Steven Pinker, THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE, post 4

Subtitled “Why Violence Has Declined”
(Viking, Oct. 2011, xxvii + 802pp, including 106pp of notes, references, and index.)

Here, a full eight years after I began, I’ll finish posting my outline and notes on Steven Pinker’s 2011 book. This is not, I stress again, a dry treatise about rates of violence over the centuries, but rather virtually a history of the human race, considering how the forces that have changed it have brought about a more peaceful and enlightened world. (And his almost-as-substantial follow-up book, ENLIGHTENMENT NOW, 2018, extends this book’s case.)

If there’s a grand theme of the book I can boil down into one sentence, it’s not about violence per se, it’s about how forces we would now call progressive have, throughout history, improved the human condition, and that these are forces that many conservatives to this day resist.

Earlier:

A couple key quotes from early in the book are posted here, at the bottom of the page.

Post 1 has some more quotes, and the outline of the book from the Introduction.

Post 2 covers part of Chapter 1, “A Foreign Country,” summarizing examples of violence from Homer, The Old Testament, and the New Testament.

Post 3 covers the rest of Chapter 1, from medieval knights to early modern Europe (with violence in Shakespeare and Grimm), honor culture with duels, and the decline of martial culture in the 20^th century. Then Chapter 2 is about “The Pacification Process,” in which the motivations for violence were more-or-less solved by Hobbes’ “Leviathan,” a government that retained a monopoly on the use of force. Chapter 3 is about “The Civilizing Process,” how movements into cities decreased violence, how primitive cultures of honor gave way to cultures of dignity, as people adopted greater self-control and empathy in order to live together in larger and larger groups. And why violence persists in some social classes, why it rose in the 1960s and decreased in the 1990s, and why the perceived coarseness of modern life is a sign of progress, not social decay.

—

What’s notable about this next chapter, that describes the kinds of violence humans have committed on each other, and the reforms that led to their decline, is how many of those reforms modern conservatives still denounce.

