The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,155

Erosion of Military Power in Modern World Politics (1988), John Mueller’s Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (1989), Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History?” (1989), James Lee Ray’s “The Abolition of Slavery and the End of International War” (1989), and Carl Kaysen’s “Is War Obsolete?” (1990).154 In 1988 the political scientist Robert Jervis captured the phenomenon they were all noticing:The most striking characteristic of the postwar period is just that—it can be called “postwar” because the major powers have not fought each other since 1945. Such a lengthy period of peace among the most powerful states is unprecedented.155

These scholars were confident that they were not being fooled by a lucky run but were putting their finger on an underlying shift that supported predictions about the future. In early 1990, Kaysen added a last-minute postscript to his review of Mueller’s 1989 book in which he wrote:It is clear that a profound transformation of the international structure in Europe—and the whole world—is underway. In the past, such changes have regularly been consummated by war. The argument presented in this essay supports the prediction that this time the changes can take place without war (although not necessarily without domestic violence in the states concerned). So far—mid-January—so good. The author and his readers will be eagerly and anxiously testing the prediction each day.156

Precocious assessments of the obsolescence of interstate war are especially poignant when they come from military historians. These are the scholars who have spent their lives immersed in the annals of warfare and should be most jaded about the possibility that this time it’s different. In his magnum opus A History of Warfare, John Keegan (the military historian who is so habitually called “distinguished” that one could be forgiven for thinking it is part of his name) wrote in 1993:War, it seems to me, after a lifetime of reading about the subject, mingling with men of war, visiting the sites of war and observing its effects, may well be ceasing to commend itself to human beings as a desirable or productive, let alone rational, means of reconciling their discontents.157

The equally distinguished Michael Howard had already written, in 1991:[It has become] quite possible that war in the sense of major, organized armed conflict between highly developed societies may not recur, and that a stable framework for international order will become firmly established. 158

And the no-less-distinguished Evan Luard, our guide to six centuries of war, had written still earlier, in 1986:Most startling of all has been the change that has come about in Europe, where there has been a virtual cessation of international warfare.... Given the scale and frequency of war during the preceding centuries in Europe, this is a change of spectacular proportions: perhaps the single most striking discontinuity that the history of warfare has anywhere provided.159

More than two decades later, none of them would have a reason to change his assessment. In his 2006 book War in Human Civilization, a military history that is more sweeping than its predecessors and salted with the Hobbesian realism of evolutionary psychology, Azar Gat wrote:Among affluent liberal democracies . . . a true state of peace appears to have developed, based on genuine mutual confidence that war between them is practically eliminated even as an option. Nothing like this had ever existed in history.160

THE LONG PEACE: ATTITUDES AND EVENTS

The italics in Gat’s “true state of peace” highlight not just the datum that the number of wars between developed states happens to be zero but a change in the countries’ mindsets. The ways that developed countries conceptualize and prepare for war have undergone sweeping changes.

A major feeder of the increasing deadliness of war since 1500 (see figure 5–16) has been conscription, the stocking of national armies with a renewable supply of bodies. By the time of the Napoleonic Wars, most European countries had some form of a draft. Conscientious objection was barely a concept, and recruitment methods were far less polite than the telegram dreaded by young American men in the 1960s that began: “Greetings.” The idiom pressed into service comes from the institution of press gangs, groups of goons paid by the government to snatch men from the streets and force them into the army or navy. (The Continental Navy during the American Revolutionary War was almost entirely rounded up by press gangs.)161 Compulsory military service could consume a substantial portion of a man’s life—as much as twenty-five years for a serf in 19th-century Russia.

Military conscription represents the application of force squared: people are