10.

HOW WE
LEARNED
TO CO-OPERATE

Erika Simon and her husband Helmut puffed and panted, because it was a tough uphill hike, on which they had embarked. They were heading for the summit of Similaun, Austria’s sixth-highest mountain and one of the country’s Oetztal Alps. This was on September 18th, 1991, and these two German hikers had no idea that this trip would lead them to an historic discovery.¹²²

They had now reached the edge of the glacier, and before them was a mass of ice and snow that led up to the 3,606 meter high peak. At this point, they had already been walking for six hours, so they were pretty tired, but their aim had been to reach the summit that day, if at all possible. So they added crampons under their boots to provide sure footing on the ice. Then they set out on the last, but also toughest, part of the trip.

Eventually they reached their goal and, afterwards, they spent the night in a mountain hut with an Austrian couple who they had met at the top. The next day, they climbed to another peak with this couple, then started to head downwards on their own. Shortly after, at 13:30, Helmut and Erika reached a recess filled with snow and melted ice, with a natural rock barrier to one side. As they walked along it, Helmut was annoyed to see something resembling litter in the snow ahead. However, just moments later, Erika cried out, “Look, it’s a human being!” It was a corpse!

Helmut dragged out his camera to take a picture, but Erika protested, as she thought it was disrespectful. However, Helmut argued that if there were relatives, these had a right to see what had happened, and so he took the picture.

But why was there even a corpse here so high in the mountains? It was a strange place to find one, wasn’t it? Had there been a murder? Or was it a hiker, who had become lost or stuck on the mountain in bad weather and died? They did not know, but when they came down to their hotel, they immediately notified the police.

The next day a policeman with a mountain guide arrived at the place where the body had been found and more experts came later. The corpse was then taken to the Forensic Institute in Innsbruck, where the Attorney General immediately opened a file for “criminal case 619/91 against unknown perpetrator”.

However, it didn’t take long before various studies made it clear that the body - which is now known as “Ötzi “ after where it had been found - was a man who had died more than 5,000 years earlier. So the police dropped the criminal case and archaeologists took over.

Their initial investigations showed that, when he died, the man had been approx. 45 years of age and was wearing waterproof shoes of bear fur and a coat, loincloth, hat, trousers made of leather and, outside this, a cloak made of straw. Instead of socks, he had grass in his shoes. He also wore a flint knife, a longbow which was (oddly enough) unfinished (why carry an unfinished bow to the mountain?), a quiver, a goatskin with 14 arrows and a copper axe. His stomach contents showed that his last meal had been deer and that he had previously eaten meat from an Alpine Ibex (a type of goat) and some plants and bread made of einkorn wheat.

The initial assessment of his health before death wasn’t too good. He lacked teeth in his upper jaw but, before the invention of dentistry and given his age, this was hardly surprising. Further studies showed he had broken a rib and nose bone, and light frostbite in one toe. Finally, it was found that he had two pieces of Birch on him, which might have been used to treat intestinal worms.

The cause of death? He had probably been surprised by a sudden snowstorm and then died of hunger and cold. And with that, what started out as the criminal proceedings 619/91 had been brought to a conclusion by the archaeologists.

Five years after the discovery of Ötzi, Oxford University Press published a book that turned the archaeological world on its head. The title was War Before Civilization, and its author was an archaeology professor named Lawrence H. Keeley. As the book’s name indicated, this was about the world before civilization, and Keeley surprised many by clearly demonstrating that this had been far more brutal than many laymen and scientists had previously thought.

Really? A very common view in the West – also among archaeologists – had, for a long time, been inspired by the so-called romantic movement that emerged in Germany in the early 1800s as a reaction against the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and the scientific rationalization of nature. This romanticism was a somewhat modified version of the so-called “Sturm und Drang” movement in the 1760s to 1780s, which were Germans opposed to aestecism, enlightenment, empiricism (the concept of testing and observing nature systematically) and universalism (the belief that some ideas have universal value, irrespective of their origin). Although Romanticism’s strongest foothold had remained Germany, it had spread to the whole of the West, and had continued to capture people’s emotions, as they imagined the simpler life in the past as peaceful. Although the Romantic movement in itself isn’t religious, it uses a narrative that resembles the Genesis narrative of the Old Testament, where people originally lived in happy harmony in the Garden of Eden until Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge, after which they were expelled and everything went haywire.

The romantic view of early life was, in modern times, reflected in various Disney movies, children’s books and in parts of the environmental movement. Philosophers such as Rousseau, and especially many of the modern-age archaeologists, had eagerly described the unspoiled past before civilization as far more harmonious and peaceful than the present. For example, in 1989, amateur anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas published a book called The Harmless People, which was about the African !kung-people (the previously mentioned people talking partly with clicking sounds). This book described how friendly and peaceful they always were.¹²³

But they weren’t harmless. The Canadian anthropologist Richard Borshay Lee, who studied the same people, had a conversation one day with four men in the tribe during which he asked one of them how many giraffes and deer he had killed. Suddenly it occurred to him to ask also how many people he had killed. The answer came promptly: “I killed Debe from Namchoha and Now and Neisi from Gam.” When he asked the next, the reply sounded: “I shot Kushe in the back, but she survived.” The third said, “I shot Kana in the foot, but he lived.”And finally, he turned to the fourth man who said that he had never killed anyone. When Lee then asked, if he had then shot someone, he replied with obvious regret, that he had always missed his shots at people.

