by Ian Morris
In the 1990s, the plot thickened further. In his book War Before Civilization, as remarkable in its way as Elias’s Civilizing Process, the anthropologist Lawrence Keeley marshaled rafts of statistics to show that the Stone Age societies that still existed in the twentieth century were shockingly violent. Feuding and raiding typically carried off one person in ten or even one person in five. If Keeley was right, this would mean that Stone Age societies were ten to twenty times as violent as the tumultuous world of medieval Europe and three hundred to six hundred times as bad as mid-twentieth-century Europe.
It is harder to calculate rates of violent death in the Stone Age societies of prehistory, but when Keeley looked at the evidence for murder, massacre, and general mayhem in the distant past, our early ancestors seemed at least as homicidal as the contemporary groups studied by anthropologists. The silent testimony of stone arrowheads lodged between ribs, skulls smashed by blunt instruments, and weapons piled in graves reveals the civilizing process as a longer, slower, and more uneven business than Elias realized.
Not even the world wars, Keeley recognized, had made modern times as dangerous as the Stone Age, and a third body of scholarship has now reinforced his point. This began taking shape back in 1960, with the publication of another remarkable (albeit almost unreadable) book. This was Statistics of Deadly Quarrels, by the eccentric mathematician, pacifist, and (until he abandoned his career after realizing how much it helped the air force) meteorologist Lewis Fry Richardson.
Richardson spent the last twenty-odd years of his life seeking statistical patterns behind the apparent chaos of killing. Taking a sample of three hundred wars fought between 1820 and 1949, including such bloodbaths as the American Civil War, Europe’s colonial conquests, and World Wars I and II, he found—to his evident surprise—that “the losses in life from fatal quarrels, varying in magnitude from murders to world wars, were about 1.6 per cent of all deaths in this period.” If we add the modern world’s wars to its homicides, then, it seems that just one person in 62.5 died violently between 1820 and 1949—about one-tenth the rate found among Stone Age hunter-gatherers.
And there was more. “The increase in world population from 1820 to 1949,” Richardson discovered, “seems not to have been accompanied by a proportionate increase in the frequency of, and losses of life from, war, as would have been the expectation if belligerency had been constant.” The implication: “Mankind has become less warlike since A.D. 1820.”
More than fifty years on from Richardson’s book, building databases of death has grown into a minor academic industry. The new versions are more sophisticated than Richardson’s and more ambitious, extending back to 1500 and forward beyond 2000. Like all academic industries, this one is full of controversy, and even in the best-documented war in history, the American-led occupation of Afghanistan since 2001, there are multiple ways of counting how many people have died. But despite all these issues, Richardson’s core findings remain intact. As the world’s population has grown, the number of people being killed has not been able to keep up. The result: the likelihood that any one of us will die violently has fallen by an order of magnitude.
The new intellectual edifice got its capstone in 2006 with the publication of Azar Gat’s monumental War in Human Civilization. Drawing on an astonishing range of academic fields (and, presumably, on his own experience as a major in the Israel Defense Forces), Gat pulled the new arguments together into a single, compelling story of how humanity had tamed its own violence across thousands of years. No one can nowadays think seriously about war without engaging with Gat’s ideas, and anyone who has read his book will see its influence on every page of mine.
Thinking on war has gone through an intellectual sea change. Just a generation ago, the decline-in-violence hypothesis was still the wild speculation of an aging sociologist, not even worth mentioning to schoolchildren baffled by Shakespeare. And it still has its opponents: in 2010, for instance, Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá’s book Sex at Dawn, strenuously denying that early human societies were violent, became a bestseller; in 2012, after several years of making similar arguments in the pages of Scientific American magazine, John Horgan pulled them together in his book The End of War; and in 2013, the anthropologist Douglas Fry assembled essays by thirty-one academics in his volume War, Peace, and Human Nature questioning whether rates of violent death really have fallen across the long term. But though all of these books are interesting, full of information, and well worth reading, all seem to me (as will become clear in the chapters that follow) to use the evidence rather selectively, and all have been overtaken by a tidal wave of broader studies reinforcing the key insights of Elias, Keeley, Richardson, and Gat. While I was writing the first version of this introduction, not one but two major works on the decline in violence appeared in the space of a single month: the political scientist Joshua Goldstein’s Winning the War on War and the psychologist Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature. A year later, the Pulitzer Prize-winning geographer Jared Diamond devoted the longest section of his book The World Until Yesterday to the same point. Arguments continue to rage, but on the basic issue, that rates of violent death really have declined, there is growing agreement.
Until, that is, we ask why violence declined.
War Makes the State, and the State Makes Peace
On this question, the divisions are deep, heated, and very, very old. They go back, in fact, to the 1640s, a time when hardly anyone thought there was a decline in violence to explain. The very bloodiness of this decade in Europe and Asia was in fact what prompted the philosopher Thomas Hobbes to put the key question on the table. Hobbes had fled England for Paris when it became clear that his homeland was descending into civil war, and the subsequent slaughter of a hundred thousand of his countrymen convinced him of one big thing: that left to their own devices, people will stop at nothing—including violence—to get what they want.
