32
THE DECLINE OF VIOLENCE
Every moment, acts of extreme violence are committed at one place or another on the planet, and we are informed of them almost instantaneously. Statisticians also tell us sometimes that violence is increasing in one part or another of the world. But what about the overall evolution of violence across the centuries?
To answer this question, it is indispensable, on the one hand, to envisage the evolution of violence over long periods of time and, on the other, not to take into account solely events or conflicts that strike our conscience the most, but to analyze the greatest amount of data possible.
The answer is surprising and disproves currently held ideas: individual and collective violence has continued to diminish for a millennium, especially in the last sixty years. This conclusion is the fruit of detailed, large-scale investigations carried out by several teams of researchers over the last three decades.
One of the reasons this assertion startles us stems from ignorance or forgetfulness of the level of violence that characterized past centuries. One survey, conducted by Steven Pinker, a Harvard professor and author of a scholarly, 800-page book on the decline of violence, shows that people are systematically mistaken in their evaluation of the level of violence that prevailed at different times in history. According to this survey, the English people questioned believe that the twentieth century was overall slightly more violent than the fourteenth century in terms of homicides, whereas in reality it was twenty to fifty times less so, depending on the nation in question. The same is true for almost all the other parameters taken into account to measure violence over the centuries.
THE DECLINE OF INDIVIDUAL VIOLENCE
In the fourteenth century, a European was on average fifty times more at risk of being victim of a homicide than today. By using the archives in English courts and municipalities, the political scientist Robert Gurr has discovered that at Oxford, in 1350, the yearly homicide rate was 110 per 100,000 inhabitants. This rate fell to 10 in the sixteenth century and to 1 today.1 As the figure below shows, the same is true throughout all of Europe.
Homicides of non-related individuals have diminished more than family murders, while men have remained responsible for 92% of murders. At the end of the 1820s, infanticide represented 15% of homicides in Europe. Today, it represents no more than 2%, and homicides in general have diminished by half since 1820.2
According to the most complete World Health Organization statistics in this field, the yearly rate of homicides throughout the world fell to 8.8 per 100,000 people in 2009.3 In all the countries of Western Europe, this rate fell to 1, whereas it remains high in countries where the forces of order and justice are corrupt or under the thumb of major drug traffickers (34 per 100,000 in Jamaica, 30 in Colombia and 55 in Venezuela). Other nations like Russia (30) and South Africa (69) have trouble transitioning between a totalitarian regime and a democracy.4
Sometimes violence increases temporarily in certain countries or cities, due to particular situations stemming typically from conflicts and political instability, but it is over the long term that we should judge the decline of violence. In the United States, for example, at the end of the 1960s violence increased, doubling in the early 1990s (while it remained stable in Canada). Then, after the introduction of new city safety policies, the rate of attacks, thefts, rapes and other crimes again fell by half.
Corporal punishment was still common when I was in public school in Île-de-France in the 1950s. Until recently, it was regarded as an effective pedagogical method, and resorting to it was encouraged both at school and at home. During the last few decades, it has sharply diminished. A Prussian teacher in the eighteenth century, obviously keen on statistics, reports in his memoirs having inflicted 154,000 whip blows and 911,527 blows with a stick on his students in his fifty-one-year career!5 Eighty-one percent of Germans still slapped their children in 1992, but in 2002 this number fell to 14%, while the percentage of those who beat them until bruises appeared fell from 31% to 4%—all following a national ban on corporal punishment. Still, corporal punishment remains frequent in certain countries in Asia and Africa.6
More generally, child abuse has diminished considerably in most countries. Thus, as the graphic above shows, it went down over 50% in the United States between 1990 and 2010.7
Domestic violence has also diminished considerably in Western countries—in the United States, the frequency of rapes went down 85% between 1979 and 2006—although it remains a serious problem in many countries.
THE DECLINE OF INSTITUTIONALIZED VIOLENCE
By “institutionalized violence” we mean any form of suffering one individual inflicts on another that is regarded as “legitimate” by the dominant powers in a society, which encourage it and support it.
For several millennia, human sacrifices were frequent in many civilizations—among the Hebrews, the Greeks, the Hindus and the Celts, for example; they took extreme forms among the Khonds of India (an Indian tribal group living in the districts of Orissa and Madhya Pradesh), or in the tribes of Benin and Dahomey, who sacrificed their fellows by the thousands. The peak was attained by the Aztecs who, according to the historian Matthew Price, sacrificed up to forty people a day, which corresponds to 1.4 million individuals between 1440 and 1524.9 In the upper castes of India, widows were sometimes burned alive on the pyre of their late husband. It is estimated that this ritual, called sati, cost the lives of 200,000 Indian widows from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries, until the British forbade the practice.
In the Middle Ages, torture was practiced openly, and didn’t seem to shock anyone. Hanging, breaking on the wheel, impaling, being torn apart by horses, and torture by being burned alive were all common practice.10 Condemned men—sometimes innocent ones—were hanged from a beam, their legs spread apart, head down, to be cut in half beginning at the crotch, all in the presence of a crowd of onlookers, including children. Those who inflicted these tortures were experts in anatomy, and strove to prolong the suffering of the victims. Torture was authorized by Pope Innocent IV (c. 1195–1254) in the framework of religious persecution, and was widely practiced by the Dominicans of the Inquisition, who put to death about 350,000 people. Pope Paul IV (1476–1559), the Grand Inquisitor, was a fervent promoter of torture, which did not prevent him from being canonized in 1712.11
Just 250 years ago, in France, the president of the Academy of Sciences complacently observed the torture of a man torn-and-quartered in public for having attacked Louis XV with a penknife.12 Samuel Pepys, member of the English Parliament and author of a diary describing life in London in the seventeenth century, recounts going for a stroll in Charing Cross where a pillory was set up for public executions. That day, Pepys witnessed the hanging of Major General Harrison, whose body was then taken apart so that his head and heart could be exhibited to the public, who shouted for joy. Pepys noted that Harrison looked “as cheerful as any man could do in that condition.” Pepys then went to eat oysters with some friends.13
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, between 60,000 and 100,000 people (85% of them women) were executed for witchcraft, usually burned on a stake after having confessed under torture to the most unlikely crimes (such as having devoured babies, caused shipwrecks, or having sexual relations with the devil). The last of the “witches” to be publicly burned alive in Switzerland was Anna Göldin, in 1782, in the canton of Glarus.
