The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,144

large numbers of men from a cross section of society rather than just from the dregs at the bottom. They used a combination of drill, indoctrination, and brutal punishment to train them for organized combat. And they instilled in them a code of discipline, stoicism, and valor. The result was that when two of these armies clashed, they could rack up high body counts in a hurry.

The military historian Azar Gat has argued that “revolution” is a misnomer for what was really a gradual development.103 The process of making armies more effective was part of the centuries-long wave of technological and organizational change that made everything more effective. Perhaps an even greater advance in battlefield carnage than the original military revolution has been attributed to Napoleon, who replaced set battles in which both sides tried to conserve their soldiers with bold attacks in which a country would deploy every available resource to inflict all-out defeat on its enemy.104 Yet another “advance” was the tapping of the Industrial Revolution, beginning in the 19th century, to feed and equip ever larger quantities of soldiers and transport them to the battlefront more quickly. The renewable supply of cannon fodder stoked the games of attrition that pushed wars farther out along the tail of the power-law distribution.

During this long run-up in military power, there was a second force (together with the consolidation of states) that drove down the frequency of combat. Many historians have seen the 18th century as a time of respite in the long European history of war. In the preceding chapter I mentioned that imperial powers like Holland, Sweden, Denmark, Portugal, and Spain stopped competing in the great power game and redirected their energies from conquest to commerce. Brecke writes of a “relatively pacific 18th century” (at least from 1713 to 1789), which can be seen as a U in figure 5–17 and as a shallow lopsided W between the peaks for the religious and French wars in figure 5–18. Luard notes that in the Age of Sovereignty from 1648 to 1789, “objectives were often relatively limited; and many wars in any case ended in a draw, from which no country secured its maximum aims. Many wars were lengthy, but the method of fighting was often deliberately restrained and casualties were less heavy than in either the preceding age or subsequent ages.” To be sure, the century saw some bloody combat, such as the world war known as the Seven Years’ War, but as David Bell notes, “Historians need to be able to make distinctions between shades of horror, and if the eighteenth century did not exactly reduce the slavering dogs of war to ‘performing poodles’ . . . , its conflicts still ranked among the least horrific in European history.”105

As we saw in chapter 4, this tranquillity was a part of the Humanitarian Revolution connected with the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment, and the dawn of classical liberalism. The calming of religious fervor meant that wars were no longer inflamed with eschatological meaning, so leaders could cut deals rather than fight to the last man. Sovereign states were becoming commercial powers, which tend to favor positive-sum trade over zero-sum conquest. Popular writers were deconstructing honor, equating war with murder, ridiculing Europe’s history of violence, and taking the viewpoints of soldiers and conquered peoples. Philosophers were redefining government from a means of implementing the whims of a monarch to a means for enhancing the life, liberty, and happiness of individual people, and tried to think up ways to limit the power of political leaders and incentivize them to avoid war. The ideas trickled upward and infiltrated the attitudes of at least some of the rulers of the day. While their “enlightened absolutism” was still absolutism, it was certainly better than unenlightened absolutism. And liberal democracy (which, as we shall see, appears to be a pacifying force) got its first toeholds in the United States and Great Britain.

COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT IDEOLOGIES AND THE AGE OF NATIONALISM

Of course, it all went horribly wrong. The French Revolution and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars caused as many as 4 million deaths, earning the sequence a spot in the twenty-one worst things people have ever done to each other, and poking up a major peak in the graph of war deaths in figure 5–18.

Luard designates 1789 as the start of the Age of Nationalism. The players in the preceding Age of Sovereignty had been sprawling dynastic empires that were not pinned to a “nation” in the sense