Part 4: The Humanitarian Revolution

Voltaire: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

• Author begins by describing a museum of torture, in Italy, with a range of devices that were common in the Middle Ages. Their use was not hidden, as is torture in modern times. Quote from p132.2:
  • Medieval Christendom was a culture of cruelty. Torture was meted out by national and local governments throughout the Continent, and it was codified in laws that prescribed blinding, branding, amputation of hands, ears, noses, and tongues….
• p132.7:
  • Most of the infractions that sent a person to the rack or the stake were nonviolent, and today many are not even considered legally punishable, such as heresy, blasphemy, apostasy, criticism of the government, gossip, scolding, adultery, and unconventional sexual practices.
• And torture-executions were popular entertainment. Nor were such practices limited to Europe; 133.7: “all of the first complex civilizations were absolutist theocracies which punished victimless crimes with torture and mutilation.”
• This chapter about how things have changed and why. It happened beginning in the Age of Reason in the 17^th century, and crested with the Enlightenment at the end of the 18^th. Some of this progress came about through explicit arguments; some by changes in sensibilities: people began to sympathize with others, were no longer indifferent to their suffering. “A new ideology coalesced from these forces, one that placed life and happiness at the center of values, and that used reason and evidence to motivate the design of institutions. The new ideology may be called humanism or human rights, and its sudden impact on Western life in the second half of the 18^th century may be called the Humanitarian Revolution” p133.7
• Even now some sneer at the Enlightenment; some wish for the return of the “moral clarity of medieval Catholicism”… but recall the horrors which the Enlightenment put to an end.
• This happened around two moments in history: the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789; and in the mid-20^th century, with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the various rights revolutions that followed.
• Several sections then review institutionalized violence through history:
  • P134: Human sacrifice: “the killing of an innocent person to slake a deity’s thirst for blood.” Bible stories. The practice died out among the Jews, “but it survived as an ideal in one of its breakaway sects, which believed that God accepted the torture-sacrifice of an innocent man in exchange for not visiting a worse fate on the rest of humanity. The sect is called Christianity.” P134.8
  • It has been seen in all the major civilizations; many examples. ‘Burial sacrifice,’ in which the retinue and harem of an Indian king would be buried along with him, lasted until 1829. “What were these people thinking?” author asks; one idea is that pain and death were so common among ancient peoples, that life was not much valued. What kind of god would create such a world? A sadistic god…
  • In most places human sacrifice died out on its own; people observed that such sacrifices did not accomplish anything, or as life became more predictable, lives became more valuable.
  • Supernatural explanations for misfortune shifted from sadistic gods to individuals wielding supernatural forces: witches. Certain mental biases lead people to perceive causes where none are present; and it can be handy to blame a despised in-law, say, for some misfortune. Witch hunts are eventually vulnerable to common sense; e.g. how anyone can be made to confess to anything through sufficient torture. The last woman burned as a witch in Europe was in 1749.
  • Two pressures at work: one, that things just happen without being due to the designs of conscious beings (p139.4: “A great principle of moral advancement, on a part with ‘Love thy neighbor’ and ‘All men are created equal,’ is the one on the bumper sticker: ‘Shit happens.’”)
  • And that increased value of human life and happiness…
  • P139: Violence against blasphemers, heretics, and apostates: A danger of unverifiable beliefs is the temptation to defend them by violent means, p140t:
    • People become wedded to their beliefs, because the validity of those beliefs reflects on their competence, commends them as authorities, and rationalizes their mandate to lead. Challenge a person’s beliefs, and you challenge his dignity, standing, and power. And when those beliefs are based on nothing but faith, they are chronically fragile. No one gets upset about the beliefs that rocks fall down as opposed to up, because all sane people can see it with their own eyes. Not so for the belief that babies are born with original sin or that God exists in three persons or that Ali was the second-most divinely inspired man after Muhammed. When people organize their lives around these beliefs, and then learn of other people who seem to be doing just fine without them – or worse, who credibly rebut then – they are in danger of looking like fools. Since one cannot defend a belief based on faith by persuading skeptics it is true, the faithful are apt to react to unbelief with rage, and may try to eliminate that affront to everything that makes their lives meaningful.
  • Estimates of the human toll of Christian persecutions, using studied by R.J. Rummel:
    • The Crusades from 1095 to 1208: 1 million
