From Pinker, Steven, The Better Angels Of Our Nature, Penguin Books (2012)
The topic of violence in nonstate societies has a long and politicized history. For centuries it was conventional wisdom that native peoples were ferocious barbarians. The Declaration of Independence, for instance, complained that the king of England “endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”
Today the passage seems archaic, indeed offensive. Dictionaries warn against using the word savage (related to sylvan, “of the forest”) to refer to native peoples, and our awareness of the genocides of Native Americans perpetrated by European colonists makes the signatories seem like a black pot in a glass house casting the first stone. A modern concern with the dignity and rights of all peoples inhibits us from speaking too frankly about rates of violence in preliterate peoples, and the “anthropologists of peace” have worked to give them a Rousseauian image makeover.
Margaret Mead, for example, described the Chambri of New Guinea as a sex-reversed culture because the men were adorned with makeup and curls, omitting the fact that they had to earn the right to these supposedly effeminate decorations by killing a member of an enemy tribe.29 Anthropologists who did not get with the program found themselves barred from the territories in which they had worked, denounced in manifestoes by their professional societies, slapped with libel lawsuits, and even accused of genocide.30
To be sure, it is easy to come away from tribal battles with the impression that they are fairly harmless in comparison with modern warfare. Men with a grievance against a neighboring village challenge its men to appear at a given time and place. The two sides face off at a distance at which their missiles can barely reach each other. They talk trash, cursing and insulting and boasting, and fire arrows or chuck spears while dodging those from the other side. When a warrior or two are injured or killed, they call it a day. These noisy spectacles led observers to conclude that warfare among primitive peoples was ritualistic and symbolic, very different from the glorious carnage of more advanced peoples.31 The historian William Eckhardt, who is often cited for his claim that violence has vastly increased over the course of history, wrote, “Bands of gathering-hunters, numbering about 25 to 50 people each, could hardly have made much of a war. There would not have been enough people to fight, few weapons with which to fight, little to fight about, and no surplus to pay for the fighting.”
Only in the past fifteen years have scholars with no political ax to grind, such as Lawrence Keeley, Steven LeBlanc, Azar Gat, and Johan van der Dennen, begun to compile systematic reviews of the frequency and damage of fighting in large samples of nonstate peoples.33
The actual death counts from primitive warfare show that the apparent harmlessness of a single battle is deceptive. For one thing, a skirmish may escalate into all-out combat that leaves the battlefield strewn with bodies. Also, when bands of a few dozen men confront each other on a regular basis, even one or two deaths per battle can add up to a rate of casualties that is high by any standard. But the main distortion comes from a failure to distinguish the two kinds of violence that turned out to be so important in studies of chimpanzees: battles and raids.
It is the sneaky raids, not the noisy battles, that kill in large numbers.34 A party of men will slink into an enemy village before dawn, fire arrows into the first men who emerge from their huts in the morning to pee, and then shoot the others as they rush out of their huts to see what the commotion is about. They may thrust their spears through walls, shoot arrows through doorways or chimneys, and set the huts on fire. They can kill a lot of drowsy people before the villagers organize themselves in defense, by which time the attackers have melted back into the forest.
Sometimes enough attackers show up to massacre every last member of the village, or to kill all the men and abduct the women. Another stealthy but effective way to decimate an enemy is by ambuscade: a war party can hide in the forest along a hunting route and dispatch enemy men as they walk by. Still another tactic is treachery: the men can pretend to make peace with an enemy, invite them to a feast, and at a prearranged signal stab the unsuspecting guests. As for any solitary man who blunders into their territory, the policy is the same as it is with chimpanzees: shoot on sight.
Men in nonstate societies (and they are almost always men) are deadly serious about war, not just in their tactics but in their armaments, which include chemical, biological, and antipersonnel weapons.35 Arrowheads may be coated with toxins extracted from venomous animals, or with putrefied tissue that causes the wound to fester. The arrowhead may be designed to break away from its shaft, making it difficult for the victim to pull it out. Warriors often reward themselves with trophies, especially heads, scalps, and genitals. They literally take no prisoners, though occasionally they will drag one back to the village to be tortured to death.
