Read The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Online
Authors: Steven Pinker
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The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (66 page)
Lars-Erik Cederman went back to Kant’s essays and discovered a twist in his prescription for perpetual peace. Kant was under no illusion that national leaders were sagacious enough to deduce the conditions of peace from first principles; he realized they would need to learn them from bitter historical experience. In an essay called “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” he wrote:
Wars, tense and unremitting preparations, and the resultant distress which every state must eventually feel within itself, even in the midst of peace—these are the means by which nature drives nations to make initially imperfect attempts, but finally, after many devastations, upheavals and even complete inner exhaustion of their powers, to take the step which reason could have suggested to them even without so many sad experiences—that of abandoning their lawless state of savagery.
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Cederman suggests that Kant’s theory of peace-through-learning should be combined with his theory of peace-through-democracy. Though all states, including democracies, start off warlike (since many democracies began as great powers), and all states can be blindsided by sudden terrible wars, democracies may be better equipped to learn from their catastrophes, because of their openness to information and the accountability of their leaders.
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Cederman plotted the historical trajectory of militarized disputes from 1837 to 1992 within pairs of democracies and other pairs of countries (figure 5–26). The inclined sawtooth for democracies shows that they started out warlike and thereafter underwent periodic shocks that sent their rate of disputes skyward. But after each peak their dispute rate quickly fell back to earth. Cederman also found that the learning curve was steeper for mature democracies than for newer ones. Autocracies too returned to more peaceable levels after the sudden shocks of major wars, but they did so more slowly and erratically. The fuzzy idea that after the 20th-century Hemoclysm an increasingly democratic world “got tired of war” and “learned from its mistakes” may have some truth to it.
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FIGURE 5–26.
Probability of militarized disputes between pairs of democracies and other pairs of countries, 1825–1992
Probability of militarized disputes between pairs of democracies and other pairs of countries, 1825–1992
Source:
Graph from Cederman, 2001. The curves plot 20-year moving averages for at-risk pairs of countries.
Graph from Cederman, 2001. The curves plot 20-year moving averages for at-risk pairs of countries.
A popular theme in the antiwar ballads of the 1960s was that evidence of the folly of war had always been available but that people stubbornly refused to see it. “How many deaths will it take till they learn that too many people have died? The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.” “Where have all the soldiers gone? Gone to graveyards, every one. When will they ever learn?” After half a millennium of wars of dynasties, wars of religion, wars of sovereignty, wars of nationalism, and wars of ideology, of the many small wars in the spine of the distribution and a few horrendous ones in the tail, the data suggest that perhaps, at last, we’re learning.
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THE NEW PEACE
Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble—and his conscience devoured him. Yes,
even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of
Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no
ideology.
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Y
ou would think that the disappearance of the gravest threat in the history of humanity would bring a sigh of relief among commentators on world affairs. Contrary to expert predictions, there was no invasion of Western Europe by Soviet tanks, no escalation of a crisis in Cuba or Berlin or the Middle East to a nuclear holocaust.
1
The cities of the world were not vaporized; the atmosphere was not poisoned by radioactive fallout or choked with debris that blacked out the sun and sent
Homo sapiens
the way of the dinosaurs. Not only that, but a reunified Germany did not turn into a fourth reich, democracy did not go the way of monarchy, and the great powers and developed nations did not fall into a third world war but rather a long peace, which keeps getting longer. Surely the experts have been acknowledging the improvements in the world’s fortunes from a few decades ago.
ou would think that the disappearance of the gravest threat in the history of humanity would bring a sigh of relief among commentators on world affairs. Contrary to expert predictions, there was no invasion of Western Europe by Soviet tanks, no escalation of a crisis in Cuba or Berlin or the Middle East to a nuclear holocaust.
1
The cities of the world were not vaporized; the atmosphere was not poisoned by radioactive fallout or choked with debris that blacked out the sun and sent
Homo sapiens
the way of the dinosaurs. Not only that, but a reunified Germany did not turn into a fourth reich, democracy did not go the way of monarchy, and the great powers and developed nations did not fall into a third world war but rather a long peace, which keeps getting longer. Surely the experts have been acknowledging the improvements in the world’s fortunes from a few decades ago.
But no—the pundits are glummer than ever! In 1989 John Gray foresaw “a return to the classical terrain of history, a terrain of great power rivalries . . . and irredentist claims and wars.”
2
A
New York Times
editor wrote in 2007 that this return had already taken place: “It did not take long [after 1989] for the gyre to wobble back onto its dependably blood-soaked course, pushed along by fresh gusts of ideological violence and absolutism.”