    • 13^th century Albigensian heresy, by the Cathars of southern France: 200,000; they were exterminated by the king of France
    • The Inquisitions of the 15^th to early 18^th centuries: 350,000
    • Protestants, after the Reformation, who were persecuting and persecuted others themselves; Martin Luther; Calvinism: the European Wars of Religion, 1520 to 1648: 5.75 million (given population at the time, in the range of WW II deaths)
  • These wars ended with the Peace of Westphalia, in 1648, as local princes were allowed to decide themselves if they were Protestant or Catholic.
  • What caused this to happen at this time? Perhaps a higher value on human life; a shift from valuing souls to valuing lives; the beginning of the Age of Reason; the awareness that human knowledge is fragile, including about the divine; the absurdity of different people being certain of their mutually incompatible beliefs, 144t. Arguments by Spinoza, Milton, Newton, Locke; reflected in Shakespeare, Bacon.
  • P144, Cruel and Unusual Punishments
  • Even without superstition and dogmas as pretexts for torture, cruel punishments continued because people enjoyed them! Cat burning, watching a man be quartered. Pillorying, flogging, were public spectacles.
  • Things began to change in the 18^th century, as Voltaire and others attacked them, and Christians as hypocrites for pursuing them. A 1764 bestseller railed against excessive punishment; the church banned it. Yet rates of judicial torture fell in the 18^th century, to virtually zero by 1850, p149.
  • P149, Capital Punishment.
  • Even in the early 1800s, there were hundreds of capital offenses; estimates are that from Jesus to the 20^th century, 19 million people were executed for trivial offenses. By now virtually all nations have abolished it, and the number of offenses has plummeted for the few that remain. The US opposed a UN moratorium against it, though many states within the US have in fact abolished it. And the means have changed: rather than burning at the stake, or hanging, gas, electric, or lethal injections are used. Where once it was thought such punishments were necessary to maintain a functional society, as it’s turned out, we get along just fine without them, 153t.
  • P153, Slavery. For most of history, slavery was the rule, not the exception: see Bible, Athens, Rome, the Slavs in the Middle Ages. Africans enslaved other Africans; the European slave trade killed some 1.5 million. A few nations didn’t abolish it until the ‘60s, or 1980.
  • Slavery was better than massacre. Why did it stop? Both economic and humanitarian concerns. Britain outlawed it in 1807. Locke wrote about it in 1689. Still, slavery was defended because Bible, 155; these defenses withered as stories were told, from experience or in fiction (Frederick Douglass; Harriet Beecher Stowe). US abolished in in 1865, the 13^th Trend was from 1800 to now, chart p156.
  • Similar was the practice of debt bondage, where debtors were thrown in prison; abolished in the US by 1840, in Europe by 1870s. Other ways were found, e.g. bankruptcy, to deal with penury.
  • Today slavery remains only in a few isolated areas, as ‘trafficking’.
  • Two other violent trends remained common: tyranny, and wars between major states.
  • P158, Despotism and Political Violence. Governments, almost by definition, are institutions that hold monopolies on the legitimate use of violence. All early complex states were despotisms in the sense that the heads of their societies could murder subjects arbitrary and with impunity: examples of many cultures, of Henry VIII, of King Solomon, Scheherazade.
  • And most transfers of power were through political murders.
  • But this declined by the 17^th and 18^th The idea came that government was like a gadget, a piece of technology that could be tweaked to bring about desired results. Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, and others theorized about this; they influenced the American founders, who established the separation of powers, since men are not angels; they gave the government a mission statement limiting its powers, and encouraging commerce; and created a way to make it upgradable. English implementation was weak; French disastrous; US flawed.
  • P161, Major War. Through most of history, conquest was what governments did. Some people had qualms, as far back as 5^th century BC in China, Mozi; Isaiah p162; Jesus preached a pacifist movement that became militant when Constantine adopted it for the Rome.
  • There were two reasons war persisted. First, the other-guy problem: if you gave up war, you were at the mercy of other nations that hadn’t. And second, militant forces within a country could defeat official pacifism.
  • Satire served to mock war; Falstaff; Swift in Gulliver’s Travels. Pascal, Voltaire.
  • Then appeared theories of ‘gentle commerce’, that it was better for nations to trade and become rich rather than plunder each other. Quakers; Kant. Kant proposed three conditions, in 1795 “Perpetual Peace”, for nations to overcome human nature and achieve peace: democracy; an international league of nations; and world citizenship, so people could move freely from nation to nation.
  • P168, Whence the Humanitarian Revolution? It’s not easy to explain how and why these changes took place. Sometimes through moral agitators and public debate, sometimes as public sensibilities changed, as e.g. the idea of smoking in offices and classrooms in recent decades.
