branches, the federalist system in which authority was divided between the states and the national government, and periodic elections to force the government to give some attention to the wishes of the populace and to transfer power in an orderly and peaceable way. Perhaps most important, the government was given a circumscribed mission statement—to secure the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness of its citizens, with their consent—and, in the form of the Bill of Rights, a set of lines it could not cross in its use of violence against them.
Yet another innovation of the American system was its explicit recognition of the pacifying effects of positive-sum cooperation. The ideal of gentle commerce was implemented in the Commerce, Contract, and Takings clauses of the Constitution, which prevented the government from getting too much in the way of reciprocal exchanges among its citizens.103
The forms of democracy that were tried out in the 18th century were what you might expect of the 1.0 release of a complex new technology. The English implementation was weak tea, the French implementation an unmitigated disaster, and the American implementation had a flaw that is best captured in the actor Ice-T’s impression of Thomas Jefferson reviewing a draft of the Constitution: “Let’s see: freedom of speech; freedom of religion; freedom of the press; you can own niggers . . . Looks good to me!” But the value of the early designs for democracy was their upgradability. Not only did they carve out zones, however restricted, that were free of inquisitions, cruel punishments, and despotic authority, but they contained the means of their own expansion. The statement “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” however hypocritical at the time, was a built-in rightswidener that could be invoked to end slavery four score and seven years later and other forms of racial coercion a century after that. The idea of democracy, once loosed on the world, would eventually infect larger and larger portions of it, and as we shall see, would turn out to be one of the greatest violence-reduction technologies since the appearance of government itself.
MAJOR WAR
For most of human history, the justification for war was pithily captured by Julius Caesar: “I came. I saw. I conquered.” Conquest was what governments did. Empires rose, empires fell, entire populations were annihilated or enslaved, and no one seemed to think there was anything wrong with it. The historical figures who earned the honorific “So-and-So the Great” were not great artists, scholars, doctors, or inventors, people who enhanced human happiness or wisdom. They were dictators who conquered large swaths of territory and the people in them. If Hitler’s luck had held out a bit longer, he probably would have gone down in history as Adolf the Great. Even today the standard histories of war teach the reader a great deal about horses and armor and gunpowder but give only the vaguest sense that immense numbers of people were killed and maimed in these extravaganzas.
At the same time, there have always been eyes that zoom in to the scale of the individual women and men affected by war and that have seen its moral dimension. In the 5th century BCE the Chinese philosopher Mozi, the founder of a rival religion to Confucianism and Taoism, noted:To kill one man is to be guilty of a capital crime, to kill ten men is to increase the guilt ten-fold, to kill a hundred men is to increase it a hundred-fold. This the rulers of the earth all recognize, and yet when it comes to the greatest crime—waging war on another state—they praise it! . . .
If a man on seeing a little black were to say it is black, but on seeing a lot of black were to say it is white, it would be clear that such a man could not distinguish black and white.... So those who recognize a small crime as such, but do not recognize the wickedness of the greatest crime of all—the waging of war on another state—but actually praise it—cannot distinguish right and wrong.104
The occasional Western seer too paid homage to the ideal of peace. The prophet Isaiah expressed the hope that “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”105 Jesus preached, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.