* * *
How did it happen? The Age of Reason and the Enlightenment brought denunciations of war from Pascal, Swift, Voltaire, Samuel Johnson, and the Quakers, among others. It also saw practical suggestions for how to reduce or even eliminate war, particularly Kant’s famous essay “Perpetual Peace.”19 The spread of these ideas has been credited with the decline in great power wars in the 18th and 19th centuries and with several hiatuses in war during that interval.20 But it was only after World War II that the pacifying forces identified by Kant and others were systematically put into place.
As we saw in chapter 1, many Enlightenment thinkers advanced the theory of gentle commerce, according to which international trade should make war less appealing. Sure enough, trade as a proportion of GDP shot up in the postwar era, and quantitative analyses have confirmed that trading countries are less likely to go to war, holding all else constant.21
Another brainchild of the Enlightenment is the theory that democratic government serves as a brake on glory-drunk leaders who would drag their countries into pointless wars. Starting in the 1970s, and accelerating after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, more countries gave democracy a chance (chapter 14). While the categorical statement that no two democracies have ever gone to war is dubious, the data support a graded version of the Democratic Peace theory, in which pairs of countries that are more democratic are less likely to confront each other in militarized disputes.22
The Long Peace was also helped along by some realpolitik. The massive destructive powers of the American and Soviet armies (even without their nuclear weapons) made the Cold War superpowers think twice about confronting each other on the battlefield—which, to the world’s surprise and relief, they never did.23
Yet the biggest single change in the international order is an idea we seldom appreciate today: war is illegal. For most of history, that was not the case. Might made right, war was the continuation of policy by other means, and to the victor went the spoils. If one country felt it had been wronged by another, it could declare war, conquer some territory as compensation, and expect the annexation to be recognized by the rest of the world. The reason that Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah are American states is that in 1846 the United States conquered them from Mexico in a war over unpaid debts. That cannot happen today: the world’s nations have committed themselves to not waging war except in self-defense or with the approval of the United Nations Security Council. States are immortal, borders are grandfathered in, and any country that indulges in a war of conquest can expect opprobrium, not acquiescence, from the rest.
The legal scholars Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro argue that it’s the outlawry of war that deserves much of the credit for the Long Peace. The idea that nations should agree to make war illegal was proposed by Kant in 1795. It was first agreed upon in the much-ridiculed 1928 Pact of Paris, also known as the Kellogg-Briand pact, but really became effective only with the founding of the United Nations in 1945. Since then, the conquest taboo has occasionally been enforced with a military response, such as when an international coalition reversed Iraq’s conquest of Kuwait in 1990–91. More often the prohibition has functioned as a norm—“War is something that civilized nations just don’t do”—backed by economic sanctions and symbolic punishments. Those penalties are effective to the extent that nations value their standing in the international community—a reminder of why we should cherish and strengthen that community in the face of threats from populist nationalism today.24
To be sure, the norm is sometimes honored in the breach, most recently in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea. This would seem to confirm the cynical view that until we have a world government, international norms are toothless and will be flouted with impunity. Hathaway and Shapiro reply that laws within a country are broken, too, from parking violations to homicides, yet an imperfectly enforced law is better than no rule of law at all. The century before the Paris Peace Pact, they calculate, saw the equivalent of eleven Crimea-sized annexations a year, most of which stuck. But virtually every acre of land that was conquered after 1928 has been returned to the state that lost it. Frank Kellogg and Aristide Briand (the US secretary of state and the French foreign minister) may deserve the last laugh.
Hathaway and Shapiro point out that the outlawry of interstate war had a downside. As European empires vacated the colonial territories they had conquered, they often left behind weak states with fuzzy borders and no single recognized successor to govern them. The states often fell into civil war and intercommunal violence. Under the new international order, they were no longer legitimate targets of conquest by more effective powers, and hung on in semi-anarchy for years or decades.
The decline of interstate war was still a magnificent example of progress. Civil wars kill fewer people than interstate wars, and since the late 1980s civil wars have declined as well.25 When the Cold War ended, the great powers became less interested in who won a civil war than in how to end it, and they supported UN peacekeeping forces and other international posses which inserted themselves between belligerents and, more often than not, really did keep the peace.26 Also, as countries get richer, they become less vulnerable to civil war. Their governments can afford to provide services like health care, education, and policing and thus outcompete rebels for the allegiance of their citizens, and they can regain control of the frontier regions that warlords, mafias, and guerrillas (often the same people) stake out.27 And since many wars are ignited by the mutual fear that unless a country attacks preemptively it will be annihilated by a preemptive attack (the game-theoretic scenario called a security dilemma or Hobbesian trap), the alighting of peace in a neighborhood, whatever its first cause, can be self-reinforcing. (Conversely, war can be contagious.)28 That helps explain the shrinking geography of war, with most regions of the globe at peace.