William Bradford of the Mayflower pilgrims observed of the natives of Massachusetts, “Not being content only to kill and take away life, [they] delight to torment men in the most bloody manner that may be, flaying some alive with the shells of fishes, cutting off members and joints of others by piecemeal and broiling on the coals, eat collops of their flesh in their sight while they live.” 36
Though we bristle when we read of European colonists calling native people savages, and justly fault them for their hypocrisy and racism, it’s not as if they were making the atrocities up. Many eyewitnesses have brought back tales of horrific violence in tribal warfare.
Helena Valero, a woman who had been abducted by the Yanomamö in the Venezuelan rain forest in the 1930s, recounted one of their raids: Meanwhile from all sides the women continued to arrive with their children, whom the other Karawetari had captured.... Then the men began to kill the children; little ones, bigger ones, they killed many of them. They tried to run away, but they caught them, and threw them on the ground, and stuck them with bows, which went through their bodies and rooted them to the ground. Taking the smallest by the feet, they beat them against the trees and rocks. . . . All the women wept.37
In the early 19th century an English convict named William Buckley escaped from a penal colony in Australia and for three decades lived happily with the Wathaurung aborigines. He provided firsthand accounts of their way of life, including their ways of war: On approaching the enemy’s quarters, they laid themselves down in ambush until all was quiet, and finding most of them asleep, laying about in groups, our party rushed upon them, killing three on the spot and wounding several others. The enemy fled precipitately, leaving their war implements in the hands of their assailants and their wounded to be beaten to death by boomerangs, three loud shouts closing the victors’ triumph. The bodies of the dead they mutilated in a shocking manner, cutting the arms and legs off, with flints, and shells, and tomahawks.
When the women saw them returning, they also raised great shouts, dancing about in savage ecstasy. The bodies were thrown upon the ground, and beaten about with sticks—in fact, they all seemed to be perfectly mad with excitement.38
It was not just Europeans gone native who recounted such episodes but the natives themselves. Robert Nasruk Cleveland, an Iñupiaq Inuit, provided this reminiscence in 1965: The next morning the raiders attacked the camp and killed all the women and children remaining there.... After shoving sheefish into the vaginas of all the Indian women they had killed, the Noatakers took Kititigaagvaat and her baby, and retreated toward the upper Noatak River.... Finally, when they had almost reached home, the Noatakers gang-raped Kititigaagvaat and left her with her baby to die. . . .
Some weeks later, the Kobuk caribou hunters returned home to find the rotting remains of their wives and children and vowed revenge. A year or two after that, they headed north to the upper Noatak to seek it. They soon located a large body of Nuataagmiut and secretly followed them. One morning the men in the Nuataagmiut camp spotted a large band of caribou and went off in pursuit. While they were gone, the Kobuk raiders killed every woman in the camp. Then they cut off their vulvas, strung them on a line, and headed quickly toward home.
Cannibalism has long been treated as the quintessence of primitive savagery, and in reaction many anthropologists used to dismiss reports of cannibalism as blood libels by neighboring tribes. But forensic archaeology has recently shown that cannibalism was widespread in human prehistory. The evidence includes human bones that bear human teethmarks or that had been cracked and cooked like those of animals and thrown out in the kitchen trash.40 Some of the butchered bones date back 800,000 years, to the time when Homo heidelbergensis, a common ancestor of modern humans and Neanderthals, first appears on the evolutionary stage. Traces of human blood proteins have also been found in cooking pots and in ancient human excrement.
Cannibalism may have been so common in prehistory as to have affected our evolution: our genomes contain genes that appear to be defenses against the prion diseases transmitted by cannibalism.41 All this is consistent with eyewitness accounts, such as this transcription by a missionary of a Maori warrior taunting the preserved head of an enemy chief:
You wanted to run away, did you? But my war club overtook you. And after you were cooked, you made food for my mouth. And where is your father? He is cooked. And where is your brother? He is eaten. And where is your wife? There she sits, a wife for me. And where are your children? There they are, with loads on their backs, carrying food, as my slaves.