During the Spanish Inquisition, auto-da-fés were announced far ahead of time so that the populace could come watch them; as during a soccer match these days, the night before the torture all the hotels in the city were full. The condemned man was brought in procession to the place of execution, with the public chanting religious songs; the sentence was proclaimed loudly and clearly, and the execution took place. Sometimes those who were to be burned at the stake were strangled first, but the crowd protested if this favor was done too often for the condemned, since they wanted to see at least some of them burned alive.14 The historian Barbara Tuchman recounts that sometimes the inhabitants of a small French town bought a condemned man from a neighboring town, to be able to enjoy a public execution.15
Violence was present even in amusements, beginning with the circus games of ancient Rome. Barbara Tuchman describes two popular sports in fourteenth-century Europe:
Players with hands tied behind them competed to kill a cat nailed to a post by battering it to death with their heads, at the risk of cheeks ripped open or eyes scratched out by the frantic animal’s claws… Or a pig enclosed in a wide pen was chased by men with clubs to the laughter of spectators as he ran squealing from the blows until beaten lifeless.16
In the sixteenth century, in Paris, a stage spectacle that was much appreciated by the crowds consisted of slowly lowering into a fire cats hanging from ropes, and watching them struggle with horrible cries until they were reduced to ashes.
REJECTION OF VIOLENCE: A CULTURAL EVOLUTION
We can see how far we’ve come since then. Attitudes began to evolve in the seventeenth and especially the eighteenth centuries. With the philosophers of the Enlightenment, people began to talk more often of sympathy for one’s fellow beings, human rights, legitimate aspirations toward happiness, and justice for all. The sufferings of others began to be regarded with more empathy.
In 1764, a twenty-six-year-old Milanese named Cesare Beccaria published a treatise, On Crimes and Punishments, in which he advocated abolishing torture and the death penalty. Beccaria also suggested that governments and courts should try above all to prevent crimes and to reform criminals instead of punishing them. This pamphlet was well-received in Europe, and its ideas were taken up by Voltaire, d’Alembert, and Thomas Jefferson.17 But it was also placed on the Church’s Index of Forbidden Books and ridiculed by Muyard de Vouglans, a lawyer and specialist in religious affairs, who accused its author of being soft-hearted and wanting to call practices—torture, mainly—into question that had survived the test of time.
In 1762, in Toulouse, Jean Calas was wrongly accused of having killed his son. Condemned, he was publicly subjected to breaking on the wheel. Attached by his outstretched arms and legs to a wheel, his bones were broken one by one with a sledgehammer while he proclaimed his innocence. After two hours, they ended up strangling him. It was following this case, which had a particular repercussion, that Voltaire wrote his Treatise on Tolerance and obtained a review of the trial and the rehabilitation of Calas. Today, in most countries, the norms have changed and lean more toward respect for life, human rights, and justice.
Slavery, which cost the lives of millions of Africans and inhabitants of the Middle East—the estimated range is anywhere between 17 and 65 million18—has been progressively abolished, mainly starting at the end of the eighteenth century (the first country to abolish slavery was Sweden, in 1335, and the latest, Mauritania in 1981). Even though it has been officially suppressed throughout the world, slavery remains endemic in certain countries (outright slavery in Mauritania, forced and “bonded” labor in India—10 million people—China, North Korea, Russia, Pakistan, the Gulf States, Brazil, and quite a few other countries), and takes new forms, especially through the trafficking of children and women for prostitution and forced begging. But it is today the work of Mafia-like traffickers and corrupt functionaries, and not, as had been the case for centuries, of governments and the general population.
After the Second World War, for the first time in human history, the idea of universal principles applicable everywhere and for everyone began to take shape. On December 10, 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed in Paris, the first article of which stipulates: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood,” while the third recalls that “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.”19
In 1983, the European Convention on Human Rights forbade the death penalty, except in wartime. In 2002, protocol number 13 forbade it in all circumstances, even wartime, and has now been ratified by 45 of the 47 countries that signed the Convention.
The death penalty was abolished in 140 of the 192 member countries of the United Nations. According to Amnesty International, in 2013, only 22 of the 198 countries around the world continued capital punishment,20 including China (several thousand executions a year), Iran (369), Iraq (169), Saudi Arabia (79), North Korea (70+), the United States (39), Somalia (34), the Sudan (21), and Yemen (14).
Most modern governments signed the International Convention against Torture adopted by the United Nations in 1984. Things are far from perfect—in Saudi Arabia, for example, they still execute people accused of witchcraft—but that shouldn’t stop us from remembering that norms do continue to improve.
According to studies carried out in the United States, acceptance of difference is progressing. The number of individuals lynched—almost always people of color—went from 150 a year in the 1880s to zero in the 1960s.21 The number of murders directly motivated solely by racial hatred in that same country where 17,000 homicides were perpetrated every year has fallen to one per year, even though racial bias obviously continues to play a role in murder, death sentences, etc. Today, racial violence represents no more than 0.5% of all forms of aggression. According to a Gallup survey, 95% of Americans disapproved of interracial marriage in 1955. This percentage has fallen today to 20%, while the number of those who think that white and black students should attend separate schools has gone from 70% in 1942 to 3% today.
