Although the Libyan and Iraq wars recently ended, the world still seems like a violent place. After all, the twenty four hour news cycles are awash with stories of crime, war, riots and other violent activities. However, Steven Pinker contends, in his The Better Angels of Our nature: Why Violence Has Declined that we are living in a time in which violence is at an all time low.
Pinker bases his claim on statistical data. For example, the records of 14th century Oxford reveal 110 homicides per 100,000 people while the middle of the 20th century saw London with a murder rate of less than 1 person per 100,000. As another example, even the 20th century (which saw two world wars and multitudes of lesser wars) killed .7% of the population (3% if all war connected deaths are counted).
Not surprisingly, people have pointed to the fact that modern wars have killed millions of people and that the number of people who die violently is fairly large. Pinker, not surprisingly, makes the obvious reply: the number of violent deaths is higher but the percentage is far lower-mainly because there are so many more people today relative to the past.
As the title suggests, Pinker attributes the change, in part, to people being better at impulse control, considering consequences, and also considering others. This view runs contrary to the idea that people today are not very good at such things-but perhaps people are generally better than people in the past. Pinker does also acknowledge that states have far more control now than in the past, which tends to reduce crime.
While Pinker makes a good case, it is also reasonable to consider other explanations that can be added to the mix.
In the case of war, improved medicines and improved weapons have reduced the number of deaths. Wounds that would have been fatal in the past can often be handled by battlefield medicine, thus lower the percentage of soldiers who die as the result of combat. Weapon technology also has a significant impact. Improvements in defensive technology mean that a lower percentage of combatants are killed and improvements in weapon accuracy mean that less non-combatants are killed. The newer technology has also changed the nature of warfare in terms of civilian involvement. With some notable exceptions, siege warfare is largely a thing of the past because of the changes in technology. So, instead of starving a city into surrendering, soldiers now just take the city using combined arms.
The improved technology also means that modern soldiers are far more effective that soldiers in the past which reduces the percentage of the population that needs to be involved in combat, thus lowering the percentage of people killed.
There is also the fact that the nature of competition between human groups has changed. At one time the conflict was directly over land and resources and these conflicts were settled with violence. While this still occurs, we now have far broader avenues of competition, such as economics, sports, and so on. As such, people might be just as violently inclined as ever, only now we have far more avenues into which to channel that violence. So, for example, back in the day an ambitious man might have as his main option being a noble and achieving his ends by violence. Today a person with ambitions of conquest might start a business or waste away his life in computer games.
In the case of violent crime, people are more distracted, more medicated, and more separated than in the past. This would tend to reduce violent crimes, at least in terms of the percentages.
A rather interesting factor to consider is natural selection. Societies tend to respond to violent crimes with violence, often killing such criminals. Wars also tend to kill the violent. As such, centuries of war and violent crime might be performing natural selection on the human species-the more violent humans would tend to be killed, thus leaving those less prone to crime and violence to reproduce more. Crudely put, perhaps we are killing our way towards peace.