If so many had died when England’s central government collapsed, Hobbes asked himself, how much worse must things have been in prehistoric times, before humans had even invented government? He answered the question in Leviathan, one of the classics of political philosophy.
Before the invention of government, Hobbes reasoned, life must have been a war of all against all. “In such condition,” he famously mused, “there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
As Hobbes saw it, murder, poverty, and ignorance would always be the order of the day unless there was strong government—government as awesome, he suggested, as Leviathan, the Godzilla-like monster that so alarmed Job in the Bible. (“On earth there is nothing like him,” said Job. “He beholds every high thing; he is king over all the children of pride.”) Such a government might be a king ruling alone or an assembly of decision makers, but either way Leviathan must intimidate its subjects so thoroughly that they would choose submission to its laws over killing and robbing each other.
How, though, had unruly humans managed to create Leviathan and escape from violent anarchy? In the 1640s there was little anthropology and less archaeology to inform discussion, but that did not stop Hobbes from holding strong views. “Savage people in many places in America” illustrated his thesis, Hobbes claimed, but he was always more interested in abstract speculation than in evidence. “The attaining to this sovereign power is by two ways,” he reasoned. “One [is] by natural force: as when a man maketh his children, to submit themselves, and their children to his government, as being able to destroy them if they refuse; or by war subdueth his enemies to his will, giving them their lives on that condition. The other
, is when men agree amongst themselves, to submit to some man, or assembly of men, voluntarily.” The violent path to Leviathan, Hobbes called “commonwealth by acquisition”; the peaceful, “commonwealth by institution.” But either way, Hobbes concluded, what makes us safe and rich is government.
This really set the cat among the pigeons. Leviathan was so unpopular among the Parisians who had given Hobbes shelter that he had to flee back to England. Once there, he faced a storm of criticism. By the 1660s, to call an idea “Hobbist” was to imply that any decent person should dismiss it; in 1666, only the intervention of the recently restored king saved Hobbes from prosecution for heresy.
Not content with getting rid of Hobbes, Parisian intellectuals soon set about disproving his depressing claims. From the 1690s onward, one French thinker after another announced that the Englishman had had things completely back to front, and seventy-five years after Hobbes was safely dead, the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau pulled the critiques together. Government could not be the answer, Rousseau concluded, because in the state of nature man was “an equal stranger to war and every social connection, without standing in any shape in need of his fellows, as well as without any desire of hurting them.” Leviathan had not tamed our warlike spirits; rather, it had corrupted our simplicity.
Rousseau, however, proved even less popular than Hobbes. He had to flee French Switzerland for the German part, only for a mob to stone his house when he got there. He next fled to England, which he did not like, before sneaking back into Paris, even though he had been officially exiled from France. But despite this stormy reception, Rousseau gave Hobbes a run for his money. In the later eighteenth century, Rousseau’s optimism about mankind’s innate goodness made many readers consider Hobbes reactionary. In the later nineteenth century Hobbes bounced back as Darwin’s evolutionary ideas made his dog-eat-dog vision seem more in accordance with nature, but in the twentieth he lost ground once again. For reasons we will return to in Chapter 1, the idealism of Edwin Starr’s “War” swept the field. By the 1980s, Hobbes’s stern vision of strong government as a force for good was in full retreat.
Hobbes’s critics spanned the ideological spectrum. “Government,” Ronald Reagan assured Americans in his first inaugural address, “is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” But Reagan’s great fear—that bloated government would stifle individual freedom—also shows just how far the modern debate over the merits of big and small government has taken us from the kinds of horrors that worried Hobbes. To people in any age before our own, our current arguments would have made no sense; for them, the only argument that mattered was between extremely small government and no government at all. Extremely small government meant that there was at least some law and order; no government at all, that there was not.
Reagan once joked that “the ten most terrifying words in the English language are ‘Hi, I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,’” but in reality the ten scariest words are “There is no government, and I’m here to kill you.” And I suspect that Reagan might have agreed; on another occasion he said, “One legislator accused me of having a nineteenth-century attitude on law and order. That is a totally false charge. I have an eighteenth-century attitude … [T]he Founding Fathers made it clear that the safety of law-abiding citizens should be one of the government’s primary concerns.”
In 1975, just a few years before Reagan’s first inaugural address, the sociologist Charles Tilly had suggested that out of all the muddle of dates and details that clog up European history, we could draw out a single big story, that “war made the state, and the state made war.” Fighting, he observed, drove the rise of strong governments, and governments then used their strength to fight even more. I am a great fan of Tilly’s work, but here, I think, he missed the real headline. The plain fact, as Hobbes had understood, is that over the past ten thousand years war made the state, and the state made peace.
