Timothy Snyder: War No More ... Why the World Has Become More Peaceful
Timothy Snyder is professor of history at Yale University.
As Steven Pinker observes, we recall the twentieth century as an age of unparalleled violence, and we characterize our own epoch as one of terror. But what if our historical moment is in fact defined not by mass killing but by the greatest levels of peace and safety ever attained by humankind? By way of this provocative hypothesis, the acclaimed psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist aims to liberate us from the overblown victimhood-by-contiguity of the present moment, maintaining quite credibly that we ought to be grateful for living when we do.
In his vivid descriptions of the distant and recent past, Pinker draws from a wide range of fields beyond his own to chart the decline of violence, which he says "may be the most important thing that has ever happened in human history." He argues that prehistory was much more violent than early civilization and that the past few decades have been much less violent than the first half of the twentieth century. He is opposing two common and related presumptions: that the time before civilization was a golden age and that the present moment is one of unique danger. Pinker rejects the idea that violence is "hydraulic," a pressure within individuals and societies that at some point must burst through. He prefers to see violence as "strategic," a choice that makes sense within certain historical circumstances. Thus, he describes two fundamental transitions: from the anarchy of hunting and gathering societies to the controlled violence of early states and then from a "culture of honor" associated with these states to a "culture of dignity" characteristic of the better moments of modernity. In Pinker's view, the state monopolizes violence and creates the possibility of fruitful trade and intellectual exchange, which in turn permit the development of a new, irenic individuality.
Pinker's first target is the tendency to romanticize the distant past. Since he believes that people fantasize about a peaceful prehistory, he deliberately overemphasizes its violence, dwelling at length on the bloodiest passages of the Old Testament. His cheerful admission of this writerly tactic presages not only the friendly tone of the entire book but also one of its shortcomings. Although Pinker writes as a scientist, his approach in this book is discursive rather than deductive, charmingly but not quite persuasively advancing his ex cathedra views about life in general. The research of others, although abundantly and generously cited, too often seems to footnote Pinker's own prior assumptions. He is most likely correct that prehistoric life was more violent than life in agrarian civilizations and modern states, but the way he pitches the evidence raises suspicions from the very beginning. He provides horrifying descriptions of premodern killings, but not of their modern counterparts, which generates a certain narrative bias. The evidence of strikingly brutal premodern warfare and sacrifice is less conclusive than he suggests, since archaeologists are more likely to find the remains of people who die in unusual ways, beyond the reach of communal cremation or at the center of a communal ritual. The book features neat charts showing the relative decline of violence over time. But the sources Pinker cites for the numbers of dead are themselves just aggregates of other estimates, the vast majority of which, if one follows the thread of sources to the end, turn out to be more or less informed guesses.
Yet even if Pinker is right that the ratio of violent to peaceful deaths has improved over time (and he probably is), his metric of progress deserves a bit more attention than he gives it. His argument about decreasing violence is a relative one: not that more people were killed annually in the past than are killed in a given year of recent history but that more people were killed relative to the size of the overall human population, which is of course vastly larger today than in earlier eras. But ask yourself: Is it preferable for ten people in a group of 1,000 to die violent deaths or for ten million in a group of one billion?..