STEVEN PINKER: Believe it or not—and I know most people do not—violence has been in decline over long stretches of time, and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species' existence. The decline of violence, to be sure, has not been steady; it has not brought violence down to zero (to put it mildly); and it is not guaranteed to continue. But I hope to convince you that it's a persistent historical development, visible on scales from millennia to years, from the waging of wars and perpetration of genocides to the spanking of children and the treatment of animals.
I'm going to present six major historical declines of violence; in each case, cite their immediate causes in terms of what historians have told us are the likely historical antecedents in that era; and then speculate on their ultimate causes, in terms of general historical forces acting on human nature.
The first major decline of violence I call the "Pacification Process." Until about five thousand years ago, humans lived in anarchy without central government. What was life like in this state of nature? This is a question that thinkers have speculated on for centuries, most prominently Hobbs, who famously said that in a state of nature "the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." A century later he was countered by Jean Jacques Rousseau, who says, "Nothing could be more gentle than man in his primitive state."
In reality, both of these gentlemen were talking through their hats: They had no idea what life was like in a state of nature. But today we can do better, because there are two sources of evidence of what rates of violence were like in pre-state societies.
One is forensic archaeology. You can think of it as "CSI Paleolithic". What proportion of prehistoric skeletons have signs of violent trauma, such as bashed-in skulls, decapitated skeletons, femurs with bronze arrowheads embedded in them, and mummies found with ropes around their necks?
There are 20 archaeological samples that I know of for which these analyses have been done. I've plotted here the percentage of deaths due to violent trauma. They range as high as 60 percent, and the average is a little bit more than 15 percent.
Let’s compare that rate with those of modern states, and let's stack the deck against modernity by picking some of the most violent eras that we can think of. This is the United States and Europe in the 20th century. This is the entire world in the 20th century—and I've thrown in not only the wars, but also the genocides and the manmade famines. It's about three percent, compared to the 15 percent rate in pre-state societies. And here is the world in the first decade of the 21st century. The bar in the graph would be less than a pixel, about a three one-hundredths of one percent.
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