So were these “harmless people”?¹²⁴

Hardly. But this is what many wanted to believe about life before civilization. When anthropologist Karl G. Heider visited the Dani tribe in New Guinea for the first time in 1961, he wrote a book called Grand Valley Dani: Peaceful Warriors.¹²⁵ However, having visited them many times later and tried to reconstruct their family histories and causes of death, he had changed his view. His own statistics showed that 29% of tribesmen had been killed by others; typically in war. For comparison, 3-4 % of the world population was killed in World War II, including 8-10 % of Germans and about 4% of the Japanese.

In his book Before the Dawn, Nicholas Wade shows similar examples of how naive some archaeologists have been. For instance, when some found large pebble piles, they were sure it was paraphernalia for boiling water; not armour for slingshots. Other archaeologists who found a significant collection of weapons at a site suggested they were used as decoration; not for warfare. In fact, many claimed that copper and bronze axes were simply a sort of money.

Christy Turner of Arizona State University found the burned, cut bones from 30 Anasazi Indians who he thought were the remains of a cannibal feast. However, this story was rejected by many colleagues who instead suggested other explanations such as the roof having collapsed on their heads. Since then, clear traces of cannibalism have been found in 25 archaeological sites in the American Southwest as well as in Africa, Latin America, Fiji and New Zealand.

In fact, Keeley (the aforementioned author of War Before Civilization) had also held a romantic view of prehistoric life, just like Elisabeth Thomas, Karl Heider and others, but this had gradually changed, as, during repeated excavations, he discovered that residences were protected by large military bulwarks. For example, he noted that the first inhabitants of Jericho had built formidable defences; their first defence wall was at least four metre high (13 feet) and 1.8 meters thick at the base. Inside that was a stone tower, which was at least eight meters high (27 feet). But most remarkable, they had cut a ditch into the rock outside which was nine meters wide (30 feet) wide, and three meters deep (nine feet). They had cut that without metal tools, so by hacking rock away with rock - a quite enormous amount of work which you would only do for a good reason.

Keeley began a systematic reading of archaeological reports from around the world, and especially the analysis of likely causes of death for prehistoric corpses. What he discovered opened his eyes. An example: studies of a 12,000 year old Nubian burial site showed that about half of the dead were killed by other people. In many cases, tribes or entire peoples had been totally eradicated by others in acts of ethnic cleansing or clan vendettas such as among Eskimos and Canadian Indians.

Several reports recounted mass murder scenes that were frozen in time. In a cave in Germany scientists discovered 34 skulls, most of which had been beaten with stone axes, after which the heads had been cut from the body. Keeley also studied reports from meetings between Western residents’ and tribal peoples in recent times, where they discovered young men often were not considered worthy of marriage before they had killed at least one enemy (or simply a member of another tribe).

And then there was an Indian village in Colorado in the US, whose defence wall was almost burned down. Here, the physical objects had been systematically destroyed, and corpses lay scattered in the various rooms of the ruins. Of the total population of about 600, approximately 60% had been killed in a single attack. What were conspicuously missing among the corpses were remains of young women. Why had they not been killed, and what subsequently happened to them? One can imagine only too easily.

Keeley did not only base his studies on archaeology, but also on anthropological observations of contemporary tribal populations. In many cases he could find modern studies that put quite accurate figures on how many killings took place in such communities and how these were done. The conclusion was that 65% of all primitive tribes that had been observed in recent times had been in a constant state of war, and a higher proportion had been at war at least once a year. On average, Keeley found that the death rate in tribal war was about 20 times higher than that in modern warfare. Archaeologist Steven LeBlanc of Harvard University has found similar figures through his own independent study of the same issue.¹²⁶

A study in Arnhem Land in Australia conducted in the late 19th century followed a tribe of Aborigines over a 20-year period. Of approximately 800 men, some 200 were killed over those 20 years.¹²⁷ In another study, this time of Indians on the border between Brazil and Venezuela, missionaries observed that every third man was killed in the war - often in attempts to take slaves.¹²⁸

When Westerners arrived in the current US, they found that local Indians often made wars and raids. For instance, in 1847, Chief Seattle, about whom we will hear more later, organized a surprise attack on neighbouring tribe the Chimakums in an attempt to wipe it out. Together with approximately 150 members of an allied tribe, Seattle and his men waited in hiding outside the village of the chimakums. As a Chimakum family unsuspectingly passed by Seattle’s army, his men fired a series of shots. As this brought many Chimakums to run out to see what had happened, Seattle’s people ran into the Chimakums illage and mowed most of them down in a quick hail of bullets. The survivors were taken as slaves.¹²⁹

It was pretty brutal, and statistics indicate that approximately 87% of the Indian tribes in North America regularly engaged in war, and many had traditions of prolonged torture of prisoners, scalping and cannibalism.

