The most peaceful period in history

Tags: 2005, Al-Qaeda, America, Cold War, History, Hunter Gatherer, North Korea, Peace, Pre-history, Steve Pinker, Ted Robert Gurr, Ted Talks, Violence, WWI, WWII

The news brings us almost daily reports about bombs exploding, attacks in remote parts of the world or security breaches close to home.

In a world that seems so threatening, full of hatred and war, we might wonder what the most peaceful times were in human existence, and what we can learn from them to stem the violence.

You’d be surprised to learn that the most peaceful period ever recorded in human history is… right now.

Harvard’s Steve Pinker argues that if people had behaved in the 20th Century as they did in the Bible, several billion people would have died in war, not several hundred million. There are more people alive today, meaning that the raw numbers of deaths are higher, but people are fundamentally far less violent and in percentage terms violence has continually decreased significantly since the enlightenment.

The below graphics shows death caused by rival humans amongst the hunter gatherer tribes in pre-history (as per fossil evidence) and the lowest bar shows deaths as a percentage of human population in the 20th century including WWI and WWII:

Source: Steve Pinker, A brief history of violence lecture

Ted Robert Gurr and a team of scholars at the University of Maryland‘s Center for International Development and Conflict Management analyzed all data available on historical conflicts and game to the conclusion that:

the general magnitude of global warfare has decreased by over 60% [since the mid 1980s], falling by the end of 2004 to its lowest level since the late 1950s

The decline of violence from the 1950s to 2005:

Source: The Human Security Brief

After World War II, a war weary world experienced a growing peace that reached its peak in the late 1950s. Then the Cold War spurred on violence accross the globe. Although only two mighty forces were at odds with each other, the US and the Soviet Union, they ignited wars in various countries. These were called proxy wars. From the Greek civil war to Korea, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, wars were fought by extension, because the two forces could not face each other directly. A nuclear war would have been too devastating.

But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, a period of peace settled over the world that is unprecedented.

The decline of violence from 2002 – 2006:

Source: The Human Security Brief

As you can see, the trend keeps continuing.

Why do we believe there is so much violence now?

Better access to media

24 hour news has clouded the reality of ever rising peace, instead creating a constant hyperbole. The constant media hype also masks the fact that crime is at is lowest level in history.

Cognitive illusion

In psychology, it is said that the easier it is to remember incidents, the more probable we think its re-occurrence will be. This is why when I traveled the London tubes after the 7 /7 train bombings, I saw virtually no-one on the underground. As the memory faded, and memories of safe transport became more common place, the carriages gradually filled. I saw a documentary here in the US that claimed the British people were indomitable and started to use the Tube right away, but from personal experience I can tell you that this was simply not the case.

For the same reason, when there was a dodged attempt to bring an airplane down this Christmas, President Obama had to step in and promise to raise security. This was as much to counteract the effects of cognitive psychology than to assure people of long lasting improvements in safety standards (in my humble opinion).

Opinion and advocacy markets and political fear mongering

Political actors and fund raisers abuse the news cycle to inspire fear in the hearts of their constituents and recruit them to march under their banner.

It is pretty hard for advocacy group to continue to raise money under the banner: ‘things are getting better all the time’. Instead, marketers know that in order to arouse people from a laissez-faire mentality, a sense of urgency needs to be created: ‘we need to turn this awful tide’.

But none of it resembles a morsel of truth.

Guilt

We live with the heavy historical burden of guilt about parts of our history: war mongering, slavery and abuse or genocide of native people. As integration expands, we feel this tricky past more acutely, as it is used  in part to rightly explain current socio-economic disparities and thus has become a political tool.

The incongruence between the rise of moral standards and human behavior

As our moral standards rise, we judge occurrences of injustice more harshly, as we should. As a result, our current justice system seems to be failing our moral standards daily, as it does, but we forget that in previous times, people expected nothing more of the ‘Kings justice’ than a 10 minute trial followed by a burning on the stake.