* * *
Together with ideas and policies that reduce the incidence of war, there has been a change in values. The pacifying forces we have seen so far are, in a sense, technological: they are means by which the odds can be tilted in favor of peace if it’s peace that people want. At least since the folk-song-and-Woodstock ’60s, the idea that peace is inherently worthy has become second nature to Westerners. When military interventions have been launched they have been rationalized as regrettable but necessary measures to prevent greater violence. But not so long ago it was war that was considered worthy. War was glorious, thrilling, spiritual, manly, noble, heroic, altruistic—a cleansing purgative for the effeminacy, selfishness, consumerism, and hedonism of decadent bourgeois society.29
Today, the idea that it is inherently noble to kill and maim people and destroy their roads, bridges, farms, dwellings, schools, and hospitals strikes us as the raving of a madman. But during the 19th-century counter-Enlightenment, it all made sense. Romantic militarism became increasingly fashionable, not just among Pickelhaube-topped military officers but among many artists and intellectuals. War “enlarges the mind of a people and raises their character,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville. It is “life itself,” said Émile Zola; “the foundation of all the arts . . . [and] the high virtues and faculties of man,” wrote John Ruskin.30
Romantic militarism sometimes merged with romantic nationalism, which exalted the language, culture, homeland, and racial makeup of an ethnic group—the ethos of blood and soil—and held that a nation could fulfill its destiny only as an ethnically cleansed sovereign state.31 It drew strength from the muzzy notion that violent struggle is the life force of nature (“red in tooth and claw”) and the engine of human progress. (This can be distinguished from the Enlightenment idea that the engine of human progress is problem-solving.) The valorization of struggle harmonized with Friedrich Hegel’s theory of a dialectic in which historical forces bring forth a superior nation-state: wars are necessary, Hegel wrote, “for they save the state from social petrifaction and stagnation.”32 Marx adapted the idea to economic systems and prophesied that
a progression of violent class conflicts would climax in a communist utopia.33
But perhaps the biggest impetus to romantic militarism was declinism, the revulsion among intellectuals at the thought that ordinary people seemed to be enjoying their lives in peace and prosperity.34 Cultural pessimism became particularly entrenched in Germany through the influence of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Jacob Burckhardt, Georg Simmel, and Oswald Spengler, author in 1918–23 of The Decline of the West. (We will return to these ideas in chapter 23.) To this day, historians of World War I puzzle over why England and Germany, countries with a lot in common—Western, Christian, industrialized, affluent—would choose to hold a pointless bloodbath. The reasons are many and tangled, but insofar as they involve ideology, Germans before World War I “saw themselves as outside European or Western civilization,” as Arthur Herman points out.35 In particular, they thought they were bravely resisting the creep of a liberal, democratic, commercial culture that had been sapping the vitality of the West since the Enlightenment, with the complicity of Britain and the United States. Only from the ashes of a redemptive cataclysm, many thought, could a new heroic order arise. They got their wish for a cataclysm. After a second and even more horrific one, the romance had finally been drained from war, and peace became the stated goal of every Western and international institution. Human life has become more precious, while glory, honor, preeminence, manliness, heroism, and other symptoms of excess testosterone have been downgraded.
Many people refuse to believe that progress toward peace, however fitful, could even be possible. Human nature, they insist, includes an insatiable drive for conquest. (And not just human nature; some commentators project the megalomania of Homo sapiens males onto every form of intelligence, warning that we must not search for extraterrestrial life lest an advanced race of space aliens discovers our existence and comes over to subjugate us.) While a vision of world peace may have given John and Yoko some good songs, it is hopelessly naïve in the real world.
In fact, war may be just another obstacle an enlightened species learns to overcome, like pestilence, hunger, and poverty. Though conquest may be tempting over the short term, it’s ultimately better to figure out how to get what you want without the costs of destructive conflict and the inherent hazards of living by the sword, namely that if you are a menace to others you have given them an incentive to destroy you first. Over the long run, a world in which all parties refrain from war is better for everyone. Inventions such as trade, democracy, economic development, peacekeeping forces, and international law and norms are tools that help build that world.
CHAPTER 12
SAFETY
The human body is a fragile thing. Even when people keep themselves fueled, functioning, and free of pathogens, they are vulnerable to “the thousand shocks that flesh is heir to.” Our ancestors were easy pickings for predators like crocodiles and large cats. They were done in by the venom of snakes, spiders, insects, snails, and frogs. Trapped in the omnivore’s dilemma, they could be poisoned by toxic ingredients in their expansive diets, including fish, beans, roots, seeds, and mushrooms. As they ventured up trees in pursuit of fruit and honey, their bodies obeyed Newton’s law of universal gravitation and were liable to accelerate toward the ground at a rate of 9.8 meters per second per second. If they waded too far into lakes and rivers, the water could cut off their air supply. They played with fire and sometimes got burned. And they could be victims of malice aforethought: any technology that can fell an animal can fell a human rival.