In Europe, many of the oldest finds show signs that people had frequently been hanged, tortured, stabbed or beaten to death. Archaeologists have found an incredibly well-preserved corpse of the 2,000 year old so-called “Lindow man” in England. The man had a fractured skull from a massive blow to the head and had also had his spine broken and his throat cut. In another find, from 2009, archaeologists found, in Alken Enge in Denmark, several hundred bodies that had been hacked to pieces 2,000 years ago.

A significant proportion of violence-related deaths in pre-civilized society came from raids, where a group from one community snuck into another group and killed the men, raped the women and perhaps took slaves from any survivors – similar to what the Vikings later did in Europe. Often they also took souvenirs with them by slicing off scalps, head, genitals or other body parts from victims. It was also popular to take a few prisoners home to the tribe where they could be tortured to death slowly for general amusement.

So what was Keeleys overall conclusion? It was that before civilization, people lived to an average age of 20 years old and approximately one in every three was killed by another human being. This is strong stuff, and it brings us back to the reconstruction of what happened to Ötzi, because it turned out that both the first assumption (that he had died recently) was wrong, as was the second (that he died 5,000 years ago by an accident). Now comes the real version of criminal case 619 /91, and yes, crime was involved.

In 2001- ten years after the discovery of Ötzi and five years after the release of Keeleys groundbreaking book - some archaeologists decided to study Ötzi case again, this time using the newly-developed DNA analysis techniques and X-rays. Their X-ray revealed, to their surprise, an arrowhead wedged in Ötzis left shoulder blade, and they quickly found a matching hole in his coat. The man had been shot!

They also examined his knife, as well as an axe and arrowhead that had been found next to him, for DNA traces. The arrowhead had blood traces from two people, and the knife contained blood from a third person. They also found evidence of fresh wounds on his hand, wrists, chest and head as he died, and they noted that he had a firm grip on his knife to the last, as if feared for his life. On his jacket, they found even more traces of human blood, which was from a fourth person. Further studies of food traces in his stomach and intestines in 2012 showed that he died some distance from his home.

And with all these observations, we can now reconstruct reasonably well what happened in the last days of Ötzi’s extremely harsh life, and it wasn’t pretty: Ötzi had, with an unknown number of others, ventured out to take part in a raid against another tribe. As the blood on his arrowhead and knife indicates, he had managed to kill or wound three tribe members, and he had pulled out his valuable arrow from his victims so it could be reused. But something had gone wrong and there had probably been a fierce battle in which at least one of his friends had been hurt. At the same time, his bow either been destroyed, or he had lost it.

His group had now taken flight, and Ötzi had carried a wounded comrade over his shoulders, hence the blood traces. Maybe he stopped along the way to find a branch to make a new bow, but he had not had time to finish it before new fighting broke out. Here, he had been hit by an arrow in the shoulder and wounded in the hand, wrist, chest and head. He was now slumped and his friends had turned him over to remove the arrows butt sticking out from the back of his shoulder, but the tip was broken off and remained seated. They left him like that, where he died after suffering alone for several days. He was subsequently covered in many layers of snow and stayed there until his body was discovered 5,000 years later – on September 18, 1991.

What do ancient documents tell us about life in ancient times? We can start with the Old Testament, which is a collection of old reports and documents, probably written over a long period presumably beginning around 1400 BC, but based on older oral reports. Here we read the story of Adam and Eve who, after being banished from Paradise, had sons Cain and Abel, which increased Earth’s total population to four people. However, it quickly dropped to three after Cain murdered Abel, bringing the global murder rate to 25 %, (just below the aforementioned ancient average of 30%).

Admittedly, this is a very small statistical sample, but it grows as the tale proceeds. We have, for instance, the story of how Abraham and his nephew, Lot, move to a town called Sodom, where people have rather lively sex lives. This angers God, who burns all men, women and children. When Lot’s wife, who is in the process of fleeing from all of this, makes the mistake of looking back, she is punished with death as well. Later, God asks Abraham to take his son to a mountain, where he shall tie him and then cut his throat and burn him as a gift to his creator.

And so it continues. According to priest and Bible historian Raymund Schwager, the Old Testament contains 600 reports of nations, kings and individuals engaged in brutal violence, including extreme cases of what we would today call terrorism or crimes against humanity.¹³⁰ In short, the whole thing is one giant bloodbath. The librarian Matthew White has calculated how many people are apparently killed in this old tale, and he reached about 1.2 million. This number even excludes the war between Judah and Israel, which itself cost half a million lives. His number evidently also excludes the flood story, where God wiped out all life on Earth except for the eight people who were in Noah’s ark.¹³¹

The tone of this and other early religious stories says a lot about how many people previously perceived their God: namely as a sovereign who demanded complete surrender and that people had few pleasures in life other than revering Him. As history Professor David Fromkin writes, the earlier Sumerians, Egyptians and Greeks viewed their gods as “vain, jealous, foolish, ill-tempered and unfaithful.”¹³² Ancient gods also tended to expect, regardless of religious suit, that their believers should kill non-believers. You should fear gods and constantly ask for forgiveness and make sacrifices, or else.