Many scholars have found the image of harmless foragers to be plausible because they had trouble imagining the means and motives that could drive them to war. Recall, for example, Eckhardt’s claim that hunter-gatherers had “little to fight about.” But organisms that have evolved by natural selection always have something to fight about (which doesn’t, of course, mean that they will always fight). Hobbes noted that humans in particular have three reasons for quarrel: gain, safety, and credible deterrence. People in nonstate societies fight about all three.43
Foraging peoples can invade to gain territory, such as hunting grounds, watering holes, the banks or mouths of rivers, and sources of valued minerals like flint, obsidian, salt, or ochre. They may raid livestock or caches of stored food. And very often they fight over women. Men may raid a neighboring village for the express purpose of kidnapping women, whom they gang-rape and distribute as wives. They may raid for some other reason and take the women as a bonus. Or they may raid to claim women who had been promised to them in marriage but were not delivered at the agreed-upon time. And sometimes young men attack for trophies, coups, and other signs of aggressive prowess, especially in societies where they are a prerequisite to attaining adult status. People in nonstate societies also invade for safety. The security dilemma or Hobbesian trap is very much on their minds, and they may form an alliance with nearby villages if they fear they are too small, or launch a preemptive strike if they fear that an enemy alliance is getting too big.
One Yanomamö man in Amazonia told an anthropologist, “We are tired of fighting. We don’t want to kill anymore. But the others are treacherous and cannot be trusted.”44
But in most surveys the most commonly cited motive for warfare is vengeance, which serves as a crude deterrent to potential enemies by raising the anticipated long-term costs of an attack. In the Iliad, Achilles describes a feature of human psychology that can be found in cultures throughout the world: revenge “far sweeter than flowing honey wells up like smoke in the breasts of man.” Foraging and tribal people avenge theft, adultery, vandalism, poaching, abduction of women, soured deals, alleged sorcery, and previous acts of violence. One cross-cultural survey found that in 95 percent of societies, people explicitly endorse the idea of taking a life for a life.45 Tribal people not only feel the smoke welling up in their breasts but know that their enemies feel it too. That is why they sometimes massacre every last member of a village they raid: they anticipate that any survivors would seek revenge for their slain kinsmen.
RATES OF VIOLENCE IN STATE AND NONSTATE SOCIETIES Though descriptions of violence in nonstate societies demolish the stereotype that foraging peoples are inherently peaceful, they don’t tell us whether the level of violence is higher or lower than in so-called civilized societies. The annals of modern states have no shortage of gruesome massacres and atrocities, not least against native peoples of every continent, and their wars have death tolls that reach eight digits.
Only by looking at numbers can we get a sense as to whether civilization has increased violence or decreased it. In absolute numbers, of course, civilized societies are matchless in the destruction they have wreaked. But should we look at absolute numbers, or at relative numbers, calculated as a proportion of the populations? The choice confronts us with the moral imponderable of whether it is worse for 50 percent of a population of one hundred to be killed or 1 percent of a population of one billion.
In one frame of mind, one could say that a person who is tortured or killed suffers to the same degree regardless of how many other people meet such a fate, so it is the sum of these sufferings that should engage our sympathy and our analytic attention. But in another frame of mind, one could reason that part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence, accident, or disease. So the number of people in a given time and place who enjoy full lives has to be counted as a moral good, against which we calibrate the moral bad of the number who are victims of violence. Another way of expressing this frame of mind is to ask, “If I were one of the people who were alive in a particular era, what would be the chances that I would be a victim of violence?” The reasoning in this second frame of mind, whether it appeals to the proportion of a population or the risk to an individual, ends in the conclusion that in comparing the harmfulness of violence across societies, we should focus on the rate, rather than the number, of violent acts.
What happens, then, when we use the emergence of states as the dividing line and put hunter-gatherers, hunter-horticulturalists, and other tribal peoples (from any era) on one side, and settled states (also from any era) on the other? Several scholars have recently scoured the anthropological and historical literature for every good body count from nonstate societies that they could find.
Two kinds of estimates are available. One comes from ethnographers who record demographic data, including deaths, in the people they study over long stretches of time.46 The other comes from forensic archaeologists, who sift through burial sites or museum collections with an eye for signs of foul play.47
How can one establish the cause of death when the victim perished hundreds or thousands of years ago? Some prehistoric skeletons are accompanied by the stone-age equivalent of a smoking gun: a spearhead or arrowhead embedded in a bone, like the ones found in Kennewick Man and Ötzi. But circumstantial evidence can be almost as damning. Archaeologists can check prehistoric skeletons for the kinds of damage known to be left by assaults in humans today. The stigmata include bashed-in skulls, cut marks from stone tools on skulls or limbs, and parry fractures on ulnar bones (the injury that a person gets when he defends himself against an assailant by holding up his arm).