THE DECLINE OF WARS AND CONFLICTS
From the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, two to three wars broke out in Europe every year.22 The knights, counts, dukes and princes of Europe constantly attacked each other and avenged past attacks by trying to ruin their opponents, killing and mutilating peasants, burning villages, and destroying harvests.
Teams of researchers have analyzed thousands of conflicts, many of which had fallen into oblivion and been rediscovered thanks to the methodical consultation of historical archives in many countries. Studies carried out based on these researches allow us to spot general tendencies. The political scientist Peter Brecke, notably, analyzed 4,560 conflicts that occurred since 1400.23 He took into account any conflict, whether between countries or within countries (civil wars, settling of accounts between clans and tribes, etc.)—which led to at least fifty deaths. In a book that includes over 1,000 bibliographical references, Steven Pinker summarizes the broad outlines of these researches: the frequency of wars between nations has regularly diminished over the centuries, as well as the average number of victims per conflict. What’s more, 2% of wars (the “great wars”) are responsible for 80% of the deaths. Finally, it seems that wars don’t follow any regular cycle, but can break out at any time, according to particular circumstances.24 The table above illustrates the phenomenon of the general diminution of the number of conflicts in Europe from the year 1400 to the present (the main peaks correspond to the wars of religion, the Napoleonic Wars, and to the two World Wars of the twentieth century). The number of conflicts has, however, increased in Africa.
WAS THE TWENTIETH CENTURY THE BLOODIEST IN HISTORY?
The Second World War was the deadliest in history, with 63 million dead, while the First World War caused 15 million. In absolute numbers, the twentieth century has indeed been the bloodiest in history. But if we take into account the direct and indirect consequences of conflicts on the population, the number of persons killed as well as the number of civilians decimated by famines and diseases, for example, and if we look at the proportion between the number of dead and the worldwide population at the time, it turns out that many wars caused much greater ravages than the Second World War.
What is closer to us—in time and place—concerns us more, and we tend to forget historical events that are remote. Who, aside from historians, has heard of the revolt of An Lushan, in China, in the eighth century? This civil war, though, which lasted for eight years, caused 10 million deaths, the equivalent of 325 million deaths today.25 If we evaluate the impact of past wars by measuring the proportion of the world population that died in them, the Second World War ranks only eleventh in terms of deadliest conflicts. If the 63 million deaths between 1939 and 1945 are equivalent to 173 million compared to the world population in 2011, then the Mongolian conquests by Genghis Khan in the thirteenth century, which caused 40 million deaths, are seen to be equivalent to 770 million deaths today. That makes them, in relative numbers, the bloodiest act of war in all history—measured by the number of victims compared to the world population.26
Matthew White, a scholarly librarian who devoted twenty years of his life to compiling every available source, calculated the number of deaths provoked by other atrocities in history. The conflicts under the Chinese Xin Dynasty in the first century caused 10 million deaths, or the equivalent of 368 million today; Tamerlane’s invasions in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries caused 17 million deaths (340 million today), the fall of the Ming Dynasty, in the seventeenth century, caused over 25 million (321 million today), the fall of Rome between the third and fifth centuries resulted in 8 million deaths (294 million today), the Muslim conquests of India from the eleventh to the seventeenth century 13 million (260 million today), and the conquest of the Americas, which caused the extermination of the local populations (due to massacres and especially illnesses brought by the colonizers) from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries caused 15 million deaths (192 million today).27
These calculations might seem artificial to those who think that the important thing is the number of human lives sacrificed, but the adjusted numbers are a more representative index of the level of violence and measure the impact of this violence on those populations in terms of risk and insecurity. We can see that our own experience and quality of life in society are very different if each of us has one chance out of a hundred or one chance out of ten thousand of being killed within the year. In fact, it is less dangerous to live on Earth in our era than at any other time in history since the appearance of wars ten thousand years ago.
For almost sixty years, none of the major world powers have entered into war against another. Military service has been reduced or abolished in most democratic countries, as well the size of armies, even though arms sales by wealthy countries to the rest of the world remains a major factor in violence. Under the aegis of the United Nations, national borders are now recognized as sacrosanct, and the number of wars leading to redistribution of territories has fallen sharply since 1950. Brazil, surrounded by ten other countries, has not been at war for 150 years, Sweden for 170 years, and Switzerland for 200 years. Costa Rica gave up its army in 1948. Since 1950, it is only conflicts involving an Islamic country or group that have not significantly diminished.28 This seems to result from the aggregation of several factors that, as explained below, foster violence in a country: absence of a functional democracy and of respect for human rights, mistreatment of women, lack of education, living in isolation with minimal exchanges of ideas, services, and goods with other countries.
The average number of victims per conflict has fallen from 30,000 in 1950 to 800 in 2005.29 This statistic goes against received ideas, since everyone remembers bloody conflicts like the Iran-Iraq War of the 1990s, which caused almost a million deaths. But they are numbers that emerge from analysis of all conflicts of every size, including both wars between nations and civil wars, conflicts between communities involving militias, mercenaries and other paramilitary organizations, as well as unilateral violence, that is, massacres of unarmed civilian populations, perpetrated by militias or governments. This tendency is illustrated by the graphs above, the work especially of Bethany Lacina and Nils Petter Gleditsch at the Peace Research Institute of Oslo, who deal with all conflicts except for genocides (which they analyze separately).
Concerning genocides, the analyses of the political scientists Rudolph Rummel and Barbara Harff, as well as researchers who compiled the database on conflicts at Uppsala University in Sweden (Uppsala Conflict Data Program, UCDP), have been summarized by Steven Pinker in the graph below. Note that the number of victims here too has been decreasing since 1950, despite tragic peaks—Bosnia with 250,000 deaths, Rwanda with 700,000 deaths, and Darfur with 373,000 deaths (evaluated in 2008).
