I chose to search for what I call “big-kill” wars, during which a million or more die — soldiers and civilians. From 1800-1850, only the Napoleonic Wars surpassed the million-death mark.
. . .The troubling rise in big-kill wars in the first half of the 20th century was followed by an even more disturbing pattern in the second half: they doubled once again. There was nothing of the magnitude of World War II in sheer numbers of dead, but the million-mark in war deaths was steadily surmounted, mostly in societies in which such losses had staggering effects.
Pointer from Charles Chu (email newsletter). Steven Pinker can show a decline in violence by looking at the ratio of war deaths to total population. But is the increase in the denominator, not a decrease in the numerator, that is holding down that ratio.
If one is unlikely to achieve surrender beforehand, then the goal of war is to eliminate the other side’s capability to continue fighting. Today’s wars are based more in stocks than flows, and so when there is any imbalance they tend to end relatively quickly and with comparatively fewer casualties in the past, even on the losing side.
That’s mostly a function of technological progress, not better angels. Obviously nuclear bombs (especially ones that can’t be preemptively destroyed because on mobile launch platforms or hidden on submarines), change everything, and that’s also technology, not angels. Modern air power also ended the entrenchments-attrition problem, which dated back to mid 19th century and was prominent in the later Civil War battles.
What makes certain modern wars especially lengthy and deadly are when none of the players can be decisively defeated, usually because they can leverage external resources, usually safe refuge across a border, or supply lines and assistance from foreign powers, which end up using the ‘local war’ as a proxy fight against yet other foreign powers.
Whenever the situation starts to get out of balance and it looks like one side is marching to victory, the foreign powers intervene just enough to keep their allies from crumbling, and the things just goes on and on. Look at Yemen or Syria today.
On the one hand, we can expect that major powers will probably not go to war directly with each other, which solves one of the classic generators of huge quantities of war fatalities. On the other hand, these proxy fights using someone else’s country as a battlefield with someone else’s combatants seems to be the new normal.
+1…I have always held the best solution for Yemen and Syria is treat like a California Wildfire. All nations agree to keep the battle within borders and give no weapons and support to other either side. Then watch burn itself out.
1) The denominator is big deal here as the world had 70% less people than 1900 and 83% of people in 1800. There loads more people in the world and it is lot more crowded than past centuries.
2) Past societies did not have the means to hit 1M dead nor did they have the technology.
3) There is a big difference between first half of 20th century and second half of the 20th century. And after the Cold War (1990ish) the number of people dead from wars is way down.
4) Look at Western Europe…Not a major war since WW2. Or say Far East today versus the Cold War Far East Asia…No major wars. What about South America? Sure Valenzuela is collapsing but who else? Outside of Africa and Middle East, war activity is limited.
I wholly agree with you about Yemen and Syria… but since Saudi Arabia and Iran disagree, I am not sure what the rest of the world can do to try and stop the flow of weapons and munitions to those wars. Both of those countries are relatively insensitive to foreign influence.
I suspect the issue of the Middle East is Iran and Saudia Arabia are both:
1) Fairly rich
2) Have not suffered a WW1/WW2 reality. At this point, it does feel like the US and rest of the world is keeping Saudia Arabia and Iran from starting the Mid East version of WW1
I think that it is a little more like the Cold War than WWI, in that the reason that I think neither Iran nor Saudi Arabia have directly attacked each other is due to mutually assured destruction (even without nuclear weapons I think both nations have the capacity to reduce the other nation to rubble within a week or so.
Also by using questionable statistical methods (e.g. he counts the Middle Eastern slave trade, spanning 7 centuries, as one event) and questionable population loss figures (see e.g. regarding An Lushan rebellion). There was a good take-down of his book somewhere, but unfortunately the search keywords escape my memory at the moment.
The book _The great big book of horrible things_ by Matt White is not to be missed as a reference for such discussions.
Another useful approach would be to look at the sort of devastation for which the Thirty Years War is paradigmatic. Offhand it is often stated that the Thirty Years War and the Second World War killed more civilians than uniformed combatants, but such things have become rarer over the long run, at least within the European State System.
I think the evidence favors Pinker’s thesis, but the methodology can make the difference. Just tweaking some variables can change the conclusion. What counts as violence: an event or regime? Taleb’s counterargument is less convincing since it is based on his assumption that violent death has an incalculable variance. this my be true but is of no use. it’s like, yeah, so what. Typical argument from ignorance on his part.
I am reminded of a Stalin quote, it is not who votes, but who counts the vote.
A lot of deaths that would in the past not be counted as war deaths now are. And many NGO opposed to this war or that will put out absurd numbers of war deaths which are picked up as “war deaths in studies like this. WW 1 and WW 2 were big an bloody. Cold War less so. Post Cold War has been pretty peaceful. And in 1800 to 1850 may have been peaceful, but go out a few years. Think of Taping Rebellion, where 20 to 100 million are estimated to have died (big range).
Per capita death rate seems to me to be clearly the correct way to look at this. If we’re looking at murders or cancer deaths, for example, we would consider a fall in death rates over 50 years a win, even if a doubling of the population results in more total deaths.
What’s really important is the probability that any given individual will die from one of these causes. To take this to an extreme, suppose that a cure to all disease, including aging, is developed, and violence also declines to the point where the mortality rate falls from the current 8 per 1,000 to a mere 1 per 100,000. To deal with population pressures, we colonize the galaxy, and the population increases by a factor of a million.
Under this scenario, the mortality rate plummets, while the total number of deaths skyrockets. This strikes me as clearly preferable to the status quo, but by Arquilla’s logic it’s a disaster.
I would argue that the truth is somewhere in the middle between Pinker and Arquilla’s viewpoints. Per capita war deaths, and all violent deaths, are declining, and that is a good thing, and an important thing. However, the number of ongoing wars with a large number of casualties has also increased, and that is a bad thing. So the world isn’t going to hell, but neither is it really approaching a utopia either.
TLDR; Pinker is too whiggish, Arquilla too alarmist.