With rising moral standards we also emotionally mature. When Jesus Christs commands us to be more ‘like these children’ we find his statement confusing. Children can be cruel, tie firecrackers to cats’ tales or bully others, destroy reputations with gossip and can be petty. Early man however was more like an ‘innocent’ child in his moral awareness, and committed rather similar acts, from throwing cats of bell towers, lowering them in fire for public amusement or indulging in terrible gossip about people that were different from them. Christ more likely referred to the innocence of children in relation to their ability to keep a sense of wonder than that he meant to imply we should admire their moral values.

A sense of anti-Westernism amongst Westerners

The aformentioned incongruence between the rise of moral standards and human behavior in Western societies can cause us to become blasé about our culture. We forget that there is no more affluent or peaceful alternative society on Earth. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continuously strive for improvement.

The human need to excel

Humans are as lazy as they are ambitious. There are two great passions in the human soul: idleness (derived from our instinctual need to preserve energy for the next big hunting and gathering session) and the need to always want more, an eternal ‘the grass is greener on the other side’ attitude that has driven so much of human progress. We are continuously striving for an utopia. Some psychologists associate this with a deep embedded wish for a return to the womb: a place of absolute security and nurture.

As a result, we have a constant attitude that what we have is not enough. This attitude is exacerbated by modern marketing, that gives a constant sense that we don’t have everything we need. This attitude spurs growth and innovation, but can at times lead us to unfairly judge our current circumstances.

Why has peace gone viral?

Preemptive wars and the logic of anarchy

Thomas Schelling gives us a simple example: a burglar enters a house. The occupier catches him in the act. Being good Americans, both have guns. The average human being doesn’t want to kill, but both reason that they have to kill the other before the other kills them, the simple logic of self preservation.

Nations think much along the same lines, because their rulers and citizens are driven by the same instinctual reasoning. The best defense is offense, they argue, and preemptive wars result.

When Theodore Roosevelt argued that the path to peace is to ‘carry a big stick and talk softly’, he might have seemed to be self serving according to some observers, but he wasn’t entirely wrong. The policy of deterrence is an evolution of the idea of preemptive war, where a nation keeps an army large enough to avenge all infringements on its territory or citizens. The next evolution was measured response, which means avenging wrong-doings in a measured way (an eye for an eye as opposed to a life for an eye). This reduced the possibility of an endless cycle of retaliatory violence. This evolution was necessary because of the statistical likelihood of smaller armies winning over larger armies, a counter-intuitive concept, but one that is very real and therefore required calculating in. Perfect examples are the Vietnam war, the Guezen in Flanders and the American revolution.

Malcolm Gladwell illustrates this reality in his question: why do underdogs win so often:

Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.

The reason behind this is, he argues, because the Goliaths of this world often play by a set of rules unknown to them. If an underdog can understand their rule book and find the loopholes, the underdog can use their logic against them. They often avoid direct confrontation, refuse to offer themselves as a target, instead act as a virus, attacking where least expected, draining the resources of the opponent while remaining illusive themselves. Weighing on the weakness of your opponent, can lead to spectacular results. Strength in numbers is vastly overrated, instead the trick appears to be to not overstretch, not to blindly use scarce resources and not to present an obvious target, causing the enemy to have to thin out their armies not knowing where the next attack will come from. This eventually leads to exhaustion and collapse of the enemy army.

During his Nobel prize acceptance speech, President Obama tried to make a case that the absence of war doesn’t always lead to peace and tried to articulate and justify a difficult balance between the capacity for war in its relationship with the potential for peace:

Seeing his speech in terms of what we’ve learned about Goliaths historic impotence at times, we can appreciate the difficult decisions he had to make: wage a war of soldiers vs a war of secret  intelligence (the latter so far being the only thing that has kept us safe from the most devastating terrorist acts while the former only relocated terrorist bases to 6 other countries)? You can read a further opinion in the blog post ‘How the enemy needs war to stay alive’.