Injuries sustained by a skeleton when it was inside a living body can be distinguished in several ways from the damage it sustained when it was exposed to the world. Living bones fracture like glass, with sharp, angled edges, whereas dead bones fracture like chalk, at clean right angles. And if a bone has a different pattern of weathering on its fractured surface than on its intact surface, it was probably broken after the surrounding flesh had rotted away. Other incriminating signs from nearby surroundings include fortifications, shields, shock weapons such as tomahawks (which are useless in hunting), and depictions of human combat on the walls of caves (some of them more than six thousand years old).
Even with all this evidence, archaeological death counts are usually underestimates, because some causes of death—a poisoned arrow, a septic wound, or a ruptured organ or artery—leave no trace on the victim’s bones. Once researchers have tallied a raw count of violent deaths, they can convert it to a rate in either of two ways. The first is to calculate the percentage of all deaths that are caused by violence. This rate is an answer to the question, “What are the chances that a person died at the hands of another person rather than passing away of natural causes?” The graph in figure 2–2 presents this statistic for three samples of nonstate people—skeletons from prehistoric sites, hunter-gatherers, and hunter-horticulturalists—and for a variety of state societies.
Let’s walk through it. The topmost cluster shows the rate of violent death for skeletons dug out of archaeological sites.48 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.
. . . . The 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.50
Finally we get to some figures for states.51 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.52 If one were to include the last four decades of the 20th century, the percentage would be even lower. One estimate, which includes American war deaths as well, comes in at less than 1 percent.
Recently the study of war has been made more precise by the release of two quantitative datasets, which I will explain in chapter 5. They conservatively list about 40 million battle deaths during the 20th century.54(“Battle deaths” refer to soldiers and civilians who were directly killed in combat.) If we consider that a bit more than 6 billion people died during the 20th century, and put aside some demographic subtleties, we may estimate that around 0.7 percent of the world’s population died in battles during that century.
Even if we tripled or quadrupled the estimate to include indirect deaths from war-caused famine and disease, it would barely narrow the gap between state and nonstate societies. What if we added the deaths from genocides, purges, and other man-made disasters? Matthew White, the atrocitologist we met in chapter 1, estimates that around 180 million deaths can be blamed on all of these human causes put together. That still amounts to only 3 percent of the deaths in the 20th century.
Now let’s turn to the present. According to the most recent edition of the Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2,448,017 Americans died in 2005. It was one of the country’s worst years for war deaths in decades, with the armed forces embroiled in conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Together the two wars killed 945 Americans, amounting to 0.0004 (four-hundredths of a percent) of American deaths that year.57 Even if we throw in the 18,124 domestic homicides, the total rate of violent death adds up to 0.008, or eight-tenths of a percentage point. In other Western countries, the rates were even lower. And in the world as a whole, the Human Security Report Project counted 17,400 deaths that year that were directly caused by political violence (war, terrorism, genocide, and killings by warlords and militias), for a rate of 0.0003 (three-hundredths of a percent).58 It’s a conservative estimate, comprising only identifiable deaths, but even if we generously multiplied it by twenty to estimate undocumented battle deaths and indirect deaths from famine and disease, it would not reach the 1 percent mark.
The major cleft in the graph, then, separates the anarchical bands and tribes from the governed states. But we have been comparing a motley collection of archaeological digs, ethnographic tallies, and modern estimates, some of them calculated on the proverbial back of an envelope. Is there some way to juxtapose two datasets directly, one from hunter-gatherers, the other from settled civilizations, matching the people, era, and methods as closely as possible? The economists Richard Steckel and John Wallis recently looked at data on nine hundred skeletons of Native Americans, distributed from southern Canada to South America, all of whom died before the arrival of Columbus.59 They divided the skeletons into hunter-gatherers and city dwellers, the latter from the civilizations in the Andes and Mesoamerica such as the Incas, Aztecs, and Mayans. The proportion of hunter-gatherers that showed signs of violent trauma was 13.4 percent, which is close to the average for the hunter-gatherers in figure 2–2. The proportion of city dwellers that showed signs of violent trauma was 2.7 percent, which is close to the figures for state societies before the present century. So holding many factors constant, we find that living in a civilization reduces one’s chances of being a victim of violence fivefold.