3
The political scientist Stanley Hoffman said that he has been discouraged from teaching his course on international relations because after the end of the Cold War, one heard “about nothing but terrorism, suicide bombings, displaced people, and genocides.”
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The pessimism is bipartisan: in 2007 the conservative writer Norman Podhoretz published a book called
World War IV
(on “the long struggle against Islamofascism”), while the liberal columnist Frank Rich wrote that the world was “a more dangerous place than ever.”
5
If Rich is correct, then the world was more dangerous in 2007 than it was during the two world wars, the Berlin crises of 1949 and 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and all the wars in the Middle East. That’s pretty dangerous.
2
A
New York Times
editor wrote in 2007 that this return had already taken place: “It did not take long [after 1989] for the gyre to wobble back onto its dependably blood-soaked course, pushed along by fresh gusts of ideological violence and absolutism.”
3
The political scientist Stanley Hoffman said that he has been discouraged from teaching his course on international relations because after the end of the Cold War, one heard “about nothing but terrorism, suicide bombings, displaced people, and genocides.”
4
The pessimism is bipartisan: in 2007 the conservative writer Norman Podhoretz published a book called
World War IV
(on “the long struggle against Islamofascism”), while the liberal columnist Frank Rich wrote that the world was “a more dangerous place than ever.”
5
If Rich is correct, then the world was more dangerous in 2007 than it was during the two world wars, the Berlin crises of 1949 and 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and all the wars in the Middle East. That’s pretty dangerous.
Why the gloom? Partly it’s the result of market forces in the punditry business, which favor the Cassandras over the Pollyannas. Partly it arises from human temperament: as David Hume observed, “The humour of blaming the present, and admiring the past, is strongly rooted in human nature, and has an influence even on persons endowed with the profoundest judgment and most extensive learning.” But mainly, I think, it comes from the innumeracy of our journalistic and intellectual culture. The journalist Michael Kinsley recently wrote, “It is a crushing disappointment that Boomers entered adulthood with Americans killing and dying halfway around the world, and now, as Boomers reach retirement and beyond, our country is doing the same damned thing.”
6
This assumes that 5,000 Americans dying is the same damned thing as 58,000 Americans dying, and that a hundred thousand Iraqis being killed is the same damned thing as several million Vietnamese being killed. If we don’t keep an eye on the numbers, the programming policy “If it bleeds it leads” will feed the cognitive shortcut “The more memorable, the more frequent,” and we will end up with what has been called a false sense of insecurity.
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6
This assumes that 5,000 Americans dying is the same damned thing as 58,000 Americans dying, and that a hundred thousand Iraqis being killed is the same damned thing as several million Vietnamese being killed. If we don’t keep an eye on the numbers, the programming policy “If it bleeds it leads” will feed the cognitive shortcut “The more memorable, the more frequent,” and we will end up with what has been called a false sense of insecurity.
7
This chapter is about three kinds of organized violence that have stoked the new pessimism. They were given short shrift in the preceding chapter, which concentrated on wars among great powers and developed states. The Long Peace has not seen an end to these other kinds of conflict, leaving the impression that the world is “a more dangerous place than ever.”
The first kind of organized violence embraces all the other categories of war, most notably the civil wars and wars between militias, guerrillas, and paramilitaries that plague the developing world. These are the “new wars” or “low-intensity conflicts” that are said to be fueled by “ancient hatreds.”
8
Familiar images of African teenagers with Kalashnikovs support the impression that the global burden of war has not declined but has only been displaced from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere.
8
Familiar images of African teenagers with Kalashnikovs support the impression that the global burden of war has not declined but has only been displaced from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere.
The new wars are thought to be especially destructive to civilians because of the hunger and disease they leave in their wake, which are omitted from most counts of war dead. According to a widely repeated statistic, at the beginning of the 20th century 90 percent of war deaths were suffered by soldiers and 10 percent by civilians, but by the end of the century these proportions had reversed. Horrifying estimates of fatalities from famines and epidemics, rivaling the death toll of the Nazi Holocaust, have been reported in war-torn countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The second kind of organized violence I will track is the mass killing of ethnic and political groups. The hundred-year period from which we have recently escaped has been called “the age of genocide” and “a century of genocide.” Many commentators have written that ethnic cleansing emerged with modernity, was held at bay by the hegemony of the superpowers, returned with a vengeance with the end of the Cold War, and today is as prevalent as ever.
The third is terrorism. Since the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, the fear of terrorism has led to a massive new bureaucracy, two foreign wars, and obsessive discussion in the political arena. The threat of terrorism is said to pose an “existential threat” to the United States, having the capacity to “do away with our way of life” or to end “civilization itself.”
