History and Violence

Via Mungowitz (and via I suspect the same email he received about it), Steven Pinker on the global reduction in violence over the last 500 years or so.

I have the usual bits of skepticism:

There's not nearly enough data for the long period of pre-1500 history, and extrapolating from what we do have seems potentially dangerous. (I wonder how much of the violent death stuff is caught up in one's being more likely to die from positively everything way back when; advances in medical technology would seem to make it less likely that you're going to die even if you're still fighting in a war).

Russet and Oneal's work on the liberal peace was, as I recall, discredited in one of my graduate seminars for some statistical reason I understood at the time but can no longer remember (one of my professors long had the theory that the liberal peace gets it backwards: states stop trading in anticipation of a war).

The historical explanation is massively overdetermined. Massively.

Then there's all Foucault's work on how the end of, say, public executions does not correspond to the lessening of violence, just pushes it into different arenas.

Also, the 500 year frame, though convenient for my belief that the Reformation and modernity was the start of everything good, does seem to exclude both the Thirty Years War and the most catastrophic reductions of native populations in the New World.

Still, modernity? Not so bad.