We should note, in this context, that religion has not always been perceived as a moral movement. The Gods of the Vikings or the Greeks were definitely not moralists who told people that they should be peaceful - quite the contrary. Perhaps Hinduism in India is the first example of a moralistic religion, but many religions, which today are perceived as moral by the followers, did not, in their originally interpretations, inspire similar moral concerns. In early interpretations of Christianity, for example, it seemed perfectly acceptable to engage in religious wars, where counterparties were tortured to death or slaughtered in their thousands. It is only subsequent interpretations of Christianity that changed it into the peace-loving religion that the majority of its contemporary followers consider it to be now.

People’s actual life on Earth was perhaps later more peaceful than described in the Old Testament, but not much. We have already discussed how the Vikings plundered and killed, and the Mongol ruler Genghis Khan, who ruled and conquered in the 1200s, encapsulated the joy of spreading misery with this line: “The greatest happiness is to scatter your enemy, to drive him before you, to see his towns reduced to ashes, to see those who love him shrouded in tears, and to gather into your bosom his wives and daughters.”¹³³

A cultural relativist may note that it sounds like a modern slasher film. The difference is, it wasn’t a film: Genghis Khan really did what he said, and the blood wasn’t tomato sauce.

And that was how it was, all the time and throughout the world. Murder, killings and torture were extremely common, and considered great entertainment; think of the Romans holding gladiatorial games, where people fought to their deaths in front of cheering crowds. After the Romans had been beaten a few times by the Goths, they showed their discontent by catching a lot of their children and driving them into different Gothic villages, where they murdered them in front of people. When Julius Caesar put down a rebellion in Gaul (France), contemporary authors reported that he killed approximately a third of the population and enslaved another third. The Roman Emperor Titus celebrated his brother’s birthday by forcing 2,500 Jews to fight against wild animals in the arenas.¹³⁴

Throughout the history of the mighty Roman Empire, 131 of its emperors, more than a third (33%) were assassinated while in office. Of the rest, 25% abdicated and many of this group were later tortured, executed, imprisoned or had their eyes gouged out. Overall, 58% were killed, while or after they were in this apparently quite dangerous job.¹³⁵

If we compare to life in the Stone Age or in Rome, Europe’s early middle Ages actually appear somewhat more peaceful, even though this was the age of Vikings and, yes, of Genghis Khan attacking from the East.

The world became more peaceful still as the concept of chivalry evolved. Chivalry can perhaps best be described as a pragmatic fusion between the ideals of Christian faith (“Though shall not kill”) and memes of the Nordic warriors (“Though shall kill”). The compromise was that knights could kill enemies of the Church, and the result was the tamed Tetons, if you will, who were called Templers.

However, we should really not overstate how positive chivalry was. We can get an idea by reading the entertaining story Lancelot, which was written somewhere between the 11th and 13th centuries, and recounting events that occurred in the sixth century. Here, one of the knights promises a beautiful princess that he, as a kind of symbolic tribute to her, will rape the most beautiful woman he can find. How sweet! Another knight tells the woman he adores that he will send her the severed heads of other knights he kills in jousting tournaments. That has to beat flowers.

Tournaments and other forms of duels form a story in its own right. If a knight felt offended, and if you were, the only suitable answer was a duel. However, kings, didn’t take part in duels, they just ordered killings. Going forward in history, we all know the story of the English King Henry VIII, who had two of his wives beheaded. At one point, he became jealous because he discovered that one of his wives, Catherine, had apparently previously had a juvenile love. The young man in question was now arrested, and sentenced to be ‘hanged, drawn and quartered’. He was hanged, but not for long enough to die, then his stomach was cut open, while his was still alive. He was then castrated, beheaded, and finally dismembered.

When Henry’s eldest daughter, Mary, became queen, she was soon nicknamed Bloody Mary (now a cocktail made with vodka and tomato juice), due to her mass killings of Protestants, often through burning. Her half-sister, Elisabeth, was imprisoned for a year and their common cousin Lady Jane Grey was executed. When Elizabeth became Queen Elizabeth 1 after Mary’s death, she executed another cousin, Queen Mary Stuart of Scotland (known as Mary Queen of Scots), whose own father had also been executed.

This was quite typical. Criminologist Manuel Eisner from Cambridge University has calculated that one-sixth of all European monarchs were killed between the years 600 - 1800. Awful, but please note that around a quarter of the former Roman emperors were killed, as were those in tribal communities. By the way, after the murders of leaders, in a third of cases the killer took over the throne, which gives us a motive.