  • The effect was that people reacted more about the suffering of other living things. But what exogenous change brought it about?
  • One candidate is the Civilizing Process, which entailed hygiene and manners; people became less repulsive. But these changes occurred centuries before, 170.6.
  • Or, people’s lives improved. This too has problems, p171.
  • Another candidate is that book production rose sharply in the 1600s, and literacy spread. Novels became popular. People could read by themselves, and could read secular material. Explorations and discoveries of the scientific revolution gave people more to read about. The ‘pokey little world of village and clan’ gave way to riches of ideas, p174b.
  • P175, The Rise of Empathy and the Regard for Human Life. Peter Singer has argued that over the course of history, people have enlarged the range of beings whose interests they value. Why? Perhaps the rise of literacy. Reading is a technology for perspective-taking, 175.3, for seeing another’s viewpoint, and thence reflecting that one’s own life and ways of doing things aren’t necessarily the only ways. Novels became mass entertainment; they were about ordinary people, not about the heroes or saints in earlier epics. [[ this is a key point ]]
  • Three bestsellers in particular, in the 1700s, were about female protagonists; they drove grown men to tears. The clergy denounced them, of course, 176b [ with complaints that echo religious scolds of today ].
  • And in later centuries, many novels and memoirs triggered social change – list p177: Stowe, Dickens, many others.
  • P177, The Republic of Letters and Enlightenment Humanism. These technologies led to a global campus, a public sphere, what today we achieve through the internet, what in a 1988 were identified as jet travel, telephones, and the xerox machine, but which two centuries ago were present in the sailing ship, the printed book, and the postal service. Information and people became portable. New ideas came from interaction with others. No one person is smart enough to figure out anything worthwhile from scratch, 178m. Newton stood on shoulders. Bizarre ideas suffered exposure, as to sunlight. Ideas were tested and debated.
  • This took place especially in cities—e.g. Amsterdam. Urbanization and democracy. Tyrants understand that speech must be suppressed.
  • And that so many violent institutions faded within a short span, was due to the philosophy that emerged of ‘enlightenment humanism’ 180.7, in which the spread of ideas led to a process of moral discovery.
  • Outline of this process, 180.9ff: First, skepticism. Dismiss faith, revelation, tradition, dogma, authority, 180b. Second, we are conscious, and committed to reason; we can’t *prove* anything, but we are entitled to have *confidence* in some beliefs about it. Thus science. People are still subject to passions and illusions; but they are capable of reason. Famous Lincoln quote, about fooling people.
  • We can infer that other people reason and feel in the ways we do; and thus we can conclude there is a universal human nature, and this is the basis for morality (not any arbitrary regulations written in a holy book 182b). We can further deduce several things: that a government is good because anarchy is worse, and so on: the result is ‘humanism’ because the flourishing of humans is the one value that cannot be denied. This may be banal and obvious? Because we are children of the Enlightenment. This idea is not necessarily atheistic, but it doesn’t not require any supernatural input, 183m, nor does it require secular ideas like prestige of nation or race, manliness, honor, etc.
  • Still these ideas have not spread across the world. There are two reasons this philosophy has been rejected across much of the world.
  • P184, Civilization and Enlightenment. After the Enlightenment came the French Revolution. Cause and effect? Some think so, though such revolutions have been common in history. But the first counter-enlightenment came with thinkers like Edmund Burke, who held a tragic view of human nature: that civilization exists to keep individuals from falling into anarchy, and social institutions, no matter how contingent or indefensible, exist for that reason. And people aren’t smart enough to create a society from first principles. He went too far, but he had a point; democracy is difficult to impose in developing societies that have not outgrown superstitions, warlords, and feuding tribes, 185m.
  • Americans, on the other hand, understood about human nature enough to build guards into the Declaration and Constitution.
  • Pinker’s earlier book The Blank Slate argues that these two extreme versions of human nature – a tragic vision resigned to its flaws, and a utopian vision that denies it exists – are both wrong. The better way is through science, which uses rationality to continually revise.
  • P186, Blood and Soil. A second counter-enlightenment movement came in the Germany: the idea that individuals exist only as part their culture with its myths and symbols. Traditional beliefs serve a purpose, and cosmopolitanism undermines this purpose; thus rationality is out, romanticism, intuition, are in. To these thinkers, violence is not a problem to be solved. These ideas led to much sublime music and poetry. And also to militant nationalism known as ‘blood and soil,’ romantic militarism, Marxist socialism, and national socialism.