Let’s turn to the second way of quantifying violence, in which the rate of killing is calculated as a proportion of living people rather than dead ones. This statistic is harder to compute from boneyards but easier to compute from most other sources, because it requires only a body count and a population size, not an inventory of deaths from other sources. The number of deaths per 100,000 people per year is the standard measure of homicide rates, and I will use it as the yardstick of violence throughout the book. To get a feel for what these numbers mean, keep in mind that the safest place in human history, Western Europe at the turn of the 21st century, has a homicide rate in the neighborhood of 1 per 100,000 per year. Even the gentlest society will have the occasional young man who gets carried away in a barroom brawl or an old woman who puts arsenic in her husband’s tea, so that is pretty much as low as homicide rates ever go.
Among modern Western countries, the United States lies at the dangerous end of the range. In the worst years of the 1970s and 1980s, it had a homicide rate of around 10 per 100,000, and its notoriously violent cities, like Detroit, had a rate of around 45 per 100,000. If you were living in a society with a homicide rate in that range, you would notice the danger in everyday life, and as the rate climbed to 100 per 100,000, the violence would start to affect you personally: assuming you have a hundred relatives, friends, and close acquaintances, then over the course of a decade one of them would probably be killed. If the rate soared to 1,000 per 100,000 (1 percent), you’d lose about one acquaintance a year, and would have a better-than-even lifetime chance of being murdered yourself.
Figure 2–3 shows war death rates for twenty-seven nonstate societies (combining hunter-gatherers and hunter-horticulturalists) and nine that are ruled by states. The average annual rate of death in warfare for the nonstate societies is 524 per 100,000, about half of 1 percent. Among states, the Aztec empire of central Mexico, which was often at war, had a rate about half that.
Below that bar we find the rates for four state societies during the centuries in which they waged their most destructive wars. Nineteenth-century France fought the Revolutionary, Napoleonic, and Franco-Prussian Wars and lost an average of 70 people per 100,000 per year. The 20th century was blackened by two world wars that inflicted most of their military damage on Germany, Japan, and Russia/USSR, which also had a civil war and other military adventures. Their annual rates of death work out to 144, 27, and 135 per 100,000, respectively.
During the 20th century the United States acquired a reputation as a warmonger, fighting in two world wars and in the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. But the annual cost in American lives was even smaller than those of the other great powers of the century, about 3.7 per 100,000.64 Even if we add up all the deaths from organized violence for the entire world for the entire century—wars, genocides, purges, and man-made famines—we get an annual rate of around 60 per 100,000.65 For the year 2005, the bars representing the United States and the entire world are paint-thin and invisible in the graph.66 So by this measure too, states are far less violent than traditional bands and tribes.
Modern Western countries, even in their most war-torn centuries, suffered no more than around a quarter of the average death rate of nonstate societies, and less than a tenth of that for the most violent one. Though war is common among foraging groups, it is certainly not universal. Nor should we expect it to be if the violent inclinations in human nature are a strategic response to the circumstances rather than a hydraulic response to an inner urge.
According to two ethnographic surveys, 65 to 70 percent of hunter-gatherer groups are at war at least every two years, 90 percent engage in war at least once a generation, and virtually all the rest report a cultural memory of war in the past.67 That means that hunter-gatherers often fight, but they can avoid war for long stretches of time. Figure 2–3 reveals two tribes, the Andamanese and the Semai, with low rates of death in warfare. But even they have interesting stories. Sources: Nonstate: Hewa and Goilala from Gat, 2006; others from Keeley, 1996. Central Mexico, Germany, Russia, France, Japan: Keeley, 1996; see notes 62 and 63. United States in the 20th century: Leland & Oboroceanu, 2010; see note 64. World in 20th century: White, 2011; see note 65. World in 2005: Human Security Report Project, 2008; see notes 57 and 58.
The Andaman Islanders of the Indian Ocean are recorded as having an annual death rate of 20 per 100,000, well below the average for nonstate peoples (which exceeds 500 per 100,000). But they are known to be among the fiercest hunter-gatherer groups left on earth. Following the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, a worried humanitarian group flew over to the islands in a helicopter and were relieved to be met with a fusillade of arrows and spears, signs that the Andamanese had not been wiped out. Two years later a pair of Indian fishers fell into a drunken sleep, and their boat drifted ashore on one of the islands. They were immediately slain, and the helicopter sent to retrieve their bodies was also met with a shower of arrows.68 There are, to be sure, hunter-gatherers and hunter-horticulturalists such as the Semai who have never been known to engage in the protracted, collective killings that can be called warfare.