Public executions were also popular in times past; so much so, in fact, that French villages in the 16th century bought doomed prisoners from the neighbouring villages so that they could entertain people with the executions. But again, this was nothing compared to the mass killings in the arenas the Romans had enjoyed.

Religious mass murder has been just as common as religion. One of the most brutal examples we know is found in the history of the Aztecs. The Aztecs (based in Central America in the 14th to 16th centuries) enjoyed catching people from other tribes, whom they dragged up to their temples and dismembered alive with sharpened flints, pulling out their hearts while they were still beating. Often, they lowered these people over flames before doing this, but raised them again before they died to maximize their pain. During these ceremonies, the dead bodies were, one-by-one, flung down the temple steps. To round of the ceremony, the heads of the victims were cut off and mounted in neat rows on large racks in the middle of the town in plain sight of men, women and children As a celebration of their rebuilt Tenochtitlan pyramid in 1487 alone, the Aztecs later claimed proudly that they slaughtered 80,400 prisoners in this way - a figure, however, that archaeologists believe is somewhat exaggerated. Excavations have also shown that both the Aztecs (and the Peruvian Inca people before them) regularly sacrificed their own children.

The Europeans have also been responsible for an abundant contribution to these statistics. In the period 1095-1208 the religious Crusades from Europe to the Middle East led to the deaths of approximately one million Muslims and Jews. Correspondingly, Muslims dispatched millions of Christians, primarily during the development of the Ottoman Empire and with the killing of 1-1.5 million Armenians; a mass murder which culminated between 1914 and 1918.

Slavery has also been a regular feature of countless early societies. Specifically, it was common in Africa, where, for example, Nigerians captured slaves and sold them off to Arab buyers. This went on for more than 1,000 years, and the French historian and slave researcher Olivier Petre-Grenouilleau has estimated that the Arabs between the seventh century and the 1920s bought approximately 17 million slaves, of which about 1.5 million died (or were castrated) en route to market - often when they were travelling through the Sahara Desert. The Arabs also took slaves from Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Ireland and the British Isles and, when Europeans powers later grew, the English, Dutch, Danes, Portuguese, Spanish and others started doing the same, exporting them to South America or Africa.

Is there a common feature in all of this? To find the answer, we should look to scientist Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and later Harvard University, who has achieved academic superstar status. In 2011, Pinker published his book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined which, over more than about 800 pages filled with charts, tables, and references, provides extensive documentation to show that the human tendency to engage in violence has been declining for several thousand years and that this decline is extreme. One of Pinker’s main conclusions - which he supported by a gigantic body of statistics - is that as civilization progresses, its propensity for violence declines, and this phenomenon is seen in a variety of forms of violence, in all cultures and among all races, and it has been persistent throughout history.¹³⁶

But why?

One of Pinker’s explanations for the decline in violent tendency is so ordinary that it could easily be overlooked, namely that people in times past would often have been quite repulsive. Like Ötzi, they would often be missing teeth, they often smelled pretty horribly, and they would very often have fungus, lice, fleas and worms. In such a situation, it is perhaps not surprising that people did not feel much empathy for others unless they knew them personally, as friends or family members. In his book, Pinker gives an example of how a manual of manners from medieval times described the standards of performance:

“Don’t foul the staircases, corridors, closets, or wall hangings with urine or other filth. • Don’t relieve yourself in front of ladies, or before doors or windows of court chambers. • Don’t slide back and forth on your chair as if you’re trying to pass gas. • Don’t touch your private parts under your clothes with your bare hands. • Don’t greet someone while they are urinating or defecating. • Don’t make noise when you pass gas. • Don’t undo your clothes in front of other people in preparation for defecating, or do them up afterwards.”

Certainly, this is not bad advice, but the fact that it was necessary to voice it provides a clue about how people often behaved at the time.

Boredom could also have been a factor. Unless you were a soldier or participated in marauding gangs like the Vikings, you would perhaps, over your whole lifetime, never travel more than a few miles from your birthplace. Every day would have been almost identical to the last and, in the evenings, all but the richest people lacked light except, possibly, a fireplace, which is why they may have been bored stiff. But if they did venture out, there were no hotels and no tourist industry or banks to change your money. No, you lived off the land, which easily gets violent, if that land is somebody else’s.

A third possible explanation for our ancestors’ extreme violence may simply be that most of them experienced a lot of misfortune in their lives. To start with, the majority of their children died during childhood and there were regular epidemics that wiped out half the inhabitants of villages. If children left home, parents would very likely never see them again and, add to that, regular famine, wars, pain and and hardship. All this was brutal, and violence and suffering hardens the soul.

Superstition also had an effect. Between the years 1450 and 1750 somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 alleged witches were executed in Europe and the US - most of them by public hanging or burning.

A fifth explanation could be the role of early religions. Given the many terrible experiences most people had during their lives, it could appear as if the gods regularly demanded sacrifice, so the best solution was to sacrifice others rather than yourself. If somebody has to do it, needn’t be you!

