The document discusses theories on the decline of violence over time. It notes that while some data shows declining homicide rates in places like medieval England compared to today, others argue that ideas of moral progress are misguided given numerous violent events throughout history. Skeptics question the notion that humans are inherently becoming less warlike or violent, noting ongoing conflicts and changing nature of warfare. The document explores debates over explanations for violence and whether it is truly decreasing for all societies.

1. What was life like in England 100 years ago?
Describe life in England 1000 years ago?
Describe life in England 10,000 years ago?
Power
Violence
Crime
Peace

3. ‘Believe it or not, and I know most people do not,
violence has been in decline for long stretches of time,
and today we may be living in the most peaceful eras of
our species existence.‘
Source: A History of Violence: Steven Pinker at TEDx New
England

4. Source: https://ourworldindata.org/homicides

5. Source: https://ourworldindata.org/homicides
‘There has been a massive decline (in homicide rates)
so that a contemporary Englishman has about 1/35
chance of being murdered as his medieval ancestor’
=pacification, civilizing processes and humanitarian
revolution

6. Why?
Pacification
Civilizing processes (Norbert Elias)
Humanitarian revolution
Death penalty, capital
punishment
Abolition of slavery
The Long Peace (0%)
& The New Peace
New rights (civil rights, animal
rights, children rights)

7. Why?
Pacification
Civilizing processes
Humanitarian revolution
Death penalty, capital
punishment
Abolition of slavery
The Long Peace (0%)
& The New Peace
New rights (civil rights, animal
rights, children rights)
Why?
Cognition (phycology; the
brain) / human nature
Motives for violence
Exploitation, Dominance,
Moralistic
Utopian ideologies / goals
(communism, Nazism,
fascism)

8. Why?
Pacification
Civilizing processes
Humanitarian revolution
Death penalty, capital
punishment
Abolition of slavery
The Long Peace (0%)
& The New Peace
New rights (civil rights, animal
rights, children rights)
Why?
Cognition (phycology; the
brain) / human nature
Motives for violence
Exploitation, Dominance,
Moralistic
Utopian ideologies / goals
(communism, Nazism,
fascism)
How?
Self control
Morality
Empathy
Moral sense
Reason

9. Why?
Pacification
Civilizing processes
Humanitarian revolution
Death penalty, capital
punishment
Abolition of slavery
The Long Peace (0%)
& The New Peace
New rights (civil rights, animal
rights, children rights)
Why?
Cognition (phycology; the
brain) / human nature
Motives for violence
Exploitation, Dominance,
Moralistic
Utopian ideologies / goals
(communism, Nazism,
fascism)
How?
Self control
Morality
Empathy
Moral sense
Reason
How?
1. State monopoly on violence
2. Gentle Commerce (trade)
3. Expanding circle (of empathy)
4. Escalator of reason
= social dilemma
(game theory; lets all get along)

10. Source: https://ourworldindata.org/homicides

11. Source: https://ourworldindata.org/homicides
Why are some countries more
red than yellow?
What trends can you identify?
Why might this be the case?

12. “For an influential group of advanced thinkers,
violence is a type of backwardness”
“…the idea of moral progress is wishful thinking and plain wrong”

13. “the idea of moral progress is wishful thinking and plain wrong”
Enlightenment Thinking = progressive improvement
John Locke
Voltaire Immanuel Kant Jeremy Bentham Auguste Comte John Stuart Mill

14. There is no
reason for
thinking
human beings
are becoming
any more
altruistic or
more peaceful

15. Holocaust
Stalin’s genocide
Nuclear War
Biological and chemical warfare
Soviet agricultural collectivisation
Refugees
Incarceration
Torture
Terrorism and counter-terrorism
Neocolonial warfare in south-east Asia, the Korean war and the
Chinese invasion of Tibet, British counter-insurgency warfare in
Malaya and Kenya, the abortive Franco-British invasion of Suez,
the Angolan civil war, the Soviet invasions of Hungary,
Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, the Vietnam war, the Iran-Iraq
war, the first Gulf war, covert intervention in the Balkans and
the Caucasus, the invasion of Iraq, the use of airpower in Libya,
military aid to insurgents in Syria, Russian cyber-attacks in the
Baltic states and the proxy war between the US and Russia that
is being waged in Ukraine – these are only some of the contexts
in which great powers have been involved in continuous
warfare against each other while avoiding direct military
conflict.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/13/john-gray-
steven-pinker-wrong-violence-war-declining
While it is true that war has changed, it has not become less
destructive.

16. There is
something
repellently
absurd in the
notion that
war is a vice of
‘backward’
peoples
‘Tribal peoples who have been praised by
anthropologists for their peaceful ways, such as the
Kalahari !Kung, in fact have rates of death by violence
not unlike those of contemporary Detroit.’
Photograph: Kim Walker/Robert Harding/Rex

17. Rubens’ The Massacre of the Innocents. Photograph: National Gallery, London