Steven Pinker and Andrew Mack at Slate put forth a hypothesis, complete with graphs and data, that the world is less violent now than over the past sixty years. They have an interesting take on violence, war, death, rape and mass killings to suggest that the world, most of it, is safer today than since the end of World War Two. A person is more likely to die of old age today than ever before.
Since we at the Burg focus on what the WoT, particularly that of the Islamic sort, is doing to the world, Pinker and Mack put forth something worthy of debate. Are we just focused (or obsessed) with something that is just a small part of the entire picture, or do Pinker and Mack, with their focus on data, miss the bigger part of what human nature and intent do over time? One could argue that the 'peacefulness' of the world today is the result of cumulative investment by humanity over a half-century to make it happen -- what happens when world leaders are no longer making those "pay it forward" investments?
One point Pinker and Mack don't explore at all in this article, or in Pinker's latest book, is the apparent fragility of our increasingly complex world. Social change, social advance, technology advances, and economic progress suggest that it might -- might -- take less to overturn our world than that of a half-century ago. That gets to how 'resilient' our world is today. If a single EMP can take out a country's advanced technology, what then happens to all the indicators of mortality, war, crime and so on? |
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