Moreover, according to the political scientist John Mueller, most recent genocides could have been prevented by an appropriate intervention of peacekeeping forces. The deaths of the 700,000 Tutsis in the Rwandan genocide were, for the greater part, caused by about 10,000 men recruited by Hutu leaders from the most violent segments of the population—criminal gangs, mercenaries, alcoholics, and drug addicts30—and the United Nations and the world powers could easily have neutralized them.
In summary, despite the emergence of a certain number of tragic wars and massacres, the world has experienced, over the last sixty years, the most peaceful period in its history in 10,000 years. Worldwide, despite major variations depending on the region, a citizen of the world of today is much less likely to be killed or attacked than a century ago, and even less than a thousand years ago.
ACTS OF TERRORISM
Media reverberation of acts of terrorism is immense. But the numbers from the largest available database, the Global Terrorism Database, show that the number of deaths imputable to terrorism is tiny compared to that of other causes of violent death.31 According to the observation agency that keeps this database up to date, since 9/11, terrorism has caused the death of 30 American citizens (11 on American soil), or 3 per year, whereas, during the same period, there were 18,000 homicides, 191 youngsters were killed by firearms in schools32 and auto accidents caused 40,000 deaths. As John Mueller emphasizes, an average American has a greater risk of being killed by lightning, a peanut allergy, or wasp sting than by an act of terrorism.33 Finally, experts have shown that fear of terrorism has caused six times as many deaths in the United States as terrorism itself. They estimate that 1,500 Americans, preferring to take their car instead of a plane for a journey from fear the flight could be hijacked or attacked, have died in road accidents. They were probably not aware that the probability of dying from a plane accident during a 4,000 kilometer flight is equivalent to the risk run by traveling 20 kilometers in a car.34 The results of a questionnaire submitted to users of air transport testify to this distorted fear of specific rare events like terrorism: people were ready to pay fourteen dollars for a premium that covered for “any act of terrorism,” but only twelve dollars for one that covered for “any reason.” Yet the latter, by definition, includes the former!35
Throughout the world, about 7,000 people are killed yearly in terrorist attacks (including in countries at war like Afghanistan). Sunni Islamist militants are responsible for two-thirds of these deaths.36 According to a Gallup survey, 38% of Muslims questioned in numerous countries partially approve of the 9/11 attack, but only 7% approve of it completely.37 This indicates that, as during a genocide, it is a minority of committed extremists who perpetrate the vast majority of crimes.
FACTORS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE DECLINE OF VIOLENCE
Before the aforementioned global studies were undertaken to measure the decline of violence, in the 1940s, the philosopher Norbert Elias foretold this decline and attributed it to the increased interdependence of world citizens.38 The more dependent people are on each other, the less likely they are to harm each other. Consensual life in society requires an increased control of emotions and a respect for civility. When our existence depends on a larger number of people, we tend to be less violent toward them. In brief, all the studies show that we find a lower homicide rate in urban, secular, commercial societies that are strongly connected socially.39
The sense of civic responsibility is also correlated to the level of violence. The American sociologist Robert Putnam has shown, for example, that the civic sense is more marked in the north of Italy than in the south, where violence is more frequent (6 to 15 homicides a year per 100,000 inhabitants in the south, compared to 1 to 2 in the north). He has also shown that the civic sense is linked to the quality of social services, especially educational services.40
THE EXISTENCE OF A STABLE GOVERNMENT
Populations that live in an established nation-state have on average a rate of violent death that’s four times lower than populations that do not enjoy the existence of a government equipped with functioning institutions.41 Europe counted no less than 5,000 politically independent units (baronies, duchies, principalities, etc.) in the fifteenth century, 200 in the Napoleonic era, 34 in the 1960s, and 50 today.42 As we have emphasized, the countless little political entities of the fifteenth century were constantly in conflict with each other.
As large kingdoms, then countries and finally democracies, formed, kings and then nations assumed the monopoly on violence. Any other form of violence linked to conflicts between rival clans, private militias or citizens settling accounts between themselves, became illegal and was repressed by the authorities, which now had much more powerful methods of intervention to impose and then maintain peace. In a state of law, citizens ultimately respect authority and laws if they recognize their benefits and acknowledge their fairness, which in turn leads to diminished violence.
Over the past few centuries, European nations have little by little disarmed citizens, militias and other armed bands. According to some analysts, if in the United States the number of homicides—especially in the southern states—is ten to fifteen times higher than in Europe, it’s because democracy was established there before the nation disarmed the citizens, who maintained the right to bear arms. Initially, the state authorized the formation of armed citizen militias to maintain order where state forces weren’t yet present. During the settling of the Far West, in which the central government played a negligible role, homicide rates reached record highs: 229 homicides per 100,000 in Fort Griffith, Texas, 1,500 in Wichita, and up to 24,000 a year (1 person out of 4!) in Benton, Wyoming. Cowboys killed each other at the slightest provocation.
