:up:

If all you are saying is 'It's a pity that we have armies', I agree. But if you want to advocate for the UK decommissioning its armed forces completely, I disagree. Perhaps you are not advocating that, in which case I misinterpreted your subsequent posts and I apologise. — andrewk

I'm saying more than the one, and less than the other. Perhaps I can put it more agreeably to you. As an individual, I see the personal value, as peace and security, in eschewing personal violence and personal weapons, along with my neighbours, in favour of a designated community protection. Generally we get along quite well in the street, but in case the rowdys start hanging around and making trouble, we don't sally forth with our baseball bats, but call the cops. We outsource our defence, and our defence is not just ours, but also that of the rowdys, so we hope and assume that the cops will be even handed in dealing with the situation, and resolve the conflict with the minimum of force.

I think states could do the same thing; outsource their defence to a beefed up UN force. At the moment, every state has its own baseball bat, and it is costly and ineffectual, and breeds violence not peace. It is as though there were half a dozen privatised police forces vying to dominate the streets, and creating mayhem not security.

But I come to this way of thinking by first rejecting the idea that my violence is ok, and only my neighbour's violence is a problem, or that my country's violence is ok, and only my neighbouring country's violence is a problem, and by thinking that personal violence and national violence are not different in kind. Let's, as someone put it, have a global 'monopoly of violence', since we seem to be inescapably violent, and need to police ourselves. If there is only one army, wars will be brief and rare.

The most upsetting thing to me about the celebrations the other day was how similar it was to the enthusiasm shown to one's favourite football team. But this is not a game where someone might break a leg occasionally, but industrialised death and destruction.

I agree with everything in that post. I too would love to see the world attain that state of having a single, trusted, global police force, and I feel uncomfortable at the celebration of national armed forces. Perhaps I'm just more pessimistic than you about the chance of ever getting there from here. I am a gloomy type more often than not, but am quite ready to believe that my pessimism about life is unwarranted. If only I could convert that intellectual belief (that optimism can be justifiable) to a belief of the heart.

So I managed to find a text-only version of the Pinker book you mentioned, and could find the names listed underneath your graph but specific publications were different from the topic, though very much related. Azar Gat is a military historian, Lawrence Keeley looked to do research on prehistoric war -- but the search "White 2011" didn't turn up anything at all, and White is such a generic name I just couldn't figure it out.

So I turn to the Human Security Project. Here's the PDF I found. -- but it cites Pinker.

So I'm guessing this all comes from Pinker. In which case I'd say that he made a pretty graph but it's a little strange to say that the rate of death is superior in measuring violence. Violence isn't just warfare, it's also homicide, incarceration, assault, threats, as well as verbal violence directed at people to hurt them.

Further, I don't see how statehood vs. statelessness is the independent variable in the data given. I mean, we're comparing prehistoric socieities to the Allied War Machine that continues to dominate the world today? How in the world are those even close to one another? Might not the death rate of the total population have something to do more with medical knowledge, the numbers of people that were around, and the closeness of community? (I'd kill for my brother, but I'm less inclined to kill for the jackass in Wyoming who cut me off in traffic)

To be honest it just looks like Pinker picked some convenient looking numbers and arranged them graph-wise to prove his point. I wanted to see the actual research to see if I was in the wrong about that. But that's how it looks to me. It's not like this is a sampling of all stateless nations and all states -- it's just a couple of each to make it look like violence is declining, when violence is measured by the rate of total population death in warfare alone.

But violence is much larger than that, and focusing on the rate is just strange to me. The only reason the rate is lower is because war is won by numbers and supplies -- economies -- and you need people to be pumping your GDP to drop the bombs.


EDIT: Sorry if I'm being harsh. I was feeling frustrated the more I was digging into it all -- I tend to find Pinker irritating just because he wields so much influence, but seems to do so sloppily.