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-- Human societies are getting less violent and cruel over time
Human societies are getting less violent and cruel over time
Contra the romantic theory of the "noble savage," modern societies are significantly less violent than their predecessors. In spite of the fact that hundreds of millions were killed in the twentieth century in World Wars and attempted genocides, the proportion of the human population that died at the hands of other people was lower in that century than in previous ones, at least according to all the evidence we have right now.
Here is something by Steven Pinker on the trend:
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| In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion. Some of the evidence has been under our nose all along. Conventional history has long shown that, in many ways, we have been getting kinder and gentler. Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as the major form of conflict resolution�all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. But, today, they are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light. ... The first is that Hobbes got it right. Life in a state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short, not because of a primal thirst for blood but because of the inescapable logic of anarchy. Any beings with a modicum of self-interest may be tempted to invade their neighbors to steal their resources. The resulting fear of attack will tempt the neighbors to strike first in preemptive self-defense, which will in turn tempt the first group to strike against them preemptively, and so on. This danger can be defused by a policy of deterrence�don't strike first, retaliate if struck�but, to guarantee its credibility, parties must avenge all insults and settle all scores, leading to cycles of bloody vendetta. These tragedies can be averted by a state with a monopoly on violence, because it can inflict disinterested penalties that eliminate the incentives for aggression, thereby defusing anxieties about preemptive attack and obviating the need to maintain a hair-trigger propensity for retaliation. Indeed, Eisner and Elias attribute the decline in European homicide to the transition from knightly warrior societies to the centralized governments of early modernity. And, today, violence continues to fester in zones of anarchy, such as frontier regions, failed states, collapsed empires, and territories contested by mafias, gangs, and other dealers of contraband. Payne suggests another possibility: that the critical variable in the indulgence of violence is an overarching sense that life is cheap. When pain and early death are everyday features of one's own life, one feels fewer compunctions about inflicting them on others. As technology and economic efficiency lengthen and improve our lives, we place a higher value on life in general. A third theory, championed by Robert Wright, invokes the logic of non-zero-sum games: scenarios in which two agents can each come out ahead if they cooperate, such as trading goods, dividing up labor, or sharing the peace dividend that comes from laying down their arms. As people acquire know-how that they can share cheaply with others and develop technologies that allow them to spread their goods and ideas over larger territories at lower cost, their incentive to cooperate steadily increases, because other people become more valuable alive than dead. Then there is the scenario sketched by philosopher Peter Singer. Evolution, he suggests, bequeathed people a small kernel of empathy, which by default they apply only within a narrow circle of friends and relations. Over the millennia, people's moral circles have expanded to encompass larger and larger polities: the clan, the tribe, the nation, both sexes, other races, and even animals. The circle may have been pushed outward by expanding networks of reciprocity, � la Wright, but it might also be inflated by the inexorable logic of the golden rule: The more one knows and thinks about other living things, the harder it is to privilege one's own interests over theirs. The empathy escalator may also be powered by cosmopolitanism, in which journalism, memoir, and realistic fiction make the inner lives of other people, and the contingent nature of one's own station, more palpable�the feeling that "there but for fortune go I". |
Yes, but has he ever been to Florida?
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| Originally posted by Sushipunk Yes, but has he ever been to Florida? |
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| Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles Heh. Well, there are still spikes here and there. Few trends are completely monotonic. |
doesn't surprise me at all.
It fuckin pisses me of when people yap about how everything is so bad "these days" as if it was worse than before, especially the violence. "You cant even go out at night these days" 
What's encouraging is that after a rash of intrastate conflicts and genocides in the eighties and nineties, the number of active conflicts is beginning to decline again. Despite all the conflagrations on the African continent, many places that were wracked by war for years are starting to see peace.
As Genocide Intervention Network has noted repeatedly, Darfur is the only current ongoing genocide in the world, which is striking since it is the first time since 1960 that there has only been one ongoing genocide... of course, there are still other situations that are on the brink of genocide, and political and ethnic massacres are commonplace in many places of the world (Myanmar, North Korea, Indonesia, DRC, Ethiopia, etc.), but at face value the development is encouraging. You can see the trend on this graph, though it is somewhat outdated since the data collection ended in 2002:
http://www.humansecurityreport.info.../Figure1.11.pdf
There are still a lot of areas of the world that bear watching though, and many of the conflicts that have been resolved or are in a freeze period do have the potential to re-emerge, such as in Uganda, Nagorno-Karabakh, Bosnia, or Rwanda, among many others.
But anyway, despite a lot of public failures in peace-keeping and conflict resolution, some headway is being made against intrastate conflict and political violence around the world in general.
A pretty good summary of the active and potential trouble spots around the world was compiled by Genocide Watch here:
http://www.genocidewatch.org/images...rsSince1945.pdf
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