This tolerance for bearing arms has persisted, although it no longer has a reason for existence, since the state is now responsible for the safety of citizens throughout the entire territory. The right to bear arms is deeply embedded in American culture. As the CNN commentator Fareed Zakaria has written, “The United States stands out from the rest of the world not because it has more nutcases—I think we can assume that those people are sprinkled throughout every society equally—but because it has more guns.” America is in fact the only country in the world where there are over 90 guns per 100 inhabitants. (Serbia follows with 58 and Yemen in third place with 54. At the other end of the spectrum one finds Singapore, a pretty safe place, with 0.5 guns per 100 inhabitants.)43 Over 310 types of firearm circulate in the civilian population, and it’s just as easy to buy a semi-automatic rifle that fires up to 50 shots a second as it is to buy a coffee grinder. A reload of 600 bullets costs only 20 euros. After another massacre in December 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut, during which 20 children and 8 adults were killed with an automatic weapon, Larry Pratt, executive director of the Gun Owners of America, basically declared on CNN that if everyone carried a gun, at least people could defend themselves, and suggested that teachers be armed.44
Despite these tragic events, and although homicides remain considerably more numerous than in Europe, since the stabilization of the state their number has been reduced tenfold. Similarly, among the African Kungs, reputedly peaceful and described as a “harmless people” in the title of a book devoted to them, we can observe that the homicide rate, already low, was diminished threefold when the region came under the authority of the government of Botswana.45
THE RISE OF DEMOCRACY
The leaders of democratic nations who can be ousted from their posts by popular vote are less inclined to engage in absurd and harmful wars. Democracy has turned out to be the form of government most likely to favor peace both inside a country and between countries. Democracies engage less often in war than dictatorial regimes or countries in which democratic institutions are not respected.46 Civil wars are also less frequent in democracies and, when they occur, they result in fewer victims than in autocracies. Using a “democracy score” from 0 to 10 assigned to each country and assessing a number of variables that are expected to affect the occurrence of military conflicts, political scientists Bruce Russet and John Oneal have examined all possible ways of pairing the countries of the world. It appeared that when one of the two countries paired was a full autocracy, it doubled the probability that they would enter into a conflict, compared to an average pair of countries. This probability is the lowest if both are democracies, but it is already significantly reduced when a single one of the countries is a democracy.47 Even more, a community of democratic states, like the European Union, is the form of global governance most likely to favor peace between its members. Two democratic countries that belong to such a community or to a federation are 83% less likely to enter into war with each other as two other nations paired by chance.48
Over time, the continued increase in the number of democracies compared to autocracies can only strengthen peace in the world.
INTERDEPENDENCE AND COMMERCE
The economy in the Middle Ages was mainly based on the possession and exploitation of land. One of the swiftest ways to get rich was, then, to conquer one’s neighbor’s lands. Economic and technological revolutions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries led to an increase in exchanges of services and merchandise. Because of this, mutual dependence of populations increased. As Steven Pinker emphasizes, “If you are trading favors and surplus with someone, your trading partner is more valuable to you alive than dead.”49 So it turns out that open countries that maintain extensive commercial relations with other countries have a reduced probability of entering into conflict with each other.
That speaks for globalization which, as we know, doesn’t enjoy unanimous support among the various currents of thought about the future of the human community. On the face of it, an increase of freely given exchanges, in a world that is more open (to education, health reform, tolerance, the right not to be mistreated, etc.) takes into account the natural interdependence of all the inhabitants on the Earth and, if correctly understood and used, should lead to a greater respect for the other and to the propagation of a feeling of universal responsibility. Progress like this seems to lead to a diminution of violence and its causes.
But openness and freedom must be linked with altruistic motivation if we hope for them to result in social justice and in reducing inequalities instead of aggravating them. In the absence of altruism, open borders and general freedom risk leading to exploitation of the weakest. Some affluent nations and multinational corporations replace military and political colonialism with economic colonialism and use free exchange and the openness of customs barriers to exploit the poorest populations—their cheap labor, their lands and the resources of their country. That is notably the case with mining resources in Africa. But the increasing discrepancy between the wealthiest and the poorest is not only immoral; it is also a factor for increasing resentment and, in the end, for violence. Like democracy, globalization should be learned and be accompanied by an increased maturity of citizens and governments, inspired not by thirst for gain, but by the spirit of cooperation and concern for the other’s fate.
For the effects of commerce between countries to be fully beneficial, it seems indispensable to stress the development of a truly equitable commerce. Well-thought-out regulation should, without hampering freedom, or limiting the openness of borders, permit profiteers and speculators to be controlled, and ensure that multinational enterprises don’t succumb to the temptation of transforming themselves into clever systems of exploitation of the poor.
Twice during the 1990s, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was on the point of being elected president of Brazil. Each time, Wall Street caused the election to derail by threatening to withdraw capital invested in the country and sharply increasing interest rates—measures that would have thrown Brazil into crisis. Goldman Sachs was at the top of the list of those who tried to intimidate Brazilian voters in this way. As the economist Joseph Stiglitz remarks, “The markets are shortsighted and have a political and economic agenda that seeks the advancement of the well-being of financiers rather than that of the country as a whole.”50 In 2002, however, the Brazilians finally refused to let their choices be ruled by international financiers and elected Lula. He performed great benefit for his country, considerably reducing inequality—even though much remains to be done—while stimulating growth and education and reducing violence.
PEACE MISSIONS AND MEMBERSHIP IN INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS
According to the political scientist Virginia Fortna, the answer to the title of her book Does Peacekeeping Work? is a “clear and resounding yes.”51 Fortna examined data relative to 115 ceasefires in civil wars waged between 1944 and 1997. It emerged that peacekeeping missions deployed by the United Nations, NATO, the African Union, or any such adequate entity reduce by 80% the risk of a conflict reopening. Even though certain peace missions fail—as the Rwandan genocide and the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia testify—their presence considerably reduces the risk of a resumption of hostilities. One of the most important positive effects of these missions is to reassure the participants in a conflict that they no longer risk being attacked at any time by their opponent. Moreover, accepting the presence of a peace mission favors negotiations. The presence of these missions also prevents minor incidents from quickly degenerating into major confrontations. Finally, thanks to the improvement of humanitarian aid in countries at war (Doctors Without Borders, Doctors of the World, UNICEF, the International Red Cross, and other NGOs), the number of people who die of hunger and disease because of war has diminished over the last thirty years.52
Membership in international organizations has undeniably contributed to the decline of violence, even if the enforcing power of these institutions, especially the United Nations and the International Court of Law, and international treaties still remains limited (the Anti-personnel Mine Ban Convention for instance has yet to be signed by the United States, Russia and China, even though 162 other states have signed it). The European Commission, the European Parliament and the European Court of Law are institutions that permit conflicts to be resolved by legal means, hence transcending the self-interests of individual nations. It has been said that “peace is the main accomplishment of the process of European integration,”53 and it is on those grounds that the European Union was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2012.