Few people get eaten today, but every year tens of thousands die from snakebites, and other hazards continue to kill us in large numbers.1 Accidents are the fourth-leading cause of death in the United States, after heart disease, cancer, and respiratory diseases. Worldwide, injuries account for about a tenth of all deaths, outnumbering the victims of AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined, and are responsible for 11 percent of the years lost to death and disability.2 Personal violence also takes a toll: it is among the top five hazards for young people in the United States and for all people in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa.3
People have long given thought to the causes of danger and how they might be forfended. Perhaps the most stirring moment in Jewish religious observance is a prayer recited before the open Torah ark during the Days of Awe:
On Rosh Hashanah will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed: . . . who will live and who will die; who will die at his allotted time and who before his time, who by water and who by fire, who by sword and who by beast, who by famine and who by thirst, who by earthquake and who by plague, who by strangling and who by stoning. . . . But repentance, prayer, and charity annul the severity of the decree.
Fortunately, our knowledge of how fatalities are caused has gone beyond divine inscription, and our means of preventing them have become more reliable than repentance, prayer, and charity. Human ingenuity has been vanquishing the major hazards of life, including every one enumerated in the prayer, and we are now living in the safest time in history.
In previous chapters we have seen how cognitive and moralistic biases work to damn the present and absolve the past. In this one we will see another way in which they conceal our progress. Though lethal injuries are a major scourge of human life, bringing the numbers down is not a sexy cause. The inventor of the highway guard rail did not get a Nobel Prize, nor are humanitarian awards given to designers of clearer prescription drug labels. Yet humanity has benefited tremendously from unsung efforts that have decimated the death toll from every kind of injury.
* * *
Who by sword. Let’s begin with the category of injury that is the hardest to eliminate precisely because it is no accident, homicide. With the exception of the world wars, more people are killed in homicides than wars.4 During the battle-scarred year of 2015 the ratio was around 4.5 to 1; more commonly it is 10 to 1 or higher. Homicides were an even greater threat to life in the past. In medieval Europe, lords massacred the serfs of their rivals, aristocrats and their retinues fought each other in duels, brigands and highwaymen murdered the victims of their robberies, and ordinary people stabbed each other over insults at the dinner table.5
But in a sweeping historical development that the German sociologist Norbert Elias called the Civilizing Process, Western Europeans, starting in the 14th century, began to resolve their disputes in less violent ways.6 Elias credited the change to the emergence of centralized kingdoms out of the medieval patchwork of baronies and duchies, so that the endemic feuding, brigandage, and warlording were tamed by a “king’s justice.” Then, in the 19th century, criminal justice systems were further professionalized by municipal police forces and a more deliberative court system. Over those centuries Europe also developed an infrastructure of commerce, both physical, in the form of better roads and vehicles, and financial, in the form of currency and contracts. Gentle commerce proliferated, and the zero-sum plundering of land gave way to a positive-sum trade of goods and services. People became enmeshed in networks of commercial and occupational obligations laid out in legal and bureaucratic rules. Their norms for everyday conduct shifted from a macho culture of honor, in which affronts had to be answered with violence, to a gentlemanly culture of dignity, in which status was won by displays of propriety and self-control.
The historical criminologist Manuel Eisner has assembled datasets on homicide in Europe which put numbers to the narrative that Elias had published in 1939.7 (Homicide rates are the most reliable indicator of violent crime across different times and places because a corpse is always hard to overlook, and rates of homicide correlate with rates of other violent crimes like robbery, assault, and rape.) Eisner argues that Elias’s theory was on the right track, and not just in Europe. Whenever a government brings a frontier region under the rule of law and its people become integrated into a commercial society, rates of violence fall. In figure 12-1, I show Eisner’s data for England, the Netherlands, and Italy, with updates through 2012; the c
urves for other Western European countries are similar. I have added lines for parts of the Americas in which law and order came later: colonial New England, followed by a region in the “Wild West,” followed by Mexico, notorious for its violence today but far more violent in the past.
When I introduced the concept of progress I noted that no progressive trend is inexorable, and violent crime is a case in point. Starting in the 1960s, most Western democracies saw a boom in personal violence that erased a century of progress.8 It was most dramatic in the United States, where the rate of homicide shot up by a factor of two and a half, and where urban and political life were upended by a widespread (and partly justified) fear of crime. Yet this reversal of progress has its own lessons for the nature of progress.
During the high-crime decades, most experts counseled that nothing could be done about violent crime. It was woven into the fabric of a violent American society, they said, and could not be controlled without solving the root causes of racism, poverty, and inequality. This version of historical pessimism may be called root-causism: the pseudo-profound idea that every social ill is a symptom of some deep moral sickness and can never be mitigated by simplistic treatments which fail to cure the gangrene at the core.9 The problem with root-causism is not that real-world problems are simple but the opposite: they are more complex than a typical root-cause theory allows, especially when the theory is based on moralizing rather than data. So complex, in fact, that treating the symptoms may be the best way of dealing with the problem, because it does not require omniscience about the intricate tissue of actual causes. Indeed, by seeing what really does reduce the symptoms, one can test hypotheses about the causes, rather than just assuming them to be true.
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