Widow-burning was also common. As the British colonized India, they spent many years battling the local traditions of burning dead men’s wives alive with the corpses of their dead husbands.

We can imagine many more explanations, including so-called “democide”: demonstrating personal power through murder. A description of the British colonial life in India says the following:

“A party given by the Mogul governor of Surat, the very first British settlement, was rudely interrupted when the host fell into a sudden rage and ordered all the dancing girls to be decapitated on the spot, to the stupefaction of his English guests.”¹³⁷

Perhaps the guy was simply mad, but to assassinate your subjects in front of prominent guests has been a strategy used throughout history - it is the ultimate demonstration of power.

One last important explanation of violence from the past is presumably that the most violent members of some primitive societies often had more children, as we previously saw in Yanomami tribe in Brazil, where murderers had many more children than non-murderers. So there was a genetic selection pressure in favour of sociopaths and sadists. Even after farming had arrived, the richest people would have been the biggest landowners, and they or their ancestors would typically have gained this land through violent batlle. These people would have the most surviving children and they passed on their aggressive genes in this way. However, as trade gained ground and provided more riches, it was traders who had most surviving children, and this supported genes for abilities in co-operation.

These elements can explain past violence, but why has the trend been downwards as Western civilization developed and spread? The obvious partial explanation is, of course, that people have become more attractive, experience fewer personal tragedies, are less bored, less superstitious and have more peaceful interpretations of their religions. And murderers no longer have the most children.

Something else has also been important: the shift from hunting to farming means that people became stationary rather than nomadic. In 2000, the US economist Mancur Lloyd Olson introduced a theoretical framework of government, which he divided into anarchy, tyranny and democracy.¹³⁸ Anarchy was the worst, because there you had roving bandits such a Genghis Kahn or the early Vikings, who would steal rape and ravage without any inhibitions whatsoever. A tyrant would also steal and perhaps more than that, but since he was a “stationary bandit” he had an incentive to encourage some degree of economic success, just like a farmer eats most of his corn but leaves a bit to sow for next year. A stationary bandit does not like that his subjects fight each other, as this hurts the economy and may escalate and bring himself in danger. So there is less violence in stationary societies than among nomads, and it should be added to this that it is also easier for a nomad to run away after committing a crime than for a farmer to do this as he loses his farm if he runs. Having something to lose can be a make people more peaceful and the more they have, the more peaceful they will be.

Furtunately, the stationary bandit tends to evolve as Thomas Hobbes hoped, so that states develop better systems to prevent crime. Steven Pinker calculated some amazing statistics around this link: When tribal societies unite to form primitive states, violence falls to approximately. 1/5 of its former level, and when these states again developed into modern nations, it falls once again to 1/30 of that, so the overall decrease from the primitive society to modern, fully civilized state involves a decline in violence to 1/150 of what it was originally.¹³⁹ So the citizens give up some of their freedom to the state, but violence falls by more than 99% as a consequence, and being free from violence is presumably freedom at its very best.

However, while dictators seek to maintain inner peace, they often feel little or no personal concern about starting a an external war, and the concept of maintaining a constant threat from external enemies is a great internal power tool - just think of North Korea or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

When there is a further shift to democracy, things get better still. In a democracy, it is the ordinary people who ultimately make decisions and they rarely see personal benefit in participating in war; rather the contrary.

Other explanations must also be included: When society grows richer, people have fewer children, and the fewer children you have, the less willing you are to send a son to war. People also grow older, and older people are more peaceful. And women gain more power, which again leads to greater peace.

We should not ignore the fact that war has actually, to some degree, played a role in creating peace, since winners of wars typically create peace within the area they have conquered, similar to Pax Romana. In other words, while empires may be rough at the edges (acting as roving bandits), they are typically peaceful inside, where the bandits are stationary.¹⁴⁰

The final reason why people have become more peaceful is the introduction of rationality and science. As previously mention, with science you can resolve disputes about what is truth simply by testing it scientifically.

The phenomenon whereby people become more peaceful is a part of what is often called the The Civilizing Process after a book written about it in 1939 by German sociologist Norbert Elias.¹⁴¹ The timing of his book was beond awful, because a very uncivilized World War broke out shortly after the book’s release, but the message is very relevant anyway.

As Elias pointed out, when civilization evolved, violent, self-important, ego-defensive and violent people fared worse, while co-operative people fared better. So the ancestors of wild and uninhibited Vikings and Teutons were (sometimes) knights (think Lancelot); and perhaps their ancestors were gentlemen (think James Bond), who again may have been replaced by modern office workers. Without otherwise comparing, this process does have clear parallels to the way wolves, through co-operation, with humans have turned into dogs.

We have previously discussed how the process of creating a civilization largely consists of separating things. Now here is another example: Elias argued convincingly that Europe’s prevailing culture of chivalry (which lasted from approximately 1000 to 1500) was dominated by a self-image, centered on personal honour and dignity. If you were contradicted, this was not just seen as an attack on your ideas, but on you as a person. It was an insult, in other words, and it therefore had to be avenged with violence. And this again leads to vendettas, sometimes endlessly, over generations and between families, tribes, nations and religions.