Anthropologists of peace have made much of these groups, suggesting that they could have been the norm in human evolutionary history, and that it is only the newer and wealthier horticulturalists and pastoralists who engage in systematic violence. The hypothesis is not directly relevant to this chapter, which compares people living in anarchy with those living under states rather than hunter-gatherers with everyone else. But there are reasons to doubt the hypothesis of hunter-gatherer innocence anyway.
Figure 2–3 shows that the rates of death in warfare in these societies, though lower than those of horticulturalists and tribesmen, overlap with them considerably. And as I have mentioned, the hunter-gatherer groups we observe today may be historically unrepresentative. We find them in parched deserts or frozen wastelands where no one else wants to live, and they may have ended up there because they can keep a low profile and vote with their feet whenever they get on each other’s nerves. As Van der Dennen comments, “Most contemporary ‘peaceful’ foragers . . . have solved the perennial problem of being left in peace by splendid isolation, by severing all contacts with other peoples, by fleeing and hiding, or else by being beaten into submission, by being tamed by defeat, by being pacified by force.” 69
For example, the !Kung San of the Kalahari Desert, who in the 1960s were extolled as a paradigm of hunter-gatherer harmony, in earlier centuries had engaged in frequent warfare with European colonists, their Bantu neighbors, and one another, including several all-out massacres.70 The low rates of death in warfare in selected small-scale societies can be misleading in another way. Though they may avoid war, they do commit the occasional murder, and their homicide rates can be compared to those of modern state societies. I’ve plotted them in figure 2–4 on a scale that is fifteen times larger than that of figure 2–3.
Let’s begin with the right-most gray bar in the nonstate cluster. The Semai are a hunting and horticulturalist tribe who were described in a book called The Semai: A Nonviolent People of Malaya and who go out of their way to avoid the use of force. While there aren’t many Semai homicides, there aren’t many Semai. When the anthropologist Bruce Knauft did the arithmetic, he found that their homicide rate was 30 per 100,000 per year, which puts it in the range of the infamously dangerous American cities in their most violent years and at three times the rate of the United States as a whole in its most violent decade.71
The same kind of long division has deflated the peaceful reputation of the !Kung, the subject of a book called The Harmless People, and of the Central Arctic Inuit (Eskimos), who inspired a book called Never in Anger.72 Not only do these harmless, nonviolent, anger-free people murder each other at rates far greater than Americans or Europeans do, but the murder rate among the !Kung went down by a third after their territory had been brought under the control of the Botswana government, as the Leviathan theory would predict.73
The reduction of homicide by government control is so obvious to anthropologists that they seldom document it with numbers. The various “paxes” that one reads about in history books—the Pax Romana, Islamica, Mongolica, Hispanica, Ottomana, Sinica, Britannica, Australiana (in New Guinea), Canadiana (in the Pacific Northwest), and Praetoriana (in South Africa)—refer to the reduction in raiding, feuding, and warfare in the territories brought under the control of an effective government.74 Though imperial conquest and rule can themselves be brutal, they do reduce endemic violence among the conquered. The Pacification Process is so pervasive that anthropologists often treat it as a methodological nuisance. It goes without saying that peoples that have been brought under the jurisdiction of a government will not fight as much, so they are simply excluded from studies of violence in indigenous societies. The effect is also noticeable to the people themselves. As an Auyana man living in New Guinea under the Pax Australiana put it, “Life was better since the government came” because “a man could now eat without looking over his shoulder and could leave his house in the morning to urinate without fear of being shot.”