Wealth and moral awareness

In wealthy societies, peace is vital for economic growth. On an instinctual level all of us understand this: we are well fed and live relative comfortable lives, and the perceived way to insure this continues is by going on with our business, not fighting another war. This makes peace and justice a valuable commodity and through the psychological powers of projection, we start negatively evaluating every instance of violence and injustice. As a result, we become more sensitive about the use of any type of tribal warfare or racism, which could upset the balance of society and our comfortable lives. Equally, institutions such as the death penalty come under attack, as we empathise with innocent victims in the legal system, the unfair socio-demographic and racial imbalance in the prison system and its corresponding threat to social balance.

This was argued by the political scientist James Payne.

On the other hand, racism can be spurred by the desire to keep economic balance as well, as some seem to identify socio-economic imbalances with historical factors such as slavery, inequality and wars, and instead suspect there is a character flaw in certain races. Equally, fear can lead to intolerance, as the behavior of certain actors can be seen to undermine society and social cohesion.

Non zero sum gain

Robert Wright postulated in the framework of game theory and economic theory a situation in which a participant’s gain or loss is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the other participant(s). If the total gains of the participants are added up, and the total losses are subtracted, they will sum to zero.

As a result, war makes no sense, because it decreases the gains to be had by trade, therefore trade is valued as a bigger win than war. This explains the current peaceful period as aided by economic and technological development.

As Wright put it:

Among the many reasons that we should not bomb the Japanese is that they built my mini-van.

Take it from the horse’s mouth:

A sense of community

Humans are endowed with a sense of community. That sense in early human stages did not exceed beyond one’s own immediate family, but grew over time to include the tribe, the village, the nation, one’s own sexes, other species (see the movement for animal rights) and so on. The embrace of empathy amongst humans is ever increasing, much as it does during the stages of individual human development, and empathy reduces the level to which we can dehumanize ‘he who is different from us’, instead we sympathize with their fortunes and pains to an extend that is unprecedented in human history.

This is likely to have happened due to increasing interaction with other humans and the realization of commonly shared conditions and values. Trade, cosmopolitanism, fiction, journalism and a whole heap of other forces have made us more acutely aware of our shared common humanity.

Benjamin Franklin never thought of the slaves as equal until he went to a school for minorities and realized that they could be absorb information as well as white kids. This caused a profound change in his opinion of black people. A similar experience caused a shift in the attitudes of John Quincy Adams and slowly rippled through society.

The decline of authority

In Biblical times authority was far more embedded in society. Speaking out against the King had the legal punishment of death attached to it. Speaking out against your parents did too. With such powers invested in authorities, people were more apt to follow. This was a natural state, as lack of science gave enormous powers to state and religion, the only tools to exercise some control over the random events of life. These two forces, religion and state, competed for power. With the rise of corporations, interest groups, institutions, individual economic independence and the rise of control over our environment through the advancement of science and the resulting technological revolutions, power is much more diluted, and authorities worldwide and in particular in the developed world  find it harder to mobilize public opinion.

We aren’t there yet

None of this means that we should rest on our laurels, but it does indicate that we are moving in a gainful direction. Numbers and statistics are a poor quantifier of evil, as evil is in the deed, not the quantity. But numbers do reflect the effectiveness of the remedies we experiment with.

Nor does this article dare to claim that we are on a path to eradicating war. There have been periods in history of relative calm before, only to melt down in a spectacular explosion of violence.

Instead, as the pendulum inevitably swings, we should be critical of our society, but not throw away the child with the bath water and instead also learn to appreciate the lessons of what went right in our society.

Steve Pinker in his own words

I’ve added some theories to Steve Pinker’s expose, so in the spirit of fairness, here is Steve in his own words:

Tags: 2005, Al-Qaeda, America, Cold War, History, Hunter Gatherer, North Korea, Peace, Pre-history, Steve Pinker, Ted Robert Gurr, Ted Talks, Violence, WWI, WWII