Blessed are the war-mongers?

There was an interesting article in this week's New Scientist arguing that war makes us peaceful....

The key premis of the article was the comparison of skeletons from differing time periods to currently recorded death rates from violence. In the New Stone Age, evidence of violent death appears in 10-20% of remains. This drops down to about 2% during the period of ancient empires and then back to 3-5 % during the barbarian invasions and collapse of empires. It came back to 2% when the Europeans began the process of exporting gun powder based war around the world. In the last century, 100 million people died in the two World Wars. That came out of be 1.5% of the population. This century the rate is 0.7% and dropping.

The article proposes that during the times of most lawlessness (New Stone Age and Barbarian invasions), if you had a grudge with your neighbour, you went out and killed him to ensure things did not get further out of hand. Certainly reading the Penteteuch seems to match that view. However, when empires formed, the elite gained little from killing the conquered, preferring instead to live off their labour. Thus successful states "pacified" the conquered, forcing them to life within the rule of law and policing them to comply.

So perhaps the ultimate role of wars is to end war.... The propagandist of WW I did not get it too wrong!

Comments

[PythonMagus]

Interesting questions. It should be relatively easy to get that data. It would have to be very high to get near 70 mill for 1% or 700 mill for 10%.

[Paul]

Hmmm, many variables. Does violent crime count? What about state sponsored mass murder (eg abortion)?