The anthropologists Karen Ericksen and Heather Horton have quantified the way that the presence of government can move a society away from lethal vengeance. In a survey of 192 traditional studies, they found that one-on-one revenge was common in foraging societies, and kin-against-kin blood feuds were common in tribal societies that had not been pacified by a colonial or national government, particularly if they had an exaggerated culture of manly honor.76 Adjudication by tribunals and courts, in contrast, was common in societies that had fallen under the control of a centralized government, or that had resource bases and inheritance patterns that gave people more of a stake in social stability. One of the tragic ironies of the second half of the 20th century is that when colonies in the developing world freed themselves from European rule, they often slid back into warfare, this time intensified by modern weaponry, organized militias, and the freedom of young men to defy tribal elders.77 As we shall see in the next chapter, this development is a countercurrent to the historical decline of violence, but it is also a demonstration of the role of Leviathans in propelling the decline.
CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS So did Hobbes get it right? In part, he did. In the nature of man we find three principal causes of quarrel: gain (predatory raids), safety (preemptive raids), and reputation (retaliatory raids). And the numbers confirm that relatively speaking, “during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war,” and that in such condition they live in “continual fear, and danger of violent death.”
But from his armchair in 17th-century England, Hobbes could not help but get a lot of it wrong. People in nonstate societies cooperate extensively with their kin and allies, so life for them is far from “solitary,” and only intermittently is it nasty and brutish. Even if they are drawn into raids and battles every few years, that leaves a lot of time for foraging, feasting, singing, storytelling, childrearing, tending to the sick, and the other necessities and pleasures of life.
In a draft of a previous book, I casually referred to the Yanomamö as “the fierce people,” alluding to the title of the famous book by the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon. An anthropologist colleague wrote in the margin: “Are the babies fierce? Are the old women fierce? Do they eat fiercely?” As for their lives being “poor,” the story is mixed. Certainly societies without an organized state enjoy “no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time, [and] no letters,” since it’s hard to develop these things if the warriors from the next village keep waking you up with poisoned arrows, abducting the women, and burning your huts.
But the first peoples who gave up hunting and gathering for settled agriculture struck a hard bargain for themselves. Spending your days behind a plow, subsisting on starchy cereal grains, and living cheek by jowl with livestock and thousands of other people can be hazardous to your health. Studies of skeletons by Steckel and his colleagues show that compared to hunter-gatherers, the first city dwellers were anemic, infected, tooth-decayed, and almost two and a half inches shorter.78 Some biblical scholars believe that the story of the fall from the Garden of Eden was a cultural memory of the transition from foraging to agriculture: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.” 79
So why did our foraging ancestors leave Eden? For many, it was never an explicit choice: they had multiplied themselves into a Malthusian trap in which the fat of the land could no longer support them, and they had to grow their food themselves. The states emerged only later, and the foragers who lived at their frontiers could either be absorbed into them or hold out in their old way of life. For those who had the choice, Eden may have been just too dangerous. A few cavities, the odd abscess, and a couple of inches in height were a small price to pay for a fivefold better chance of not getting speared.80 The improved odds of a natural death came with another price, captured by the Roman historian Tacitus: “Formerly we suffered from crimes; now we suffer from laws.” The Bible stories we examined in chapter 1 suggest that the first kings kept their subjects in awe with totalistic ideologies and brutal punishments. Just think of the wrathful deity watching people’s every move, the regulation regulation of daily life by arbitrary laws, the stonings for blasphemy and nonconformity, the kings with the power to expropriate a woman into their harem or cut a baby in half, the crucifixions of thieves and cult leaders. In these respects the Bible was accurate. Social scientists who study the emergence of states have noted that they began as stratified theocracies in which elites secured their economic privileges by enforcing a brutal peace on their underlings. 81 Three scholars have analyzed large samples of cultures to quantify the correlation between the political complexity of early societies and their reliance on absolutism and cruelty.82 The archaeologist Keith Otterbein has shown that societies with more centralized leadership were more likely to kill women in battles (as opposed to abducting them), to keep slaves, and to engage in human sacrifice.
The sociologist Steven Spitzer has shown that complex societies are more likely to criminalize victimless activities like sacrilege, sexual deviance, disloyalty, and witchcraft, and to punish offenders by torture, mutilation, enslavement, and execution. And the historian and anthropologist Laura Betzig has shown that complex societies tend to fall under the control of despots: leaders who are guaranteed to get their way in conflicts, who can kill with impunity, and who have large harems of women at their disposal. She found that despotism in this sense emerged among the Babylonians, Israelites, Romans, Samoans, Fijians, Khmer, Aztecs, Incas, Natchez (of the lower Mississippi), Ashanti, and other kingdoms throughout Africa.
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