The theory that the Enlightenment was responsible for the Terror and Napoleon is, to put it mildly, dubious. Political murder, massacre, and wars of imperial expansion are as old as civilization, and had long been the everyday stuff of European monarchies, including that of France. Many of the French philosophes from whom the revolutionaries drew their inspiration were intellectual lightweights and did not represent the stream of reasoning that connected Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, and Kant. The American Revolution, which stuck more closely to the Enlightenment script, gave the world a liberal democracy that has lasted more than two centuries. Toward the end of this book I will argue that the data on the historical decline of violence vindicate Enlightenment humanism and refute its critics on the right and the left. But one of these critics, the Anglo-Irish writer Edmund Burke, deserves our attention, because his argument appeals to the other major explanation for the decline of violence, the civilizing process. The two explanations overlap—both appeal to an expansion of empathy and to the pacifying effects of positive-sum cooperation—but they differ in which aspect of human nature they emphasize.
Burke was the father of intellectual secular conservatism, which is based on what the economist Thomas Sowell has called a tragic vision of human nature.150 In that vision, human beings are permanently saddled with limitations of knowledge, wisdom, and virtue. People are selfish and shortsighted, and if they are left to their own devices, they will plunge into a Hobbesian war of all against all. The only things that keep people from falling into this abyss are the habits of self-control and social harmony they absorb when they conform to the norms of a civilized society. Social customs, religious traditions, sexual mores, family structures, and long-standing political institutions, even if no one can articulate their rationale, are time-tested work-arounds for the shortcomings of an unchanging human nature and are as indispensable today as when they lifted us out of barbarism.
According to Burke, no mortal is smart enough to design a society from first principles. A society is an organic system that develops spontaneously, governed by myriad interactions and adjustments that no human mind can pretend to understand. Just because we cannot capture its workings in verbal propositions does not mean it should be scrapped and reinvented according to the fashionable theories of the day. Such ham-fisted tinkering will only lead to unintended consequences, culminating in violent chaos.
Burke clearly went too far. It would be mad to say that people should never have agitated against torture, witch hunts, and slavery because these were long-standing traditions and that if they were suddenly abolished society would descend into savagery. The practices themselves were savage, and as we have seen, societies find ways to compensate for the disappearance of violent practices that were once thought to be indispensable. Humanitarianism can be the mother of invention.
But Burke had a point. Unspoken norms of civilized behavior, both in everyday interactions and in the conduct of government, may be a prerequisite to implementing certain reforms successfully. The development of these norms may be the mysterious “historical forces” that Payne remarked on, such as the spontaneous fading of political murder well before the principles of democracy had been articulated, and the sequence in which some abolition movements gave the coup de grâce to practices that were already in decline. They may explain why today it is so hard to impose liberal democracy on countries in the developing world that have not outgrown their superstitions, warlords, and feuding tribes.151
Civilization and Enlightenment need not be alternatives in explaining declines of violence. In some periods, tacit norms of empathy, self-control, and cooperation may take the lead, and rationally articulated principles of equality, nonviolence, and human rights may follow. In other periods, it may go in the other direction.
This to-and-fro may explain why the American Revolution was not as calamitous as its French counterpart. The Founders were products not just of the Enlightenment but of the English Civilizing Process, and self-control and cooperation had become second nature to them. “A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation,” the Declaration politely explains. “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.” Prudence, indeed.
But their decency and prudence were more than mindless habits. The Founders consciously deliberated about just those limitations of human nature that made Burke so nervous about conscious deliberation. “What is government itself,” asked Madison, “but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?”152 Democracy, in their vision, had to be designed to counteract the vices of human nature, particularly the temptation in leaders to abuse their power. An acknowledgment of human nature may have been the chief difference between the American revolutionaries and their French confrères, who had the romantic conviction that they were rendering human limitations obsolete. In 1794 Maximilien Robespierre, architect of the Terror, wrote, “The French people seem to have outstripped the rest of humanity by two thousand years; one might be tempted to regard them, living amongst them, as a different species.”153
In The Blank Slate I argued that two extreme visions of human nature—a Tragic vision that is resigned to its flaws, and a Utopian vision that denies it exists—define the great divide between right-wing and left-wing political ideologies.154 And I suggested that a better understanding of human nature in the light of modern science can point the way to an approach to politics that is more sophisticated than either. The human mind is not a blank slate, and no humane political system should be allowed to deify its leaders or remake its citizens. Yet for all its limitations, human nature includes a recursive, openended, combinatorial system for reasoning, which can take cognizance of its own limitations. That is why the engine of Enlightenment humanism, rationality, can never be refuted by some flaw or error in the reasoning of the people in a given era. Reason can always stand back, take note of the flaw, and revise its rules so as not to succumb to it the next time.
