Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

That uptick, however, comes at the end of a vertiginous six-decade plunge. World War II at its worst saw almost 300 battle deaths per 100,000 people per year; it is not shown in the graph because it would have scrunched the line for all subsequent years into a wrinkled carpet. In the postwar years, as the graph shows, the rate of deaths roller-coastered downward, cresting at 22 during the Korean War, 9 during the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and 5 during the Iran-Iraq War in the mid-1980s, before bobbing along the floor at less than 0.5 between 2001 and 2011. It crept up to 1.5 in 2014 and subsided to 1.2 in 2016, the most recent year for which data are available.

Followers of the news in the mid-2010s might have expected the Syrian carnage to have erased all of the historic progress of the preceding decades. That’s because they forget the many civil wars that ended without fanfare after 2009 (in Angola, Chad, India, Iran, Peru, and Sri Lanka) and also forget earlier ones with massive death tolls, such as the wars in Indochina (1946–54, 500,000 deaths), India (1946–48, a million deaths), China (1946–50, a million deaths), Sudan (1956–72, 500,000 deaths, and 1983–2002, a million deaths), Uganda (1971–78, 500,000 deaths), Ethiopia (1974–91, 750,000 deaths), Angola (1975–2002, a million deaths), and Mozambique (1981–92, 500,000 deaths).¹¹

Searing images of desperate refugees from the Syrian civil war, many of them struggling to resettle in Europe, have led to the claim that the world now has more refugees than at any time in history. But this is another symptom of historical amnesia and the Availability bias. The political scientist Joshua Goldstein notes that today’s four million Syrian refugees are outnumbered by the ten million displaced by the Bangladesh War of Independence in 1971, the fourteen million displaced by the partition of India in 1947, and the sixty million displaced by World War II in Europe alone, eras when the world’s population was a fraction of what it is now. Quantifying this misery is by no means callous to the terrible suffering of today’s victims. It honors the suffering of yesterday’s victims, and it ensures that policymakers will act in their interests by working from an accurate understanding of the world. In particular, it should prevent them from drawing dangerous conclusions about “a world at war,” which could tempt them to scrap global governance or return to a mythical “stability” of Cold War confrontation. “The world is not the problem,” Goldstein notes; “Syria is the problem. . . . The policies and practices that ended wars [elsewhere] can with effort and intelligence end wars today in South Sudan, Yemen, and perhaps even Syria.”¹²

Mass killings of unarmed civilians, also known as genocides, democides, or one-sided violence, can be as lethal as wars and often overlap with them. According to the historians Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, “Genocide has been practiced in all regions of the world and during all periods in history.”¹³ During World War II, tens of millions of civilians were slaughtered by Hitler, Stalin, and imperial Japan, and in deliberate bombings of civilian areas by all sides (twice with nuclear weapons); at its peak the death rate was about 350 per 100,000 per year.¹⁴ But contrary to the assertion that “the world has learned nothing from the Holocaust,” the postwar period has seen nothing like the blood flood of the 1940s. Even within the postwar period, the rate of deaths in genocides has juddered down a steep sawtooth, as we see in two datasets shown in figure 11-3.

Figure 11-3: Genocide deaths, 1956–2016

Sources: PITF, 1955–2008:Political Instability Task ForceState Failure Problem Set, 1955–2008, Marshall, Gurr, & Harff 2009; Center for Systemic Peace 2015. Calculations described in Pinker 2011, p. 338. UCDP, 1989–2016: UCDP One-Sided Violence Dataset v. 2.5-2016, Melander, Pettersson, & Themnér 2016; Uppsala Conflict Data Program 2017, “High fatality” estimates, updated with data provided by Sam Taub of UCDP, scaled by world population figures from US Census Bureau. The arrow points to 2008, the last year plotted in fig. 6–8 of Pinker 2011.