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Each of these scourges, of course, continues to take a toll in human lives. The question I will ask in this chapter is exactly how big a toll, and whether it has increased or decreased in the past few decades. It’s only recently that political scientists have tried to measure these kinds of destruction, and now that they have, they have reached a surprising conclusion:
All these kinds of killing are in decline
.
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The decreases are recent enough—in the past two decades or less—that we cannot count on them lasting, and in recognition of their tentative nature I will call this development the New Peace. Nonetheless the trends are genuine declines of violence and deserve our careful attention. They are substantial in size, opposite in sign to the conventional wisdom, and suggestive of ways we might identify what went right and do more of it in the future.
THE TRAJECTORY OF WAR IN THE REST OF THE WORLDAll these kinds of killing are in decline
.
10
The decreases are recent enough—in the past two decades or less—that we cannot count on them lasting, and in recognition of their tentative nature I will call this development the New Peace. Nonetheless the trends are genuine declines of violence and deserve our careful attention. They are substantial in size, opposite in sign to the conventional wisdom, and suggestive of ways we might identify what went right and do more of it in the future.
What was the rest of the world doing during the six hundred years when the great powers and European states went through their Ages of Dynasties, Religions, Sovereignty, Nationalism, and Ideology; were racked by two world wars; and then fell into a long peace? Unfortunately the Eurocentric bias of the historical record makes it impossible to trace out curves with any confidence. Before the advent of colonialism, large swaths of Africa, the Americas, and Asia were host to predation, feuding, and slave-raiding that slunk beneath the military horizon or fell in the forest without any historian hearing them. Colonialism itself was implemented in many imperial wars that the great powers waged to acquire their colonies, suppress revolts, and fend off rivals. Throughout this era there were plenty of wars. For the period from 1400 through 1938, Brecke’s Conflict Catalog lists 276 violent conflicts in the Americas, 283 in North Africa and the Middle East, 586 in sub-Saharan Africa, 313 in Central and South Asia, and 657 in East and Southeast Asia.
11
Historical myopia prevents us from plotting trustworthy trends in the frequency or deadliness of the wars, but we saw in the preceding chapter that many were devastating. They included civil and interstate wars that were proportionally (and in some cases absolutely) more lethal than anything taking place in Europe, such as the American Civil War, the Taiping Rebellion in China, the War of the Triple Alliance in South America, and the conquests of Shaka Zulu in southern Africa.
11
Historical myopia prevents us from plotting trustworthy trends in the frequency or deadliness of the wars, but we saw in the preceding chapter that many were devastating. They included civil and interstate wars that were proportionally (and in some cases absolutely) more lethal than anything taking place in Europe, such as the American Civil War, the Taiping Rebellion in China, the War of the Triple Alliance in South America, and the conquests of Shaka Zulu in southern Africa.
In 1946, just when Europe, the great powers, and the developed world started racking up their peaceful zeroes, the historical record for the world as a whole snaps into focus. That is the first year covered in a meticulous dataset compiled by Bethany Lacina, Nils Petter Gleditsch, and their colleagues at the Peace Research Institute of Oslo called the PRIO Battle Deaths Dataset.
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The dataset includes every known armed conflict that killed as few as twenty-five people in a year. The conflicts that rise to the level of a thousand deaths a year are promoted to “wars,” matching the definition used in the Correlates of War Project, but they are otherwise given no special treatment. (I will continue to use the word
war
in its nontechnical sense to refer to armed conflicts of all sizes.)
12
The dataset includes every known armed conflict that killed as few as twenty-five people in a year. The conflicts that rise to the level of a thousand deaths a year are promoted to “wars,” matching the definition used in the Correlates of War Project, but they are otherwise given no special treatment. (I will continue to use the word
war
in its nontechnical sense to refer to armed conflicts of all sizes.)
The PRIO researchers aim for criteria that are as reliable as possible, so that analysts can compare regions of the world and plot trends over time using a fixed yardstick. Without strict criteria—when analysts use direct battlefield deaths for some wars but include indirect deaths from epidemics and famines in others, or when they count army-against-army wars in some regions but throw in genocides in others—comparisons are meaningless and are too easily used as propaganda for one cause or another. The PRIO analysts comb through histories, media stories, and reports from government and human rights organizations to tally deaths from war as objectively as possible. The counts are conservative; indeed, they are certainly underestimates, because they omit all deaths that are merely conjectured or whose causes cannot be ascertained with confidence. Similar criteria, and overlapping data, are used in other conflict datasets, including those of the Uppsala Conflict Data Project (UCDP), whose data begin in 1989; the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), which uses adjusted UCDP data; and the Human Security Report Project (HSRP), which draws on both the PRIO and UCDP datasets.
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