War is good for us

At the heart of this work is a startling and improbable statistic and the equally surprising and counterintuitive thesis that flows out of it. We are used to looking back on the 20th century as comfortably the most violent in all human history — the silver medal usually goes to the 14th — but if Ian Morris(a fellow at Stanford University) is to be believed, the century that could wipe out perhaps 50 million to 100 million in two world wars and throw in the gulags, the Cultural Revolution, civil wars, government-orchestrated famine, trench-stewed pandemics and any number of genocides for good measure was, in fact, the safest there has ever been.

If sometime around 7a.m. on 1 July 1916, as you waited to go over the top somewhere along the Somme, you had been tapped on the shoulder and told that you’d never had it so good, you might well have been mildly surprised at the news, but you would have been wrong to be. It would seem from the growing evidence of graves that Stone Age man had something like a 10–20 per cent chance of meeting a violent death, and if you factor in the anthropological evidence of surviving 20th-century Stone Age societies, then, as Morris puts it, Stone Age life was ‘10–20 times as violent as the tumultuous world of medieval  Europe and 300–600 times as bad as mid-20th-century Europe.’

This might all have been sad news for a generation that had embraced the rosy idyll of Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa — she had clearly never watched the Samoan rugby team at play — but assuming that it’s true, the crucial question is why? Morris is the first to acknowledge the provisional and very probably inaccurate nature of the statistical evidence, but as the archaeological finds continue to dispose of any Rousseauian dream of man in his natural and uncorrupted state, Thomas Hobbes is not just back in the game — Morris’s way of writing is infectious — but quite possibly the only game in town.