How long has violence been around

What if our disrupted sense of belonging drives us to war? We cannot put the Internet back into a box and pretend that it does not exist. That we will end up living in a cohesive global society seems to be inevitable. Whether we will first suffer catastrophic violence, a possibility toward which history and evolution strongly hint, is still up for debate. His latest book, Why We Fight , exploring the evolutionary psychology of violence and how it has shaped the societies in which we live today, is available now from Oxford University Press.

Contact us at letters time. Found in the collection of the New-York Historical Society. By Mike Martin. Why is there so much chaos? The history of violence offers one possible answer.

Oxford University Press. Related Stories. It's Time to Listen. The 25 Defining Works of the Black Renaissance. Already a print subscriber?

Go here to link your subscription. Need help? Visit our Help Center. About this course Skip About this course. Language: English Video Transcript: English. What you'll learn Skip What you'll learn. A broad understanding of the origins and nature of violence in history, including interpersonal violence, homicide, sexualized violence, and state violence. Develop an understanding of evolving attitudes towards violence across time and across cultures.

Demonstrate a basic knowledge of relevant historical debates, including whether the world is getting more or less violent. Develop an awareness of ethical issues and standards within history. Syllabus Skip Syllabus. We will explore early records from rock art and archaeological discoveries. Week 2: Intimate and Gendered Violence Violence in the intimacy of the family, usually committed by men against women and children, but also against slaves and servants, has been a constant throughout history.

The phenomenon will be examined using concepts of moral hierarchy, and from legal-cultural and political perspectives. This includes examining sexual violence, as well as the violence perpetrated by women against children, and in particular infanticide. Week 3: Interpersonal Violence This week will look at the history of homicide, including the modern fascination with the serial killer, and the dramatic variation in homicide rates between different countries.

Week 4: The Sacred and the Secular: Persecutions and Public Executions The evolution of the criminal justice system, changing attitudes over time towards public executions and torture, and the role of both the Church and the state will be explored. Meanwhile, for another kind of violence—homicide—the data are abundant and striking. The criminologist Manuel Eisner has assembled hundreds of homicide estimates from Western European localities that kept records at some point between and the mids.

In every country he analyzed, murder rates declined steeply—for example, from 24 homicides per , Englishmen in the fourteenth century to 0. 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 , the number of battle deaths in interstate wars has declined from more than 65, per year in the s to less than 2, 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 and the number of campaigns of mass killing of civilians decreased by 90 percent.

The decline of killing and cruelty poses several challenges to our ability to make sense of the world. To begin with, how could so many people be so wrong about something so important? Partly, it's because of a cognitive illusion: We estimate the probability of an event from how easy it is to recall examples.

Scenes of carnage are more likely to be relayed to our living rooms and burned into our memories than footage of people dying of old age. Partly, it's an intellectual culture that is loath to admit that there could be anything good about the institutions of civilization and Western society. Partly, it's the incentive structure of the activism and opinion markets: No one ever attracted followers and donations by announcing that things keep getting better.

And part of the explanation lies in the phenomenon itself. The decline of violent behavior has been paralleled by a decline in attitudes that tolerate or glorify violence, and often the attitudes are in the lead. As deplorable as they are, the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the lethal injections of a few murderers in Texas are mild by the standards of atrocities in human history.

But, from a contemporary vantage point, we see them as signs of how low our behavior can sink, not of how high our standards have risen. The other major challenge posed by the decline of violence is how to explain it. A force that pushes in the same direction across many epochs, continents, and scales of social organization mocks our standard tools of causal explanation. The usual suspects—guns, drugs, the press, American culture—aren't nearly up to the job.

Nor could it possibly be explained by evolution in the biologist's sense: Even if the meek could inherit the earth, natural selection could not favor the genes for meekness quickly enough. In any case, human nature has not changed so much as to have lost its taste for violence. Social psychologists find that at least 80 percent of people have fantasized about killing someone they don't like.

And modern humans still take pleasure in viewing violence, if we are to judge by the popularity of murder mysteries, Shakespearean dramas, Mel Gibson movies, video games, and hockey. What has changed, of course, is people's willingness to act on these fantasies.

The sociologist Norbert Elias suggested that European modernity accelerated a "civilizing process" marked by increases in self-control, long-term planning, and sensitivity to the thoughts and feelings of others. These are precisely the functions that today's cognitive neuroscientists attribute to the prefrontal cortex. But this only raises the question of why humans have increasingly exercised that part of their brains.

No one knows why our behavior has come under the control of the better angels of our nature, but there are four plausible suggestions. The first is that Hobbes got it right.