...According to non-governmental organizations that keep such statistics, since 1945, in Europe and the Americas, there has been a steep decline in interstate wars, in deadly ethnic riots or pogroms, and in military coups, even in South America. Worldwide, there's been a steep decline in deaths in interstate wars.
The
death rate goes down from 65,000 deaths per conflict per year in the 1950s to less than 2,000 deaths per conflict per year in 2000-2010, as horrific as it was.
Since the end of the Cold War, there have been fewer civil wars, fewer genocides -- indeed, a 90 percent reduction since post-World War II highs -- and even a reversal of the 1960s uptick in homicide and violent crime. This is from the FBI Uniform Crime Statistics.
There is a fairly low rate of violence in the '50s and the '60s, then it soared upward for several decades, and began a precipitous decline, starting in the 1990s, so that it went back to the level that was last enjoyed in 1960.
So the question is, why are so many people so wrong about something so important? I think there are a number of reasons. One of them is we have better reporting. The Associated Press is a better chronicler of
wars over the surface of the Earth than sixteenth-century monks were.
There's a cognitive illusion. We cognitive psychologists know that the easier it is to recall specific instances of something, the higher the probability that you assign to it. Things that we read about in the paper with gory footage burn into memory more than reports of a lot more people dying in their beds of old
age.
There are dynamics in the opinion and advocacy markets: no one ever attracted observers, advocates and donors by saying things just seem to be getting better and better.
There's guilt about our treatment of native peoples in modern intellectual life, and an unwillingness to acknowledge there could be anything good about Western
culture.
And of course, our change in standards can outpace the change in behavior. One of the reasons violence went down is that people got sick of the carnage and cruelty in their time. That's a process that seems to be continuing, but if it outstrips behavior by the standards of the day, things always look more barbaric than they would have been by historic standards.
So today, we get exercised -- and rightly so -- if a handful of murderers get executed by lethal injection in Texas after a 15-year appeal process. We don't consider that a couple of hundred years ago, they may have been burned at the stake for criticizing the king after a trial that lasted 10 minutes, and indeed, that would have been repeated over and over again.
Today, we look at capital punishment as
evidence of how low our behavior can sink, rather than how high our standards have risen.
Well, why has violence declined? No one really knows, but I have read four explanations...WATCH VIDEO