In the Middle Ages, some of these vendettas translated into formal duels, which was actually a step towards greater civilization, as it could break endless revenge cycles. But duels still represented personification of reasoning which, apart from leading to violence, also prevented dialogue and creativity.

However, eventually the culture changed so that arguments became more de-personalized. This meant that the previous honour/shame/revenge complex was gradually replaced with peaceful dialogue and often humour. Already the citizens of Athens had, as an early example of this separation process, developed the concept of “politics” whereby one could discuss society and its management without necessarily discussing the leaders themselves. Each idea then had to stand or fall on its own merits.

This was an extremely useful meta-idea, as it facilitated debate and thus creativity. The gradual dismantling of the honour culture during the Mediaeval Age inspired more humour. In the West today, it is strictly forbidden to discriminate against people because of religion, sexuality or race, but there is a clear exception to these rules; you can say more or less anything, if it is delivered in the form of humour.

Humour is often the pressure relief valve that can be used to deal with defeat and weakness in a peaceful manner, but it also makes it more difficult for people to be fanatics. Because of its immense cultural usefulness and the free joy it brings (laughing is even healthy), it has therefore gradually developed into a higher art form with styles such as sarcasm, irony, farce, gallows humour and so on. Irony is a good way of preventing fanaticism, self-irony is an effective vaccine against shame, and humour can generally replace hatred and anxiety that may otherwise block innovation.

Many other phenomena were separated. Today, in the West, you can discuss almost anything without thinking about whether it is accepted by the State, the Church, your boss or family elders, because opinions are separated from authority.

This cultural trait is probably more unusual than many of the West’s inhabitants fully understand. In many other cultures, Western humour is often perceived as incomprehensible or offensive if it insults authorities or deals with taboo subjects. In countries with cultures without a tradition of irony it is impossible to admit publicly that you have made a mistake or do not have the answer to a question, as it would cast shame upon oneself and perhaps even on one’s family, tribe, religion or country. Ayatollah Khomeini, for instance, was strongly against laughter and explained why: “Allah did not create man so that he could have fun. The aim of creation was for mankind to be put to the test through hardship and prayer. An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious.”¹⁴² For this reason, there are still societies in Islam where it is frowned upon if people laugh out loud, and that may especially go for women.

It should mentioned that some early interpretations of Christianity held similar views, which are described in Umberto Eco’s book The Name of The Rose, where munks are searching in secret for Aristole’s allegedly lost treatise on comedy. The Christian view in some corners was that you should not laugh at anything, since it all was Gods creation and thus not funny.

Evidently, the Western concept of de-personalization is not always adhered to and, especially if people have weak arguments in a debate, you may see them “get personal”. But generally people accept that the proper way is to “play the ball, not the man”, and that is why we often start a critique with the phrase “With all due respect ...” .The implication here is: “I respect you, but not your ideas.” Furthermore, we might add “disarming” humour, as we often call it.

So we have developed a set of highly-effective memes for the peaceful and respectful exchange of ideas that stimulate innovation without involving duels or axe murders. In reality, this is a clear parallel to the depersonalization that happened much earlier with the introduction of trade. Once the personal issues were separated out, the number of win-win transactions exploded and creativity blossomed.

It is very likely that the start of the 21st century is the most peaceful point so far in human history. And the century before it was - even in spite of its two World Wars and Mao and Stalin’s mass killings - far more peaceful than the Middle Ages. They were even more peaceful than the century before, which involved the Napoleonic wars, countless colonial wars, the American Civil War, the horrifying Taiping rebellion, and much more. The Taiping rebellion alone killed at least 20 million people which, adjusted for the world’s much smaller population, makes it comparable to World War II, whereas the Napoleonic Wars alone matches WWI, when adjusted.

Now, as Pinker points out, war and raids are not the only forms of violence. There are also, for example, piracy, honour killings, ritual executions, ethnic cleansings, civilian murders, fights, rape, slavery, conscious cruelty and discrimination against people because of their race, gender or sexual orientation that can be viewed as emotional violence.

But all of this has declined as civilizing processes progressed. In Europe, for example, virtually all previous dictatorships from after World War II, such as in Spain, Greece, Portugal and Eastern Europe, have now been replaced by democracies, and the same is true of many countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia. Furthermore, racial hatred has become increasingly rare, e.g. fewer and fewer whites in the U.S. express reluctance to have black neighbours, and the country has even elected a black president (Obama) - twice!

Here are two important correlations: we grow more peaceful when we trade more and also when we get richer. As previously mentioned, the predominant way of getting rich in past times was extractive and based on win-loose transactions. It was to take other people’s land, buildings or women by force. This would normally involve hiring mercenaries, but these would often live partially from looting after conquests, so once you had them, they expected action.¹⁴³

In modern society, success comes predominantly from being able to offer people something they are willing to pay for or which somebody else will sponsor. We have all heard about concerts for peace, and that’s great, but surely global investment and trade is the biggest peacemaker, because it requires co-operation and it gives you something to lose if you attack others. In fact, studies show that the nations that take part in a lot of foreign trade are less likely to engage in war than isolationist nations.¹⁴⁴ Demonstrating for world peace is unlikely to achieve it, but negotiating free trade agreements might.