BLOOD AND SOIL
A second counter-Enlightenment movement took root in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and was centered not in England but in Germany. The various strands have been explored in an essay by Isaiah Berlin and a book by the philosopher Graeme Garrard.155 This counter-Enlightenment originated with Rousseau and was developed by theologians, poets, and essayists such as Johann Hamann, Friedrich Jacobi, Johann Herder, and Friedrich Schelling. Its target was not, as it was for Burke, the unintended consequences of Enlightenment reason for social stability, but the foundations of reason itself.
The first mistake, they said, was to start from the consciousness of an individual mind. The disembodied individual reasoner, ripped from his culture and its history, is a figment of the Enlightenment thinker’s imagination. A person is not a locus of abstract cogitation—a brain on a stick—but a body with emotions and a part of the fabric of nature.
The second mistake was to posit a universal human nature and a universally valid system of reasoning. People are embedded in a culture and find meaning in its myths, symbols, and epics. Truth does not reside in propositions in the sky, there for everyone to see, but is situated in narratives and archetypes that are particular to the history of a place and give meaning to the lives of its inhabitants.
In this way of thinking, for a rational analyst to criticize traditional beliefs or customs is to miss the point. Only if one enters into the experience of those who live by those beliefs can one truly understand them. The Bible, for example, can be appreciated only by reproducing the experience of ancient shepherds in the Judaean hills. Every culture has a unique Schwerpunkt, a center of gravity, and unless we try to occupy it, we cannot comprehend its meaning and value.156 Cosmopolitanism, far from being a virtue, is a “shedding of all that makes one most human, most oneself.”157 Universality, objectivity, and rationality are out; romanticism, vitalism, intuition, and irrationalism are in. Herder summed up the
Sturm und Drang (storm and impulse) movement he helped to inspire: “I am not here to think, but to be, feel, live! . . . Heart! Warmth! Blood! Humanity! Life!” 158
A child of the counter-Enlightenment, then, does not pursue a goal because it is objectively true or virtuous, but because it is a unique product of one’s creativity. The wellspring of creativity may be in one’s own true self, as the Romantic painters and writers insisted, or it may be in some kind of transcendent entity: a cosmic spirit, a divine flame. Berlin elaborates:Others again identified the creative self with a super-personal “organism” of which they saw themselves as elements or members—nation, or church, or culture, or class, or history itself, a mighty force of which they conceived their earthly selves as emanations. Aggressive nationalism, self-identification with the interests of the class, the culture or the race, or the forces of progress—with the wave of the future-directed dynamism of history, something that at once explains and justifies acts which might be abhorred or despised if committed from calculation of selfish advantage or some other mundane motive—this family of political and moral conceptions is so many expressions of a doctrine of self-realization based on defiant rejection of the central theses of the Enlightenment, according to which what is true, or right, or good, or beautiful, can be shown to be valid for all men by the correct application of objective methods of discovery and interpretation, open to anyone to use and verify.159
The counter-Enlightenment also rejected the assumption that violence was a problem to be solved. Struggle and bloodshed are inherent in the natural order, and cannot be eliminated without draining life of its vitality and subverting the destiny of mankind. As Herder put it, “Men desire harmony, but nature knows better what is good for the species: it desires strife.”160 The glorification of the struggle in “nature red in tooth and claw” (as Tennyson had put it) was a pervasive theme in 19th-century art and writing. Later it would be retrofitted with a scientific patina in the form of “social Darwinism,” though the connection with Darwin is anachronistic and unjust: The Origin of Species was published in 1859, long after romantic struggleism had become a popular philosophy, and Darwin himself was a thoroughgoing liberal humanist.161
The counter-Enlightenment was the wellspring of a family of romantic movements that gained strength during the 19th century. Some of them influenced the arts and gave us sublime music and poetry. Others became political ideologies and led to horrendous reversals in the trend of declining violence. One of these ideologies was a form of militant nationalism that came to be known as “blood and soil”—the notion that an ethnic group and the land from which it originated form an organic whole with unique moral qualities, and that its grandeur and glory are more precious than the lives and happiness of its individual members. Another was romantic militarism, the idea that (as Mueller has summarized it) “war is noble, uplifting, virtuous, glorious, heroic, exciting, beautiful, holy, thrilling.”162 A third was Marxist socialism, in which history is a glorious struggle between classes, culminating in the subjugation of the bourgeoisie and the supremacy of the proletariat. And a fourth was National Socialism, in which history is a glorious struggle between races, culminating in the subjugation of inferior races and the supremacy of the Aryans.
The Humanitarian Revolution was a milestone in the historical reduction of violence and is one of humanity’s proudest achievements. Superstitious killing, cruel punishments, frivolous executions, and chattel slavery may not have been obliterated from the face of the earth, but they have certainly been pushed to the margins. And despotism and major war, which had cast their shadow on humanity since the beginning of civilization, began to show cracks. The philosophy of Enlightenment humanism that united these developments got a toehold in the West and bided its time until more violent ideologies tragically ran their course.
