Taming War

Making crime the state's problem also became an element of a larger pacification in human history. Most significant among its effects was the overall decline of pain, cruelty, and violence.

The taming of violence is probably the state's single most signifi­cant accomplishment. But at the same time, the state, like a protec­tion racket, may well also have been the main cause of the violence it then suppressed. As it subdued its subjects at home, it united them in warfare abroad. Domestic peace and outward aggression were flip sides of the state's coin. Yet this was not a hydraulic effect, with pressures reduced in one spot erupting elsewhere. Total violence decreased. Living as we do in the shadow of half a century of world war, it may seem counterintuitive, but violent deaths per capita— including the state's own military acts—have steadily declined over the past five millennia. On that there is scholarly consensus. In dispute remains what the situation looked like ten thousand years ago, in the prestate age of hunter-gatherers. From the behavior of certain primates, from existing human tribes, and from skeletal evi­dence at prehistoric burial sites, some archaeologists and evolution­ary psychologists have concluded that warfare was then sufficiently endemic (killing perhaps a quarter of all males) to have powered the engines of evolution—warlike traits being selected for.⁶⁶ Others have questioned this conclusion, pointing out that the evidence for wide-scale warfare in prehistoric times is still scant.

That warfare eventually grew common is undisputed; the ques­tion is when. Much also hangs on how warfare is defined. Besides eradicating most of the planet's terrestrial megafauna, Homo sapiens may also have had a hand in the extinction of Neanderthals, Den- isovans, Homo floresiensis, and other archaic near-human peoples. Whether that happened through outright aggression or a subtler outcompetition for resources is unclear. By perhaps thirty thousand years ago, Homo sapiens were the lone humanoids on the planet.⁶⁷ Given this possible ur-xenocide, the scholarly debate over warfare among hunter-gatherers thus deals largely with our aggression against ourselves, not our near kin.

The Homo sapien hunter-gatherers of sparsely populated prehis­toric times likely came into contact with each other only sporadi­cally, perhaps meeting up at hunting grounds or for ceremonial purposes. They probably rarely fought over common resources, though this is a guess only. From ten thousand years ago, as with most other aspects of human life then, little evidence of warfare has survived.⁶⁸ But as populations densified and settled, social stratifica­tion multiplied. With the emergence of complex foraging commu­nities, hereditary leaders arose, and the potential for antagonism between now more proximate groups increased. The beginnings of agriculture and domesticated livestock intensified the territoriality of settlement. At some point, moving in search of new resources put groups in conflict with others who were already occupying what only seemed to be empty and yielding territory.⁶⁹ That complex hunter-gatherers were violent seems widely agreed upon. Evidence for warfare increased in the Neolithic (starting ca. 5500 BCE). By the beginning of the Copper Age (ca. 4500 BCE), it was undeniable.⁷⁰

Beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, proto-states began, ordering the affairs of evermore complex, sedentary, agricultural civilizations. Sedentism preceded both widespread grain agriculture and state for­mation by several millennia.

States produced violence, then, but mostly in the sense that the circumstances they were called on to tame would have led to war­fare even in their absence. Proximity, density, and the ability to pro­duce and store valuables that were vulnerable to plunder, such as nuts, grains, textiles, and slaves—all this encouraged raids and wars as a shortcut to wealth without work, though of course not without the cost of armaments, training, and casualties. States, too, fell for this temptation. True, they suppressed violence internally by adju­dicating and policing, but they encouraged violence externally by plundering and conquering neighbors. As tribes and villages became chiefdoms, chiefdoms became states, and states eventually empires, the internal pacifying effect spread, reducing the number of entities in competition and expanding what counted as domestic and thus demilitarized territory. States thus both produced and suppressed violence. Had humanity remained foragers, with Malthusian pres­sures checking their numbers, warfare could perhaps have been sidestepped. But after the shift to agriculture, states and warfare were unavoidable. Having perhaps invented or at least accompa­nied war, states then also became part of subduing violence.

Those scholars who have most forcefully noted the pacifying effect of states compare today's violent-death rates to the rates sup­posedly characteristic of hunter-gatherer societies. Among prehis­toric societies, an average of 15 percent of skeletons examined give evidence of violent death, some of which may have happened in hunts. Violent deaths in the twentieth century, including even those caused only indirectly, range between 1 and 3 percent.⁷³ Compared to stateless societies, states thus successfully suppressed violence.

Living as we do under the state's thumb, it takes an act of his­torical imagination or perhaps a comparison with the turmoil of contemporary failed states to appreciate the effect on our lives of this peaceful ordering. The level of social chaos considered accept­able even as recently as the eighteenth century would be incon­ceivable today, absent utter social breakdown. Intent on plunder, thousand-strong crowds savagely attacked the crews and the police trying to protect them of ships wrecked on the English coast in the eighteenth century. During the Gordon riots of 1780, the mob ran unchecked in central London. After the elections in 1819, promi­nent MPs were pelted with mud in public, and the windows of the rich were broken if they refused the crowd's insistence on candles in them.⁷⁴ Rioting was in effect a tolerated form of public expres­sion, and the authorities were largely unable to do anything about it in any case. Today we accept only much lower levels of public disorder. Outdoor marches and assemblies require official approval and all manner of permits and insurances.⁷⁵ Universal suffrage has made everyone complicit in governing, dramatically raising the bar for legitimate rioting by providing other means of being heard. Enhanced police power, too, has raised the stakes of unrest.⁷⁶ When riots occur, they are often own goals, the poor damaging their own neighborhoods.