Ch5, The Long Peace, p189

• Two British scholars made predictions in the 1950s: Toynbee, that future wars were likely; and Richardson, not a historian, who studied weather statistics, data, and suggested that future wars were not inevitable. Turned out he was right, Toynbee was wrong.
• P190, Statistics and Narratives. There are many ways to fit curves to data. Even if WWII was the most destructive event in history, it doesn’t tell us anything. The second half of the century was peaceful. WWII might have been the latest in an escalating series; it might be part of a cycle; it might be random, figures p191-2.
• This chapter is about long term trends in war, trends being: no cycles; lots of randomness; an escalation recently reversed; declines in other dimensions of war, p192. We need both statistics and narratives to understand these.
• P193, Was the 20^th Century Really the Worst? Not necessarily; the population was bigger, and we tend to overestimate trends from familiar events (historical myopia, or the availability heuristic, p193b). Thus, if we scale historical events to the sizes of population at the time, we get the top 21 events, p195, ranked with WWII in 9^th placed, and an 8^th century An Lushan Revolt in first place.
• Of course we don’t always have good data, or any data, for historical events.
• (Aside about Genghis Khan, and how many in the modern population have his genes. Hard to argue that war isn’t instrumental in some kind of competition for survival… p196b)
• A figure plotting the top 100, p197, shows that the worst events are evenly scattered across history. Again, we’re likely missing many events, especially those that fall between crime and war.
• P200: Statistics: The Timing of Wars. Richardson compiled data on 315 “deadly quarrels”, using various assumptions and corrections. And made three generalizations…
• First, a detour concerning probability, p202, with example about lightning; the next strike is most likely tomorrow. It’s example of a Poisson process, in which events are random and independent, like rolling dice. The result is that randomness comes in clusters—because it’s less likely that events would be evenly spaced out, 203m.
• Other examples of the cluster illusion: the London Blitz (subject of Pynchon novel); gambler’s fallacy; the birthday paradox; constellations (unlike evenly spaced worms) [[ My thought: how most SF films make the stars evenly spaced, moreso than they actually are ]]; and Richardson’s data, p205, of war durations across time – random in the same way.
• Thus his conclusion is that wars are random; they don’t reveal any pattern or historical narrative; war is not an itch that must be scratched eventually.
• Still, this doesn’t mean the probability of the events (wars starting) is steady over time; a process with a drifting probability is called nonstationary. Data indicate no cycles of changing periodicity.
• We still tend to exaggerate the narrative coherence of history. Was the most important person of the 20^th century the guy who triggered WWI? And likely no WWII without Hitler; i.e. there was no force building to war.
• So: has the probability of war changed over time? Richardson’s data was biased, and he didn’t live to experience the current long peace. Yet he concluded that the probability had decreased, slightly, since 1820. And further, that wars became less frequent—but more lethal.
• P210, Statistics: The Magnitude of Wars. His second discovery: the number of quarrels of each magnitude is tightly related to the number of deaths per quarrel – plotted log-log, a straight line, p211. That is, very violent wars are rare; with every tenfold jump in the death toll, there are as third as many, p211. This is a ‘power-law’ distribution. Later data sets show the same pattern. (Other examples: word frequency; distribution of incomes, p213.) This is different than, say, a Gaussian distribution, or bell curve, as a plot of the height of men. Whereas a plot of city sizes is L-shaped, 214, then when plotted as logs, becomes a straight line.
• Thus: there’s no such thing as a ‘typical war’. The distribution is scale-free. And they have a nonnegligible number of extreme values. That is, extreme values are unlikely, but not astronomically unlikely, 215b. E.g., an enormously deadly war.
• So why are wars so distributed? First we can conclude that size doesn’t matter—the chances of an escalation are independent of size. Do they exhibit preferential attachment, the so-called Matthew Effect, the rich get richer, 216b? No, data doesn’t support this. Or ideas from the science of complex systems, like criticality. Wars are often wars of attrition, one of those paradoxical situations in game theory, 217b; the loser pays too (as in eBay? Really?) – a Pyrrhic victory. In these situations there’s an advantage in displaying determination; thus the idea of loss aversion, 219m, where people keep investing despite already having lost time or money. Many wars show this irrational strategy, 219b.