WAR NO LONGER AROUSES ADMIRATION
Attitudes toward war have also changed. In the past, only few voices were raised to discredit war, like Voltaire’s who spoke, in Candide, of “millions of murderers in uniform.” Wars were mostly considered to be a necessary evil with positive outcomes. In the nineteenth century, Hegel wrote: “Wars are terrible, but necessary, for they save the nation from social petrification and stagnation.” Alexander de Tocqueville affirmed, “War almost always enlarges the spirit of a people and raises its character.”54
Until the First World War, patriotic heroism was the order of the day, and pacifism was reduced to unforgivable cowardliness. Soldiers were accompanied by bands on their departure, and cannons were blessed. “At school, we sang ‘Die for the Homeland!’ It was the most beautiful song,”55 recounts the French farmer Ephraïm Grenadou, veteran of the First World War. Authors at the time glorified war. A few strong voices were raised in favor of pacifism, including that of the Socialist Internationale, which strongly opposed war and was supported especially by Jean Jaurès who, on the verge of the 1914–18 war, fought till his last breath for peace, proclaiming, “The affirmation of peace is the greatest of fights.” Hated by nationalists, he was assassinated in July 1914 by a nationalist, who was then acquitted in 1919.
Over the course of the twentieth century, the attitude of our contemporaries faced with war has evolved considerably. Patriotic enthusiasm belongs to a time gone by, and today, as the political scientist John Mueller stresses, war is no longer perceived as a heroic, holy, virile, or purifying enterprise, but as an immoral, repulsive, barbaric, futile, stupid operation, and a source of enormous waste.56 Conquerors no longer arouse admiration, while the conquered are no longer regarded as humiliated populations, but as victims. Just before the second Iraq war, no one wanted to see Saddam Hussein continue his deadly dictatorship, but millions of demonstrators took to the streets around the world to proclaim, “Anything except one more war.” This evolution contributes to favoring the development of a feeling of “universal responsibility” that the Dalai Lama and many other great moral figures of our time—including Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and Martin Luther King Jr.—have wished for.
THE RISE OF RESPECT FOR HUMAN RIGHTS, FOR WOMEN, FOR CHILDREN, AND FOR ANIMAL RIGHTS
An analysis of the content of hundreds of thousands of books of all kinds published in English has shown that the frequency of references to civic rights has doubled since 1960; references to women’s rights have quintupled; and references to children’s rights have increased tenfold.57
In Western democratic countries, violence against women is less and less accepted, and the abuse that’s still rampant in many countries revolts the public opinion of societies where greater equality between the sexes reigns. In 1976, in the United States, domestic violence was ranked only ninety-first in importance on a list of 140 crimes. Most people questioned in that country thought that violence was unacceptable between individuals who didn’t know each other, but tolerable between spouses. This investigation also revealed that at that time, Americans thought that the sale of LSD was a more reprehensible crime than the rape of a woman in a park! Since then, things have changed. In 1995, another survey showed that 80% of people questioned saw domestic violence as “a social and legal problem of great importance.” Remember that in the United States, rapes fell 85% between 1979 and 2006.
The fact still remains that violence against women remains a major problem in many countries around the world. A report by the World Health Organization studying 48 countries established that, depending on the country, from 10% to 50% of women have been victims of severe domestic violence—50% of them in Peru and Ethiopia compared to 10% in Japan, Brazil, and Serbia.58 Disparities remain great. Only 1% of New Zealanders think that it is permissible to beat a wife when she disobeys her husband, against 78% of Egyptians in rural areas, and 50% of Indians in the northern districts of India. The list of atrocities committed against women is long, from genital mutilation to forced prostitution, and includes “crimes of honor” in which women were murdered by some relatives after being accused of tarnishing the “honor” of the family, even though these women were often victims of abuse by other men.59
Child abuse is also less and less tolerated and, as we have seen, its frequency has considerably diminished. According to surveys, in 1976, only 10% of people questioned in the United States were of the opinion that child abuse should be considered a serious problem. In 1999, this percentage went up to 90%.60
Attitudes toward animals, too, have changed greatly since the 1970s, mainly following publication of Animal Liberation, the book by the philosopher Peter Singer that launched the movement of the same name.61 Throughout the world, the way we treat animals in many slaughterhouses is abominable; the public has begun to become aware of this incontrovertible moral problem. Under the pressure of public opinion, rules have been passed that forbid the most barbaric torture and impose some measures for improvement in the treatment of animals before and during slaughter, even though this is still a hell for animals.
In research laboratories, researchers have long had carte blanche to conduct the most improbable and useless experiments (like making hundreds of cats die of heat in order to study their resistance to high temperatures). Increasingly stricter rules have been put in place (in Europe especially), and a recent survey showed that most researchers now acknowledge that animals feel pain—a fact that, surprisingly, has long been disputed. Software for virtual dissection (V-Frog) allows people today to study the anatomy and physiology of a frog in a much more precise and instructive way than the archaic and barbaric methods of vivisection.62 Other substitutes to experimenting on live animals are being developed, such as carrying out toxicity tests on cell cultures, using computer simulations and modeling (in silico testing), etc. These days, researchers who are indifferent to the fate of laboratory animals are scorned by their colleagues.