Nations that trade a lot tend to become richest, and Benjamin M. Friedman of Harvard University has, in studies of the US, UK, France and Germany, identified that when there was economic growth in these nations, they became more open, tolerant, fair, rational, moral and democratic, and they tolerated more social and geographical mobility. For example, it was in such boom times that Germany was united, that the US introduced many civil rights, and that the UK launched university educations and introduced women’s suffrage. It was also in boom-times that we have seen taboo-breaking movements focused on freedom, such as the “hippie”, “yuppie” and “geek”movements.¹⁴⁵ When we grow richer we become more fun, more experimental, more tolerant and more peaceful.

Corresponding trends can be seen in developing countries. Development expert and Oxford economics professor Paul Collier has shown that the incidence of war and civil war in poor countries falls when they enjoy economic growth. People become increasingly intolerant and unpleasant to one another when an economy stagnates or starts to decline. If a poor country experiences declining incomes, it will typically attract dictatorial regimes and rising corruption, crime and superstition.¹⁴⁶ It was in bad economic times that the richer countries saw the beginning of Ku Klux Klan, the growth of protectionism, organized anti-Semitism, Nazism and fascism.

As for the poor countries, Collier tried to find statistical correlations that could explain the frequency of civil wars. He studied political repression, colonial history, internal income gaps and many other reasons for civil war that are often given in the political debate. He could not find any correlation with any of those variables. Nor was ethnic diversity a statistically-valid explanation. For example, there has been an almost constant civil war-like situation in Somalia, which has one of the world’s most ethnically homogeneous populations.

However, what he did find was a very clear correlation between civil war and economic growth: The richer a country is and the faster its wealth grows, the lower its risk of civil war. The statistics are simple: a doubling of the level of income halves the risk of civil war. As an example, it is those Muslim nations that have had the greatest absolute or relative economic decline, that have seen growing trends of violence and terror, if not outbreaks of civil wars such as in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Sudan, Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria, Libya, Egypt and Somalia. Similarly, there is a clear negative correlation with the economic growth rates. Statistically, Collier has found that the average poor country has a 14% chance of starting a new civil war over a given five-year period. If the country has an economic growth rate of 3%, however, this risk is 12%. If the growth rate is 10%, the risk of civil war falls to 3%. But when, instead of growth, the economy declines by 3%, the risk of civil war rises to a horrifying 17%. Since most developing countries after the 1980s has shifted to market economic systems, their income levels and growth rates increased significantly, and therefore there are fewer civil wars.

There is another statistical method for predicting the risk of an outbreak of war or civil war; the proportion of the population which is made up of young men and, especially, young unemployed men – the so-called “youth bulge”. If the latter is more than 30% of a country’s population, the risk of an outbreak of some kind of war has historically been almost 90%.

However, the civilizing process following economic growth is also a cure here, as one of the most predictable effects of wealth growth is declining birth rates, and this counteracts - with some delay - youth unemployment among men.

Let us conclude: Western civilization has many opponents who argue that it has made the world more violent and dangerous. For this reason, they think like the German Sturm und Drang romantics and yearn for a more primitive, pre-civilized society with less technology, wealth and globalisation. But they are wrong, and this is important. Life before civilization was really “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”, as Hobbes put it so well, and life without civilization today is not much better. The West’s creativity has made life safer and more peaceful; not vice versa. It has tought us how to co-operate. It has done this because it has:

Stimulated genetic self-domestication

Made people healthier and more attractive to look at (and better smelling), which increases respect for the lives of strangers

Given people more contentment in life, reducing their boredom

Reduced the amount of horror people experience in their lives, which has made them less hardened to violence

Moved from dominance by roving bandits to the more peaceful stationary bandits and finally to the even more peaceful democracy

Reduced the prevalence of dogmatic religion and superstition

Lead to falling birth rates, which stimulated increased reluctance to send children to war

Resulted in a greater proportion of older people, who are naturally less violent.

Given more power to women, who are also less violent

Introduced the scientific method for solving conflictingviews on truth

Enabled more international trade and global investments, which make people more peaceful

Genetically selected peaceful and co-operate people

Replaced the concepts of honour and revenge with respectful debate and disarming humour

Endowed higher economic growth and prosperity which make people more satisfied with their lives and therefore also more peaceful

In general, caused less population growth, thus reducing excess of aggressive and unemployed young men

All this is because of a combination of Robert Wright’s competitive advantage of being co-operative, Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan as protector of peace, Norbert Elias’ civilizing process and Adam Smith’s egoistic pursuits of peaceful win-win transactions. Co-operation taught us to become creative, and creativity tought us to co-operate.