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violence-and-the-long-peace

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tagsconcept-society, history, pinker, sapolsky, society, violence

Violence and the Long Peace

Summary: Has human violence declined over history? Pinker argues yes; archaeologists contest the prehistoric evidence; Sapolsky notes that nomadic hunter-gatherers rarely war while most non-state societies do. The picture is genuinely complex.

Sources: Sapolsky-Behave.md · Pinker-Enlightenment Now.md · Raw/Remarque-All Quiet on the Western Front.md · Raw/Chang-Mao The Unknown Story.md

Source pages: Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst — Quotes

Last updated: 2026-05-06

Pinker’s thesis

Pinker argues that violence — measured per capita — has declined over the last five centuries and especially the last seventy years. The “Long Peace” since 1945 between major powers is historically unprecedented. The causes: state institutions that monopolize force, trade that makes cooperation more valuable than raiding, and expanding circles of empathy enabled by literacy and communication.

Sapolsky cites Pinker extensively and generally endorses the macro-trend while noting the empirical battles.

The contested prehistoric evidence

The key empirical question: was prehistoric life more or less violent than the present? Pinker and archaeologist Lawrence Keeley argue that prehistoric death rates from violence were higher than modern ones; R. Brian Ferguson and others dispute the evidence:

  • Many sites claiming to show “warfare” contain only single violent deaths — homicide, not war
  • Fractured bones may be healed injuries from ritual combat, not lethal attacks
  • The Jebel Sahaba site (Sudan, ~10,000 years ago) — Pinker’s exhibit A — had most “embedded projectiles” reclassified by the original excavator as debris

“When you survey the thousands of prehistoric skeletal remains from hundreds of sites worldwide, rates of violent deaths are far lower than 15 percent.” (source: Sapolsky-Behave.md)

Hunter-gatherers and war

“The HGs who peopled earth for hundreds of thousands of years were probably no angels, being perfectly capable of murder. However, ‘war’ — both in the sense that haunts our modern world — seems to have been rare until most humans abandoned the nomadic HG lifestyle.” (source: Sapolsky-Behave.md)

Among non-state societies generally, 90–95% engage in warfare. The exceptions are nomadic hunter-gatherers, who can simply move when conflict arises rather than fight over fixed territory.

State formation and violence

States reduce inter-personal violence by monopolizing force. But they also concentrate violence when they choose to use it — genocide, total war, and democide are products of organized states. The per-capita trend depends heavily on which deaths count and over which time period.

Graeber and Wengrow add a genealogical argument: the state doesn’t simply replace violence with order — it transforms violence into kinship. Sovereignty expands by incorporating strangers into a hierarchy through the language of care, family, and protection. The coercion is still there; it has been relabeled. This complicates any simple narrative of state institutions as violence-reducers, since the reduction in some forms of violence is purchased by institutionalizing others. See graeber-wengrow-dawn-of-everything.

Socioeconomic inequality and crime

Sapolsky documents that relative deprivation — poverty amid plenty — predicts violence better than absolute poverty. The states with the most income inequality spend proportionally less on education. Air rage is fourfold higher in coach when there is a first-class section.

Remarque: the Lost Generation

All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) is the paradigm case of the Lost Generation — young men for whom the war erased the life-script they had been promised. Remarque’s narrator Paul Bäumer goes to war with his classmates because their teacher told them it was noble and necessary. They arrive at the front to find that every category their education offered — duty, honor, heroism, the fatherland — has no referent in the reality they face.

The novel’s argument, made through experience rather than assertion: industrial war does not produce heroes. It produces interchangeable corpses. The machinery of killing is indifferent to individual virtue, courage, or cowardice. Death is bureaucratic and random. (source: Raw/Remarque-All Quiet on the Western Front.md)

This connects directly to the statistical argument about violence: individual acts of violence may have declined, but the 20th century demonstrated that organized state violence — total war — could kill on a scale no pre-modern society achieved. Pinker’s per-capita argument depends heavily on the denominator; Remarque’s novel makes the numerator viscerally present.

See narrative-bias: the narrative the young men went to war with (heroism, duty, national glory) was the story their culture needed; the biological reality of the trenches was the story they got.

Chang and Halliday: totalitarian control as information monopoly

Mao: The Unknown Story (Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, 2005) presents Mao’s rule as an exercise in information monopoly: the regime’s power rested not only on violence but on controlling what the population could know about the violence being done to them.

The key mechanisms: a hierarchy of access (officials knew more than citizens, but still less than the inner circle), deliberate compartmentalization of information about famine deaths and camp conditions, and the systematic elimination of anyone who documented or reported accurate numbers. By the time the death tolls from the Great Leap Forward were acknowledged internally, no institutional memory remained to attribute responsibility. (source: Raw/Chang-Mao The Unknown Story.md)

This is the political application of narrative-bias: when the state controls what information exists, WYSIATI ensures the population constructs only the narrative the state allows. The distinction from Pinker’s long-peace argument is important: the Long Peace refers to inter-state violence. Intra-state democide — governments killing their own populations — was the 20th century’s most lethal category of violence, and it is not covered by any of the mechanisms Pinker identifies as reducing inter-personal violence.

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