[LINK] "A History of Violence"

[rfmcdpei]

I forget whoever pointed me towards Steven Pinker's essay of the same name, originally published in 2007 in The New Republic. I'm sorry that I can't thank that person, since it's one of the more thought-provoking essays that I've come across recently, tackling the myth of the noble peaceful "savage" and arguing that the 20th century has actually

Comments

[dignam]

Interesting. I was just writing on a similar theme.

"The question to me, at least, is: "Why didn't Rome fall?" -I mean, it didn't fall for a while, at any rate. The amount of carnage, chaos and panic you describe each year, every year, 500 times over, makes our past decade look like a sunny afternoon at Coney Island. Bread and circuses in the bad times, I suppose; and between you and me, America is plenty good at baking both."

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/06/talkin-gibbon-in-the-hypercloud.html

[gunlord]

I do agree (mostly) with the assertion that the myth of the 'noble savage' is just that--a myth. However, just as quick pointer, I wouldn't be too hasty to take the claim that "If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million" as an indication, in and of itself, that things are less violent today than they used to be. After all, to take one example, medical technology today has advanced to the point where many wounds that would have been fatal in the past can be healed now. In a tribal society, one without antibiotics, surgeons, etc. etc. it seems likely to me that many people would be die from wounds that got infected/couldn't be patched up. Thus, I wonder if the disparity between proportions of people killed in interstate warfare versus tribal warfare may be inflated by the fact that many of the people who die in tribal warfare would have lived on had they access to the medical technology

[rfmcdpei]

Maybe, but then again we didn't have a nuclear war. Even though we had the weapons and we certainly had the rivalries, leaders on all sides--and the populations that they governed, and other populations--were all too terrified about the effects on their own peoples and on others to do anything. A good nuclear war could have killed two billion people easily, but it didn't.

[lux_apollo]

This is going to sound horrible, but if 2 billion people *had* died in our recent wars, we'd be in much less of an overpopulation pickle right now.

:-s

[rfmcdpei]

Overpopulation, maybe, but war on that scale would have its own atrocious effects on the Earth's ability to support life. A 1980s-era nuclear war would easily have destroyed the ozone layer, frex, and the volume of dust and whatnot thrown into the upper atmosphere would be enough to block off sunlight worldwide for years. We might well have a more thorough global mass extinction than the one we're undergoing now.

[lux_apollo]

Well, of course. But I'm a biologist. Life would go on - just not as it is now.
Not saying the situation wouldn't be made of infinite fail, though.

[rfmcdpei]

Point; I didn't intend to be overbearing. It's just that I think we're being smarter than we would have been if, say, Napoleonic Europe's powers and Qing China had nukes. (Dystopia, there.)