What’s more, aside from regions in the world that number many vegetarians (400 to 500 million in India, or about 40% of the population), in many countries, the number of people who become vegetarian out of concern for the fate of animals is regularly increasing. At the same time, the number of hunters is diminishing, and their average age increasing.
THE DECLINE OF RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE
A study of the inhabitants of North America indicates that in 1924, 91% of American secondary school students thought that “the Christian religion is the only true religion, and all populations should be converted to it.” In 1980, this number fell to 38%, despite the power of Evangelical movements in the United States. In 1990, 62% of American Protestants and 74% of Catholics agreed with the statement, “All religions deserve respect.”63 It has been shown that greater tolerance goes hand in hand with a lessening of violence.
Religious intolerance still remains a major factor for violence throughout the world. In numerous societies, religion is manipulated for political ends and used as a rallying flag to revive sectarian, tribal, or nationalist passions, and to increase hatred. Intolerance is also a characteristic of practitioners so profoundly convinced of the truth of their beliefs that they think anything is permitted for the sake of imposing them on others. Inability to respect the religious and intellectual traditions of others, including, of course, those of non-believers, leads people to ignore the diversity of human beings and their legitimate aspirations. As the Dalai Lama often says, “The deep conviction people have when they follow their own path should be coupled with absolute respect for the path of others.”
THE MARGINALIZATION OF VIOLENCE
According to the lawyer Donald Black, in developed countries, most crimes are committed by members of the poorest sectors of the population, who derive little security from the government that is supposed to protect them. They mistrust the authorities, scorn them and are scorned by them in return. According to the criminologist Mark Cooney, they are stateless people within the state; they function outside of the state system, often thanks to illegal activities. Without recourse to the justice system and unable to call the police for help, they institute a parallel system of justice that is particular to them, and usually settle their differences by resorting to violence.64 Most homicides thus stem from capital punishment applied by private individuals. According to Steven Pinker, the process of the “civilization of customs” has considerably reduced violence in our societies, but it has not eliminated it: it has relegated it to people on the outer fringes of society and the economy.65
EDUCATION AND READING, CATALYSTS FOR EMPATHY
At the end of the eighteenth century, over half of French citizens knew how to read and write. In England, the number of books published by decade went from a few hundred in the fifteenth century to 80,000 in the early nineteenth century.66 It seems that, to a certain extent, when people began to read stories and novels that advocated tolerance and portrayed the suffering linked to violence, people became more used to putting themselves in the place of others, envisaging their point of view, and imagining their feelings, which favored the development of empathy and the decline of violence. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example, in which the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe movingly describes a slave’s condition, was the highest-selling novel in the nineteenth century, and had a major impact on the emergence and success of the abolitionist cause.67
THE INCREASED INFLUENCE OF WOMEN
Despite progress still to be made, Western countries are evolving more toward respect and increased acknowledgment of the role of women in society. With a few rare exceptions, war is planned, decided upon, and perpetrated by men, and 99.9% of soldiers who take part in combat are also men (even in countries like Israel, which recruit a large number of women, women are rarely on the front lines). Men are also the most intransigent during negotiations. Swanee Hunt, former American ambassador and activist against exploitation of women throughout the world, told me that one day she met a group of African officials engaged in peace negotiations that seemed stymied by two parties. Having noted that both delegations were made up exclusively of men, Hunt asked, “Why aren’t there any women in your group?” They replied: “Because they’d make concessions.” Swanee Hunt remembers thinking at that point: “Bingo! That’s why this negotiation, like so many others, isn’t successful!”68 In fact, how can a solution acceptable to the various participants be found at all without making mutual concessions?
A collection of ethnographic studies shows that every society that treats women better is less prone to war. In the Middle East especially, a survey revealed that individuals who were most in favor of equality between men and women were also the most in favor of a nonviolent resolution to the Israeli-Arab conflict.69 Steven Pinker concludes:
Biology and history suggest that all else being equal, a world in which women have more influence will be a world with fewer wars.70
Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a survivor of the two nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (whither he fled after the explosion in Hiroshima, thinking to find refuge there) gave this ultimate piece of advice before dying at the age of ninety-three: “The only people who should be allowed to govern countries with nuclear weapons are mothers, those who are still breast-feeding their babies.”71 Women and children are the first victims in wars, and the more their voices can be heard in society, the lower the risk will be for conflict. It is not a question of simply giving more power to women, but of moving away from cultural models that celebrate virile strength, glorify war, and justify violence as a quick and effective way to resolve problems.72 In Sex and War, the biologist Malcolm Potts and his co-authors think that giving women complete control over their reproduction (by allowing free access to contraception and the choice of their spouse) is a crucial factor in fighting violence.73 Refusing to treat women as mere reproductive vessels is the best way to prevent an excessive portion of the population being made up of young men who often find themselves jobless and marginalized. In fact, it has been demonstrated that, in societies that grant more autonomy to women, there are fewer gangs of rootless young men who become troublemakers.74
Desmond Tutu, the Gandhi activist Ela Bhatt, the former US president Jimmy Carter, and other members of the Global Elders have launched a movement called “Girls, Not Brides.”75 Archbishop Desmond Tutu especially militates passionately against girls being married in childhood or puberty, a phenomenon that’s still widespread in Africa and Asia (every day, 25,000 girls are married too young and without their consent). A teenaged girl under fifteen is five times more likely to die in labor than a young woman in her twenties. This scourge could prevent the realization of six of the eight Objectives for the Millennium for Development pursued by the United Nations: reducing poverty and hunger, ensuring basic education for all, promoting the equality of the sexes and the autonomy of women, reducing infant mortality, improving maternal health, and fighting AIDS, malaria and other diseases. Only two objectives, the preservation of the environment and the establishment of a global partnership for development, are not directly linked to the problem of early marriages of girls. Compulsory education of girls could contribute to thwarting this practice.
