Did the Enlightenment cause a global decline in violence? (No)

[Ad Orientem]

Two powerful rebuttals to the latest article of Whig orthodoxy...

http://theweek.com/articles/545429/did- ... e-violence

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/m ... -declining

[MachineGhost]

I haven't read Pinker's book, but it seems pretty clear to me the seed of empathy and compassion started long before Rome or the Enlightenment, with the Greeks.

[Pointedstick]

This seems to be a fairly weak article whose major points are underpinned by emotional appeals rather than data. The points about the absolute level of violence and proxy wars seem extremely flimsy. Nobody is arguing that violence has vanished, just that it's been become rarer. Furthermore, the percentage of humans dying in armed struggle is lower than ever before and falling. In other words, 10 million people dying out of 7 billion is less of a big deal compared to 1 million out of a global population of 300 million. Despite the emotional examples of modern conflict in Africa, that continent is more peaceful today then it has been in recorded history. It is a mistake to focus on anecdotes instead of data. A lot of the more compelling counterpoints made in the article date from the World War II era which ended 70 years ago. Surely the decolonization struggles, the cold war proxy conflicts have been destructive, but on the scale of what came before? I don't think so.

I agree that it's implausible to attribute the decline in violence to people being nicer and more compassionate. However, if the author is right that one of the major contributors to global peace has been the proliferation of nuclear weapons (a theory that I agree with), it seems hard to avoid the admission that nuclear weapons are entirely a product of scientific-rationalist enlightenment thought patterns. If another cause has been simple increases in prosperity leading to less conflict over scarce resources, well, that too is the product of enlightenment thinking via the industrial revolution that it enabled.