5
THE LONG PEACE
War appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modern invention.
—Henry Maine
In the early 1950s, two eminent British scholars reflected on the history of war and ventured predictions on what the world should expect in the years to come. One of them was Arnold Toynbee (1889–1975), perhaps the most famous historian of the 20th century. Toynbee had served in the British Foreign Office during both world wars, had represented the government at the peace conferences following each one, and had been chronicling the rise and fall of twenty-six civilizations in his monumental twelve-volume work A Study of History. The patterns of history, as he saw them in 1950, did not leave him optimistic:In our recent Western history war has been following war in an ascending order of intensity; and today it is already apparent that the War of 1939–45 was not the climax of this crescendo movement.1
Writing in the shadow of World War II and at the dawn of the Cold War and the nuclear age, Toynbee could certainly be forgiven for his bleak prognostication. Many other distinguished commentators were equally pessimistic, and predictions of an imminent doomsday continued for another three decades.2
The other scholar’s qualifications could not be more different. Lewis Fry Richardson (1881–1953) was a physicist, meteorologist, psychologist, and applied mathematician. His main claim to fame had been devising numerical techniques for predicting the weather, decades before there were computers powerful enough to implement them.3 Richardson’s own prediction about the future came not from erudition about great civilizations but from statistical analysis of a dataset of hundreds of violent conflicts spanning more than a century. Richardson was more circumspect than Toynbee, and more optimistic.
The occurrence of two world wars in the present century is apt to leave us with the vague belief that the world has become more warlike. But this belief needs logical scrutiny. A long future may perhaps be coming without a third world war in it.4
Richardson chose statistics over impressions to defy the common understanding that global nuclear war was a certainty. More than half a century later, we know that the eminent historian was wrong and the obscure physicist was right.
This chapter is about the full story behind Richardson’s prescience: the trends in war between major nations, culminating in the unexpected good news that the apparent crescendo of war did not continue to a new climax. During the last two decades, the world’s attention has shifted to other kinds of conflict, including wars in smaller countries, civil wars, genocides, and terrorism; they will be covered in the following chapter.
STATISTICS AND NARRATIVES
The 20th century would seem to be an insult to the very suggestion that violence has declined over the course of history. Commonly labeled the most violent century in history, its first half saw a cascade of world wars, civil wars, and genocides that Matthew White has called the Hemoclysm, the blood-flood.5 The Hemoclysm was not just an unfathomable tragedy in its human toll but an upheaval in humanity’s understanding of its historical movement. The Enlightenment hope for progress led by science and reason gave way to a sheaf of grim diagnoses: the recrudescence of a death instinct, the trial of modernity, an indictment of Western civilization, man’s Faustian bargain with science and technology.6
But a century is made up of a hundred years, not fifty. The second half of the 20th century saw a historically unprecedented avoidance of war between the great powers which the historian John Gaddis has called the Long Peace, followed by the equally astonishing fizzling out of the Cold War.7 How can we make sense of the multiple personalities of this twisted century? And what can we conclude about the prospects for war and peace in the present one?
The competing predictions of Toynbee the historian and Richardson the physicist represent complementary ways of understanding the flow of events in time. Traditional history is a narrative of the past. But if we are to heed George Santayana’s advisory to remember the past so as not to repeat it, we need to discern patterns in the past, so we can know what to generalize to the predicaments of the present. Inducing generalizable patterns from a finite set of observations is the stock in trade of the scienti
st, and some of the lessons of pattern extraction in science may be applied to the data of history.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that World War II was the most destructive event in history. (Or if you prefer, suppose that the entire Hemoclysm deserves that designation, if you consider the two world wars and their associated genocides to be a single protracted historical episode.) What does that tell us about long-term trends in war and peace?
The answer is: nothing. The most destructive event in history had to take place in some century, and it could be embedded in any of a large number of very different long-term trends. Toynbee assumed that World War II was a step in an escalating staircase, as in the left panel in figure 5–1. Almost as gloomy is the common suggestion that epochs of war are cyclical, as in the right panel of figure 5–1. Like many depressing prospects, both models have spawned some black humor. I am often asked if I’ve heard the one about the man who fell off the roof of an office building and shouted to the workers on each floor, “So far so good!” I have also been told (several times) about the turkey who, on the eve of Thanksgiving, remarked on the extraordinary 364-day era of peace between farmers and turkeys he is lucky enough to be living in.8
But are the processes of history really as deterministic as the law of gravity or the cycling of the planet? Mathematicians tells us that an infinite number of curves can be drawn through any finite set of points. Figure 5–2 shows two other curves which situate the same episode in very different narratives.
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Page 29