Google search on "Roman Empire" "Life Expectancy." I notice that it's changed since yesterday so I can't promise that all the same numbers are there. Enjoy.

"Fraggle Rock" was a very popular TV show. This screen name, which was never used as a term in the script, is already taken on many websites. The names of the characters are hopeless. I'd have to be GoboFraggle47. I'm sure he's not talking about me.

 

I have made this thread a sticky since there are so many points of discussion that can come out of it.

 

The consensus on the subject indicates that this is not a proper comparison. Babur was indeed a descendant of Genghis Khan on his mother's side, but he was also descended from Timur--"Tamerlane," a Turk--through his father. There is a big discontinuity between the Mongol Empire and the Mughals or Moghuls, even though Moghul is the Persian rendition of "Mongol."

The Mongols under the Khans conquered China, assimilated its culture, and spread it wherever they went. The Moghuls conquered Persia and spread its culture.

 

Just read this...where should it go? Violence against women....

UK: Over 500 held for sex trafficking in six-month crackdown
Thu. July 03, 2008 02:02 am.- By Bonny Apunyu. - Send this news article
(SomaliNet) In a six-month crackdown which led to 528 arrests, thirteen children were among 167 victims of human trafficking recovered by police, the Home Office said on Wednesday.

A report said the investigation involved 55 police forces who searched over 800 premises including residential apartments, massage parlours and nail bars and rescued 167 women forced into prostitution or servitude.

The victims were mostly from China, Southeast Asia and eastern Europe.

"We still have an insidious problem in the heart of our society," Dr Tim Brain, of the Association of Chief Police Officers told reporters. Brain added that of those arrested, 88 had been charged with offences including the trafficking of humans, brothel management and money laundering.

"We have some way to go before human trafficking investigation is core business for every single police force," Brain said.

Many of the premises investigated were in "ordinary" suburban areas, Brain said, used as fronts for brothels with neighbours largely unaware of illegal activity taking place.-Reuters

 

You have to be careful of the slick way these newsvermin calculate their statistics. Their job is to make you scared and angry, because scared and angry people buy more news.

Out of seven billion people that's less than half a percent of the population. Go back to the "golden age" of Greece, Rome, Persia, etc. and you'll find a huge percentage of their people in slavery. A quick Google on the topic yields a consensus that more than one fourth of the population of ancient Greece was probably slaves, and it could have been more than one half!

Far more people are killed by lightning today than 3,000 years ago. Does that mean that lighting has become an epidemic and requires intrusive, draconian government laws to protect us from this scourge? No, it just means that the population of the world is about 50 times larger than it was then.

 

This is not true. Modern forensic techniques have determined that the leading cause of death for adults at the end of the Mesolithic Era was murder. In fact more people were killed by other people than by all other causes combined! Something like 60 percent. It stands to reason, of course. Without agriculture or even the transportation technology of wheels and draft animals, hunter-gatherer tribes have virtually no surplus food, so in a lean year their survival instinct causes them to fight the other tribes for what food there is.

But even as recently as the last millennium, the armies of Genghis Khan killed a full ten percent of the population that was within reach of the transportation technology of the era. That is very likely the high water mark of our ten thousand years of civilization, but even if it's not, absolutely no one that came after him has matched his body count. The U.S. Civil War is often regarded as the bloodiest war prior to the 20th century, and it only killed three percent of the population within reach, the entire U.S. WWII killed three percent of the population within reach--the entire planet--still no match for the Mongols.

Since WWII a few civil wars have taken huge tolls of their national populations--Korea, Vietnam, the Congo--but those were very localized and they still didn't come close to three percent of the populations of the participating nations.

There's good reason to feel that we're living in far less bloody times than our ancestors, all the way back to the Stone Age. You younger members have never lived during a conflict with a seven-figure body count.

 

I don't understand what you mean by "owned." A greater percentage of the human race live under democratic, representative governments than at any time in history. Slavery exists only in the darkest corners of society. My country doesn't even have military conscription and most Americans get grumpy if they're simply called up to serve on a criminal jury.

There are some huge pockets of poverty and despotism but they're inexorably shrinking. On the average, people have more economic and personal freedom than ever. The Soviet Bloc collapsed, people in China have TV sets, and women are elected to the Pakistani government.

In America and Europe adults complain about having to work at all and their children have emigrated from the real world completely and live in World of Warcraft.