Gongwer

Thomas Gongwer
History 4650
Professor Roth
Prcis
The Long Peace
In his book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Why Violence Has Declined, Steven
Pinker argues that mankind is becoming less violent. In chapter five, The Long Peace, Pinker
combats the counter argument to his hypothesis, which states that the twentieth century is the
most violent century in history, because of World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. He
begins by dismissing the Cold War and uses it to strengthen his own argument. Pinker sides with
historian John Gaddis who calls the Cold War the Long Peace, because the two world super
powers went to great lengths to avoid directly going to war and fought through proxies. Pinker
acknowledges the two World Wars and the genocides that occurred in the first half of the
twentieth century, but he attacks his opposition with a plethora of statistical charts to show that
these wars claimed proportionately fewer lives than wars in the past.
Pinker says that the wars are random and independent occurrences, and that there is no
trend toward conflict and violence throughout history. In fact, he claims that war, especially the
two World Wars, were chance events and not a result of the escalation of violence and
willingness to go to war. He provides statistical data and support from Lewis Richardson, a
scientist, to explain that we need to look at more than death tolls. Wars crescendo when nations
reach an unacceptable amount of cost and casualty. More people died in the two World Wars
than in any other time period but there were also drastically more people alive than during any
other large wars. He provides data showing the death tolls as the percentage of people on earth
at the time of each war. When seen this way, the percentage of destruction and casualties was
lower than, for instance during the Mongol Empire. He also notes that overtime humans have

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documented our history better. The destructiveness of the past was just not as well recorded as
more modern events are.
Pinker never claims that the World Wars and coinciding events of genocide were not
atrocious. However, he does claim that they have increased our fear of war and deterred us from
it. The global growth in the application of the value for human life during the long peace is a
result of those wars. The second half of the twentieth century proves that there has not been an
escalation of destructiveness in war, but instead it has declined. Pinker explains that this decline
can be credited to the spread of democracy and that democracies are less likely to go to war with
one another, because of reciprocities of trade. The increase in democracy and global trade has
led to an increase of global empathy, resulting from cultural exchanges attempting to reach
mutually beneficial trades. He applies philosophies from Kants Perpetual Peace to further
support the prediction of this long peace lasting, and uses the example of Europe, supported
with statistical data to demonstrate that the amount of conflict between powers is declining.
Pinker reiterates his point that people are becoming less violent and the twentieth century was
not the bloodiest in history. In fact, these events have actually strengthened mankinds resolve to
avoid war whenever possible.