• People are also subject to Weber’s Law: a change is noticeable only as a constant proportion to the existing rate or density, p220.
• Next, which is worse, many small wars or a few big ones? P220. The answer: peaks at both extremes, p221. Also: the proportion of deaths caused by all deadly quarrels is… 1.6%. …
• P222, The Trajectory of Great Power War. Can we say more now about how the probability of wars, and the damage they cause, have changed over time? Great powers are usually involved. A plot of how often great powers fought each other, since 1500, shows the rate tailing off, p224; other plots show similar drops.
• P228, The Trajectory of European War. We have more data on Europe; the Conflict Catalog of some 4560 conflicts. Again we see drops, with spikes for the world wars and the wars of religion in the 17^th From here we switch to narrative history…from various historians, 231m. summary preview p231.5
• P231, The Hobbesian Background and the Ages of Dynasties and Religions. Europe has had roughly 2 wars per year for 1100 years. War was seen as the natural order of things. Motives were the three identified by Hobbes: predation, preemption of predation by others, and credible deterrence or honor, 232.3. We can group these wars or periods into five ‘ages’:
  • Age of Dynasties, 1400-1559, p233. Problems arise from designating a successor as a firstborn son, say; fathers can die young, sons may not be too bright, and so on p233.
  • Age of Religions, 1559 to 1648. Rival religions fought for influence, showing no mercy to followers of other religions. Issues were nonnegotiable.
• 235, Three Currents in the Age of Sovereignty. By 1648 Europe was organized into sovereign states. There were fewer units to fight, and so fewer wars; the logic of Leviathan, 235. Yet wars got more lethal, as militaries got improved weaponry, and were organized into standing armies.
  • Age of Sovereignty, 1648-1789, saw a calming as some powers gave up war for commercial pursuits, religious fervor diminished, and so on, as part of the Humanitarian Revolution.
• 238, Counter-Enlightenment Ideologies and the Age of Nationalism
  • Age of Nationalism, 1789, with the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, various movements in Europe, culminating in 1917 with WWI.
  • Age of Ideology, as the US got involved and democracy fought it out with communism.
• Another way is to see the past two centuries as a struggle among four forces: Enlightenment humanism, conservatism, nationalism, and utopian ideologies, 239t. The French combined nationalism and utopian ideology, 239m. Then followed the counter-E’s, one inspired by Burke, the other tied by blood and soil. Etc, long sequence. Hegelian doctrine: history is the working out of a divine plan, leading to the emergence of superior states… 241t. Leading to the notion of self-determination of peoples, even though nation and people are not the same.
• Also in the 19^th century: romantic militarism, the idea that war itself is a noble pursuit, e.g. quotes p242; without war there is materialism and indolence, 243t. Even anti-war thinkers thought it had its benefits. All of this culminated in WWI, smry 244m.
• 244, Humanism and Totalitarianism in the Age of Ideology. The Enlightenment critique of war never went away and became the anti-war movement of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, with many thinkers 245m, bestsellers in 1889 and 1909, one arguing that war was economically futile, 245b, who became more or less right. WWI was the first ‘literary war’ with many works following it, by Eliot, Hemingway, and others, 246b, which encouraged audiences to empathize, e.g. 247t. The films Duck Soup, The Great Dictator, 248. Aversion to war became common. Hitler was exploited that sentiment.
• 249, The Long Peace: Some Numbers. The most interesting statistic: zero. The number of times nuclear weapons have been used (since 1945). The atomic clock. The number of times the superpowers have fought on the battlefield. Number of times any great powers have fought each other. And so on: several other examples.
• These are the result of a psychological turning, a change in the cognitive categorization of war. True, wars are still being fought. And the long peace is not a perpetual peace. There is no fever waiting for war to break out. It’s possible we’re just in a lucky streak, but probably not. Scholars have noticed, 253b, and quotes 254.
• 255, Attitudes and Events. Further evidence: military conscription has declined, as has the number of military personnel.
• And we have a set of sanity checks of how components of a war-friendly mindset went out of fashion, 257b. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which repudiated the values of collective good in favor of individual good. Another contributor: the freezing of international borders, taking territorial expansion off the table. Israel is an exception. Another ideal that faded: honor, p261. Better to back down, with examples, notably the Cuban missile crisis.
