Steven Pinker writes in the The New Republic (subscription required)
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.
...
The criminologist Manuel Eisner has assembled hundreds of homicide estimates from Western European localities that kept records at some point between 1200 and the mid-1990s. In every country he analyzed, murder rates declined steeply--for example, from 24 homicides per 100,000 Englishmen in the fourteenth century to 0.6 per 100,000 by the early 1960s.
On the scale of decades, comprehensive data again paint a shockingly happy picture: Global violence has fallen steadily since the middle of the twentieth century. According to the Human Security Brief 2006, the number of battle deaths in interstate wars has declined from more than 65,000 per year in the 1950s to less than 2,000 per year in this decade. In Western Europe and the Americas, the second half of the century saw a steep decline in the number of wars, military coups, and deadly ethnic riots.
Zooming in by a further power of ten exposes yet another reduction. After the cold war, every part of the world saw a steep drop-off in state-based conflicts, and those that do occur are more likely to end in negotiated settlements rather than being fought to the bitter end. Meanwhile, according to political scientist Barbara Harff, between 1989 and 2005 the number of campaigns of mass killing of civilians decreased by 90 percent.
As we enter into two years of a presidental election campaign we will hear many statements about how the world is always getting worse. The politicians and media will cooperate to keep us in a state of anxiety.
Statistics demonstrating the reverse case get little attention. I've touched on it occasionally - see The Decline of War, Part V . My guess is that niether the liberal left or the conservative right want to look at this trend. The left needs to convince the world that the military is ever more dangerous. Evidence that violence is declining would undercut their case. The conservative right sees the world as ever more dangerous. Evidence of declining violence would undercut the case for a stronger military.
Pinker's analysis also could put some of our prominent church leaders in a real quandry. How can they look heroic and virtuous by standing up and couragously speaking against the military when things are actually getting better?
Go over to The New Republic, take out a trial subscription, and read Pinker's article. He offers some speculation as to the reasons for the long term decline in violence.
Comments