A Cause of the Secular Decline in Violence

Steven Pinker writes on the well-known (in the Steveosphere) decline in violence from the Middle Ages to today, and suggests four possible reasons for the decline: wider governmental control, a sense that life is no longer cheap (from better sanitary and medical conditions etc.), greater incentives to cooperate, and an escalation in empathy, (Singer’s “expanding moral circle”).

He doesn’t mention another and nearly proven possibility: evolution. Clark showed convincingly that England’s population evolved over several hundred years up to 1800, with middle class personality traits increasing in incidence among the population. Cochran and Harpending have shown convincingly that evolution currently proceeds at a rate up to 100 times faster than before civilization; furthermore, they asserted that the breeding of docility is a process that civilization could be expected to encourage, so it would also be likely from living under expanded and more powerful governments.

Pinker writes:

Whatever its causes, the decline of violence has profound implications. It is not a license for complacency: We enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to end it, and so we should work to end the appalling violence in our time.

Not necessarily, Dr. Pinker. Or if they did work to end it, some of their methods included the massive application of capital punishment and letting the poor starve, along with other measures that few would advocate today.