IT’S BETTER TO RESTORE PEACE AND CURE WOUNDS THAN TO AVENGE AFFRONTS
Most peace processes have been crowned with success when one of the parties has, of its own free will, taken an innovative, risky, and irrevocable step. This kind of initiative reassures the opponent and produces confidence in the fact that the other has no intention of resuming hostilities. Concerning civilian conflicts, it turns out that it is better to calm resentments and facilitate reconciliation than to insist that “justice be done” at all costs. I recently heard the testimony of women from Liberia stating they’d rather restore peace in the community than revive hatred by pursuing all those who had committed atrocities. This wish to turn the page while being satisfied with incomplete justice and granting general amnesty (except for a few military leaders) perplexed the representatives of the International Court of Law, who were divided between their engagement in not letting these crimes against humanity go unpunished and the opinion of concerned citizens, for whom reconciliation was more important than punitive justice.
One of the best examples of this attitude is that of the Commission for Truth and Reconciliation created in 1995 by Nelson Mandela and presided over by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, both winners of the Nobel Peace Prize. This commission was charged with taking note of violations of human rights and crimes committed, during the last fifteen years of apartheid, by the South African government and by liberation movements, in order to allow for national reconciliation between victims and perpetrators of violent acts.
An important point in this process consisted of encouraging public confession of crimes committed, often linked to a request for forgiveness, in the presence of the victims, and offering amnesty in exchange. It was important in the eyes of all to reveal the truth and acknowledge all crimes committed without dissimulation, so as not to leave anything in the shadows that could perpetuate resentments, and then deciding by common accord to renounce the application of the law of an eye for an eye. “To forgive, not to forget” was the motto of this healing undertaking.76
THE CHALLENGES STILL TO BE OVERCOME
There is still a lot to do, and immense financial resources are still wasted in waging wars. Two billion dollars a day get devoted worldwide to military expenses—but these colossal sums could be used to meet all kinds of urgent needs of humanity and of the planet. To give only a recent example, the cost of the war in Iraq has risen to three trillion dollars, and the cost of the Afghanistan war, since its beginning in 2001 until its end in 2011, amounted to 557 billion dollars.77
Today, 95% of weapons that feed conflicts throughout the world are made and sold by the five permanent members of the Security Council of the United Nations. As the Dalai Lama declared during a visit to France, “A country that sells weapons sells its soul.”
But a reduction of weapons would not be enough in and of itself. Weapons are only the tools of war, and historical studies show that an increase of the destructive power of weapons does not necessarily lead to an increase of the number of victims in conflicts. The absolute weapon, the atomic bomb, has fortunately not been used since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So it is the factors that lead to war that should as a matter of urgency be addressed.
A lack of natural resources does not lead people into war. Senegal and Malawi, two countries with few resources other than agricultural, ranked “high” (respectively 72 and 77 in the world) in the Global Peace Index (GPI) 2014 report, higher than the United States, which ranks 101 (“medium”)78 . In fact, many countries in Africa have major mining resources that can turn out to be a curse since they are often ravaged by armed conflict over control of these resources, as is the case with the Democratic Republic of Congo (which ranks 155, among the last ten countries with “low” level of peace).79 As we have seen, recurrent causes of conflicts are linked more to the absence of a stable democratic government, to corruption, to repression, and to intolerant ideologies.
The poverty of citizens, especially when it quickly worsens, represents a major cause for instability and violence. Deprivation of food, degradation of health services, education, and security services are frequent causes of conflicts. Half of the wars occur today in countries where the billion poorest people live (this was not always the case, since in the past wealthy countries were often busy with conquest of colonies or fought among themselves). The countries whose GNP was $250 per inhabitant in 2003 have, on average, entered five times more often into war (15% compared to 3%) in the last five years than the countries whose average GNP was $1,500. Neglecting poverty in the world maintains a major source of insecurity and violence.80
If poverty can lead to war, war leads in turn to poverty by resulting in the devastation of infrastructures (roads, factories, and so forth) and agricultural resources, the dispersion of qualified people, and institutional chaos. As for dictators, they pay scant attention to reason or human lives. So a stable, democratic government is indispensable for emerging from both poverty and war. Transitions are always long and difficult, as the present state of countries of the former Soviet bloc attests, since establishing democracy demands time, and requires a profound transformation of cultures.
As for religions, they should make special efforts in favor of peace. Historically, they have rarely been instruments for that peace that their ideals advocate. They have often become ferments of division and not of union. It is all the more important that religious leaders meet and learn to know each other better, as the Dalai Lama constantly recommends, so that they can act together toward peace when unrest and dissension appear.
In summary, wars bring more suffering to victims of an attack than they do well-being to the aggressors. But as long as the aggressor draws advantages from war, limited as they may be, it will be hard to prevent wars from occurring. Those who resort to violence should therefore be punished, so that they no longer benefit from it.
THE AGE OF REASON
As more and more children have access to education and develop their intelligence and knowledge, the citizens of the world become aware of the necessity for living in peace. It has been observed that the faculty of reasoning, degree of intelligence, and level of emotional equilibrium of ten-year-old children were signs of their subsequent acceptance of democratic, pacifist, anti-racist, and egalitarian points of view.81
In conclusion to his 800-page book on the decline of violence, Steven Pinker counts on reason to reduce violence. He thinks reason alone can let us extend the reach of empathy and moral sense beyond the circle of our relatives and members of our “group”—nation, religion, ethnic group or any other particularism apt to undermine the perception of our common humanity.82