Where Are the Better Angels of Our Nature Today?
Eric Paul Nolte
In 2024, September 1 marked the 85th anniversary of the start of the Second World War, if one marks that date as the moment when Hitler unleashed the Nazi war machine on Poland.
Steven Pinker is a celebrated professor of psychology and a researcher on language and cognition. The title of his 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, echoed this famous phrase from Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address.
Pinker argues that deathly violence between groups of humans was vastly worse in the past, going back to primitive humanity. One should read Pinker to get a sense of the actual, appalling scale of this violence.
And yet, Pinker shows that the opinion is now widely held that our times today are more threatening and violent than ever.
Now that the world today is in the midst of wars in Europe between Ukraine and Russia, and a civil war in the middle east between the Palestinians (among others) and the state of Israel, one might say that Pinker is mistaken.
Before anyone accepts the claim that times are worse today than ever, let us examine some facts and figures.
Are things worse today?
Well, compared to what?
Pinker has listed the death toll in the top 21 wars and other conflicts.
At the top of this list of death tolls, in absolute numbers, is the Second World War, in which some 55 million people died, soldiers and civilians.
However, adjusting this rank according to where 55 million stands as a percent of the population at the time of the war, puts this figure as merely the ninth most lethal conflict in history!
The most lethal conflict in history was the An Lushen Revolt in the 8th century, fought within the Tang dynasty in China. There were 36 million dead, but adjusting this number as a percentage of the population would give us a mid-20th century equivalent death toll of 429 million, nearly eight times the casualties of WW-II.
According to the Wall Street Journal (9/17/2024) the war between Ukraine and Russia has resulted in something around a million casualties. Ukraine was said to have suffered around 80,000 dead and 400,000 wounded. Russia’s casualties were listed as around 200,000 dead and 400,000 wounded.
According to the AP’s reporting on August 15, 2024, since the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas out of Gaza, the death toll among Palestinians in the territory has surpassed 40,000, a figure also reported by Hamas health officials in the Gaza,
Palestinians killed in the West Bank: 623.
People killed in Lebanon, around 530.
Israelis killed during the start of the war on October 7th are about 1,200.
According to The Times of Israel, the Israeli Defense Force has named 706 soldiers and security officers killed during the war, a figure updated on September 1, 2024.
The total death toll of the war in Israel is now about 44,000.
Other hotspots in the world include China, where the U.S. is among several countries that have accused the Chinese of committing genocide against the Muslim Uyghur population in the far western province of Xinjiang. More than a million Uyghurs have been incarcerated in detention camps where they have been subjected to ongoing human rights abuses, according to the UN.
Other armed conflicts in the world include something like a wider war in the Middle East (Iran, Syria, Yemen), in Africa (Ethiopia, Sudan, Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso. Think also of Haiti, Armenia-Azerbaijan, the recent fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. And while no open fighting has emerged between the US and China, there are tensions that include worry about China and Taiwan.
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In closing this little essay, it is worth quoting from Pinker’s list of the most devastating conflicts in history.
Before giving us his list, Pinker asks us if we have even heard of all these conflicts. He confesses that he himself had not. He writes:
“… did you know that there were five wars and four atrocities before World War I that killed more people than that war? I suspect that many readers will also be surprised to learn that of the twenty-one worst things that people have ever done to each other (that we know of), fourteen were in centuries before the 20th. And all this pertains to absolute numbers. When you scale by population size, only one of the 20th century’s atrocities even makes the top ten. The worst atrocity of all time was the An Lushan Revolt and Civil War, an eight-year rebellion during China’s Tang Dynasty that, according to censuses, resulted in the loss of two-thirds of the empire’s population, a sixth of the world’s population at the time.”
Pinker’s list makes it clear that today’s wars, indeed, including even the casualties in both world wars, are but a fraction of the deaths from wars in previous times.
We are not hearing very much of this perspective today, and even it were more widely discussed, it might be a small comfort, given that we live in one of the most frightening of times.
Our times are indeed frightening, given all of the insanity in the world, including the righteous vitriol we hear spewing out from so many factions. These voices are not just from dogmatic religious factions but also from the supposedly most enlightened institutions as well. We hear not a little dogmatic lecturing of other flavors, such as Woke Marxism and environmentalism of the kind that aims to take over industrial civilization and hand it over to government central planners.
In an age where we hear muttering in the world about the possibility of hurling nuclear weapons across borders, we are rightly worried today.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if everybody in the world could agree on a single proposition, such as the belief that, normally, a difference of opinion should not be regarded as an unforgivable sin that should be punished by death?
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Pinker’s list gives us first the conflict’s rank, as measured in absolute numbers. Then the cause of the conflict (e.g. “the Second World War.) The next column lists the century; then the death toll in absolute numbers. Then the death toll as a mid-20th century equivalent, adjusted for population, which gives us finally, the Adjusted Rank of the conflict.
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Second World War; 20th Century; 55 million; 55 million; No. 9
Note that World War Two’s 55 million deaths puts it merely as the 9th worst conflict in history, as measured by those deaths as a percentage of the population of the world.
2. Mao Zedong; 20th C; 40 million; 40 million; No. 11
(Mostly government
caused famine)
3. Mongol conquests; 13th C; 40 million; 278 million; No. 2
4. The An Lushan Revolt; 8th C; 36 million; 429 million; No. 1
5. Fall of the Ming Dynasty; 17th C; 25 million; 112 million; No. 4
6. Taiping Rebellion; 19th C; 20 million; 40 million; No. 10
(China)
7. Annihilation of 15th - 19th C; 20 million; 92 million; No. 7
the American
Indians
8. Josef Stalin 20th C; 20 million; 20 million; No. 15
9. Mideast Slave Trade 7th - 19th; 19 million; 132million; No. 3
10. Atlantic Slave Trade. 17th-19th C; 18 million; 83 million; No.8
11. Timur Lenk. 14th - 15th C; 17 million; 100 million; No. 6
(Tamerlane)
[Uzbekistan]
12. British India. 19th C; 17 million; 35 million; No. 12
(Mostly
preventable famine)
13. First World War 20th C; 15 million; 15 million; No. 16
14. Russian Civil War. 20th C; 9 million; 9 million; No. 20
15. Fall of Rome. 3rd - 5th C; 8 million; 105 million; No. 5
16. Congo Free State. 19th-20th C; 8 million; 12 million; No.18
17. Thirty Years War. 17th C; 7 million; 32 million; No. 13
18. Russia’s Time 16th - 17th C; 5 million; 23 million; No. 14
of Troubles
19. Napoleanic Wars. 19th C; 4 million; 11 million; No. 19
20. Chinese Civil War. 20th C; 3 million; 3 million; No. 21
21. French Wars of 16th C; 3 million; 14 million; No. 17
Religion
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2025.0209