• Another, p263, popular resistance to leaders’ plans for war: demonstrations, with lists of popular films and songs. US military policy became more cautious. Military attitudes changed, with long story about the ethical warrior. Even the Afghan and Iraq wars are quite different, with fewer deaths and more drones and news focused on civilian deaths (5300 during a period in Afghanistan; 800,000 in Vietnam). Attitudes more extreme in Europe, where governments are no longer about the security of the nation, so much as the welfare of the people.
• 268, Is the Long Peace a Nuclear Peace? What went right? Why has there been no nuclear war? Is it just the terror of the bomb? And is the nuclear peace the cause of the long peace? Not really. Previous terrible weapons never halted war. Countries without the bomb no longer fight wars either. There is a ‘nuclear taboo’ against use of such weapons as being a breach in history. The taboo was slow to build, but eventually use of such weapons became unthinkable.
• We can still worry about all the nuclear states. Proliferation has not proceeded as fast as was worried. P272. Several countries have even given up nuclear weapons, p273. The history of poison gas offers a parallel case. Can we get rid of them entirely? It’s been proposed, with the Global Zero movement.
• 278, Is the Long Peace a Democratic Peace? Again, is there an exogenous variable to explain the peace? Recall Kant’s essay, and his condition of democracy. Is this the cause? There are two items in support. The trend lines match. And, is it true that no two democracies have ever fought? Well, no, see list p280, though maybe not all of those were democracies. But maybe that’s cherry-picking the data. Also, democracies don’t behave as nicely as Kant thought they would. A later study found more support, using regression. Still, maybe democracy isn’t the first cause.
• 284, Is the Long Peace a Liberal Peace? Perhaps the Democratic Peace is a special case of Liberal Peace (in the classic sense), with its notion of gentle commerce and non-zero sum interactions – c.f Robert Wright’s book, 284b. We know that trade has mushroomed, and there are many examples of how freer trade correlates with greater peace. Yet some historians are skeptical. Again we can do a regression, and the result suggests a Capitalist Peace, 287, and the arguments are persuasive. However not all democracies are capitalist, or vice versa, 288t. The notion of a Liberal Peace, though, is on solid ground.
• 288, Is the Long Peace a Kantian Peace? After WWII many thinkers supposed only a world government could avoid future self-destruction. Einstein, Russell, others, 289t. Today only kooks and science fiction fans carry on the campaign, for various reasons. [[ Because among other things with only one entity, there’s no motivation for competition or improvement, and no escape ]]
• A better idea is that a world government is an economic cooperation like the European Union; this is the third vortex of Kant’s triangle. Another regression analysis verifies the correlation.
• Is there a deeper cause than the three legs of Kant’s triangle? Perhaps his more general principle of the Categorical imperative, 291. The ‘realism’ movement would snort; without world government, nations live in permanent Hobbesian anarchy. But this depends on a concept of human nature as self-interested rational animals; in fact, humans are moral animals as well. So the Kantian cause is plausible, and if so, war may go the way of cat-burning, slavery, dueling, and a host of other customs, 291b.
• And among developed countries, the late 20^th century brought TV, computers, jet travel, and communications that created a ‘global village’, in parallel with the forces that drove the Humanitarian Revolution. – end 1^st para 292.5 : “A world in which a person can open the morning paper and meet the eyes of a naked, terrified little girl running toward him from a napalm attack nine thousand miles away is not a world in which a writer can opine that war is ‘the foundation of all the high virtues and faculties of man’ or that it ‘enlarges the mind of a people and raises their character.’”
• Similar forces may have ended the Cold War and led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, as news of the West filtered in; something similar is happening in China. [[ This reflects how autocracies survive only as long as they can isolate themselves from outsiders; and why Trump tries to demonize the news. ]]
• Or maybe the world learns from its mistakes; the three pinnacles of war deaths were each followed by extended basins, 293t. Kant realized this. Another data set shows pairs of democracies respond more quickly than other pairs, in returning to peaceable levels. Perhaps we’re learning.

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So gist of this is that author concludes the three legs of the Kant triangle are indeed the foundations of the reduction of violence in war, and the further growth of an interconnected world is undermining autocracies and maintaining the ‘long peace’.