In the thirty-odd years since Reagan’s speech, scholarly opinion has moved back toward Hobbes, in a sense going beyond Reagan to embrace a seventeenth-century attitude on law and order. Most of the recent books identifying a decline in violence cite Hobbes approvingly. “Hobbes was closer to the truth,” says Gat in his War in Human Civilization, than the “Rousseauite Garden of Eden.”
However, Hobbes’s new champions rarely seem entirely at ease with his bleak thesis that the power of government is what makes us safe and prosperous. Keeley, the anthropologist, clearly prefers Hobbes to Rousseau but feels that “if Rousseau’s primitive golden age is imaginary, Hobbes’s perpetual donnybrook is impossible.” Stone Age peoples do not really wage a war of all against all, Keeley concluded, and the rise of government has brought as much pain as peace.
Elias, the sociologist, took a different tack. He never actually mentioned Hobbes in The Civilizing Process, although he shared the phitosopher’s hunch that government was crucial in curbing violence. But where Hobbes made Leviathan the active party, overawing its subjects, Elias put the subjects in the driver’s seat, suggesting that they lost their taste for violence because they adopted gentler manners to fit in better at elegant royal courts. And in contrast to Hobbes’s guess that the great pacification took place in the distant past, Elias dated it to the years since 1500.
Pinker, the psychologist, put things bluntly in his 2002 book, The Blank Slate. “Hobbes was right, Rousseau was wrong,” he announced. But in his more recent work The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker steps back a little, diluting the Leviathan thesis. The story of the decline of violence, Pinker argues, is not just about Leviathan. It “is a tale of six trends, five inner demons, and five historical forces.” To understand it properly, says Pinker, we need to break the story down into multiple phases—a Civilizing Process, a Humanitarian Revolution, a Long Peace, and a New Peace—and to recognize that each has its own causes, some going back millennia, some operating only since 1945 (or even 1989).
Goldstein, the potitical scientist, goes further still. The important changes, he argues, are all postwar (post-World War II, that is), and to understand them, we have to out-Hobbes Hobbes. The greatest blow to violence, Goldstein argues, was not the rise of government, as Hobbes suggested. It was the rise of an über-government, in the form of the United Nations.
Clearly, the experts disagree deeply over the roles of war and government in making the world safer and richer. What that kind of disagreement usually means, in my experience, is that we have been looking at the question in the wrong way and therefore finding only partial and contradictory answers. We need a different perspective.
War Pig
In some ways, I am the least likely person to be able to offer such a perspective. My brush with Petrov aside, I have never fought in a war or even seen the carnage close-up. The nearest I’ve come was in Tel Aviv in 2001, when a suicide bomber blew up a disco a few hundred yards from where I was staying, dismembering twenty-one teenagers. I think I heard the blast, though it’s hard to be sure; I was sitting in the hotel bar, where a high-school graduation party, crowded with luckier students, was in full swing. No one could fail to hear the ambulances, though.
Nor do I come from a distinguished military family. My parents, both born in England in 1929, were too young for World War II, and by going down the mines, my father also missed out on Korea. Coal mining had killed his own father before World War II broke out, while my mother’s father was kept back from the fighting because he was a steelworker. (He was a communist too, although that became less of an issue after Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941.) My mother’s uncle Fred did serve with Monty in North Africa but never fired his rifle or even saw a German. By his account, war consisted of jumping into trucks to chase unseen enemies through the desert, then jumping into other trucks to be chased back to the starting point. His closest brush with danger, he always said, was when he lost his false teeth in a sandstorm.
Instead of serving my country, I misspent my youth in rock bands. I was perhaps a bi
t less peace-and-love than many of my 1970s contemporaries, but my inarticulate instincts were still largely on the side of the song “War.” The first guitar part I ever mastered, in fact, was the crashing riff to Black Sabbath’s epic “War Pigs,” with its immortally heavy-handed opening lines:
Generals gathered in their masses
Just like witches at black masses.
Eventually, after several diverting but not very lucrative years of grinding out songs that sounded suspiciously like “War Pigs,” I discovered that being a historian and archaeologist came more naturally to me than being a heavy metal guitarist.
The founding fathers of history writing, Herodotus and Thucydides in ancient Greece and Sima Qian in ancient China, made war their central topic, and if you were to judge solely by the documentaries airing on the History Channel or what you see for sale on airport book stands, you could be forgiven for thinking that historians have been following their lead ever since. But in fact—for reasons I will come back to in Chapter 1—professional historians and archaeologists have largely turned their backs on war in the last fifty years.
For my first couple of decades in their ranks (I got my PhD in 1986), I largely followed my elders’ example, and it was only while I was writing my book Why the West Rules—for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future that I finally got a sense of what war has been good for. My wife, normally more a consumer of modern fiction than of history books, had been reading each chapter as I drafted it, but when I gave her one particularly big chunk of text, she finally confessed, “Well … I did like it … but there’s a lot of war.”