The two philosophers travel and meet aboriginal peoples.
Hobbes:
Endemic ``war’‘, murderous feuds for gain, safety, and reputation, a war of every man against every man, which made life ‘poore, nasty, brutish, and short’ (Leviathan, 1651, 13).
The creation of the state—the leviathan—was the only system that could guarantee at least internal peace.
Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins and Foundation of Inequality among Mankind (1755):
aboriginal humans lived harmoniously in nature, with abundant resources
But with the coming of
agriculture
demographic growth
private property
\(\Rightarrow\) war
So who was right? And how do we know?
1.7 Humans in the state of nature: Three sources of information
Today’s hunter-gatherers are different: isolated, poor environments
Evidence from the Pleistocene is inconclusive
Best: Australian Lab
1.8 Notes
Problem: Hunter–gatherers have no written records, so the evidence comes from those in contact with them. Recent and historical hunter–gatherers interacted with agriculturalists and pastoralists, often fighting over products and livestock \(\Rightarrow\) violence. These are contaminated samples.
How do we observe `pure’ examples of hunter–gatherers?
Evidence from archeological records, esp. bones: at least some of them were injured in combat (note: we know it’s in combat by examining the damage to the bone. Damage to a living bone is different from damage incurred after death).
1.9 Did hunter-gatherers fight?
The myth of the peaceful savage
1960s: peaceful aborigines, e.g. Arctic Eskimos But:
harsh environment -> thinly spread
Diffuse resources, hard to monopolise
High level of violence
90% of hunter-gatherer societies have intergroup warfare at least every 2 years
1.9 Notes
The surviving hunter-gatherer groups have survived perhaps for a reason. I.e., they are not representative of the prehistorical hunter-gatherers.
Largely confined to poor environments (Arctic, deserts) unsuitable for agriculture
Low population densities
Move a lot to subsist
Few possessions
Poster case was the central Canadian Arctic Eskimos
Not surprising given harsh environment and thinly spread. Resources very diffuse and hard to monopolize
Even then, they had a very high rate of quarrels, blood feuds, and homicide (often to kidnap women). 10 times higher than USA at their peak of 1990
Other Eskimos living in different conditions (e.g., Greenland and coastal Alaska) were strongly territorial and war-like.
Another poster case: the Kalahari Bushmen, east African Hadza, and central African Pygmies, celebrated as peaceful.
Yet clear evidence that there was fighting not only with their agricultural neighbors, but also among themselves even before contact with non-hunter–gatherers.
Homicide rates very high, far higher than US or any other state society
Much of that fighting centered on the water-holes vital for survival in this area,
Only with enforcement of law by Canada and southern Africa did violence rates decrease.
A comparative study of 99 hunter-gatherer groups, belonging to 37 different cultures, found that nearly all engaged in warfare. Most engaged in intergroup warfare at least every two years (on par with other human societies)
2 The decline of war (?)
2.1 Three major steps in the decline of violence
Rise of the state-leviathan
1815–1945
1945–
2.2 Hobbes was right
Percentage of deaths in warfare in nonstate and state societies (Pinker, p. 49)
2.2 Notes
Rise of states \(\rightarrow\) mortality drops from 15% of pop (25% of men) to about 1–5%. Why? enforcement of internal peace by the leviathan
Notes on graph, from Pinker:
``The topmost cluster shows the rate of violent death for skeletons dug out of archaeological sites. They are the remains of hunter-gatherers and hunter-horticulturalists from Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas and date from 14,000 BCE to 1770 CE, in every case well before the emergence of state societies or the first sustained contact with them. The death rates range from 0 to 60 percent, with an average of 15 percent average of the rates of death by warfare is within a whisker of the average estimated from the bones: 14 percent, with a range from 4 percent to 30 percent.
In the next cluster I’ve lumped pre-state societies that engage in some mixture of hunting, gathering, and horticulture. All are from New Guinea or the Amazon rain forest, except Europe’s last tribal society, the Montenegrins, whose rate of violent death is close to the average for the group as a whole, 24.5 percent
Finally we get to some figures for states. The earliest are from the cities and empires of pre-Columbian Mexico, in which 5 percent of the dead were killed by other people. That was undoubtedly a dangerous place, but it was a third to a fifth as violent as an average pre-state society. When it comes to modern states, we are faced with hundreds of political units, dozens of centuries, and many subcategories of violence to choose from (wars, homicides, genocides, and so on), so there is no single “correct” estimate. But we can make the comparison as fair as possible by choosing the most violent countries and centuries, together with some estimates of violence in the world today. As we shall see in chapter 5, the two most violent centuries in the past half millennium of European history were the 17th, with its bloody Wars of Religion, and the 20th, with its two world wars. The historian Quincy Wright has estimated the rate of death in the wars of the 17th century at 2 percent, and the rate of death in war for the first half of the 20th at 3 percent. If one were to include the last four decades of the 20th century, the percentage would be even lower. ’’
2.3 But the 20th century was the bloodiest, right?
Yes, in terms of absolute casualties.
But not in terms of % of population killed
2.4 But the 20th century was the bloodiest, right?
Source: Pinker p. 197
2.5 But is war-deaths per capita the right metric?
Maybe fewer people exposed to risk of death (i.e., not less war-prone)
2.6 Better measure of war-proneness: of Arsonists and Trees
Deaths per capita may be the wrong measure of war-proneness
2.7 So, has the NUMBER of wars decreased?
2.7 Notes
But why limit our attention to Europe?
2.8 So, has the NUMBER of wars decreased?
2.8 Notes
The result is the opposite of what one would expect if war were on the decline: uses of force held more or less steady through the first World War but then increased steadily thereafter.
Are we satisfied with that?
Problem: no correction is made for the number of interaction opportunities in the international system. Ther are far more states now than 100 years ago.
2.9 So, has the NUMBER of wars decreased?
2.9 Notes
To correct for this issue, divide the number of uses of force in a given year by the number of pairs of states (` dyads’) present in the international system.
Are we satisfied with that? No. Most states cannot project power beyond thier own region. A clash between Bolivia and Botswana is unlikely, because they are too weak and do not care about each other
We need to include political relevance.
2.10 So, has the NUMBER of wars decreased?
3 The long peace (1945–)
3.1 What is the long peace?
0 nuclear weapons used
0 tactical nuclear weapons used
0 war between great powers
0 interstate wars in Europe
0 interstate wars between major developed countries
0 forced territory expansion by developed countries (exception: Israel)
0 states have disappeared through conquest
3.1 Notes
The proponents of the end of war argument counter by saying that the period since the end of World War II has been remarkably peaceful.