The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,194

from the science of public health about which scourges kill the most people and which weapon against each one is the most cost-effective. Most childhood deaths in the developing world come from four causes: malaria; diarrheal diseases such as cholera and dysentery; respiratory infections such as pneumonia, influenza, and tuberculosis; and measles. Each is preventable or treatable, often remarkably cheaply. Mosquito nets, antimalarial drugs, antibiotics, water purifiers, oral rehydration therapy (a bit of salt and sugar in clean water), vaccinations, and breast-feeding (which reduces diarrheal and respiratory diseases) can save enormous numbers of lives. Over the last three decades, vaccination alone (which in 1974 protected just 5 percent of the world’s children and today protects 75 percent) has saved 20 million lives.76 Ready-to-use therapeutic foods like Plumpy’nut, a peanutbutterish goop in a foil package that children are said to like, can make a big dent in malnutrition and starvation.

Together these measures have slashed the human costs of war and belied the worry that an increase in indirect deaths has canceled or swamped the decrease in battle deaths. The HSRP estimates that during the Korean War about 4.5 percent of the population died from disease and starvation in every year of the four-year conflict. During the DRC civil war, even if we accept the overly pessimistic estimate of 5 million indirect deaths, it would amount to 1 percent of the country’s population per year, a reduction of more than fourfold from Korea.77

It’s not easy to see the bright side in the developing world, where the remnants of war continue to cause tremendous misery. The effort to whittle down the numbers that quantify the misery can seem heartless, especially when the numbers serve as propaganda for raising money and attention. But there is a moral imperative in getting the facts right, and not just to maintain credibility. The discovery that fewer people are dying in wars all over the world can thwart cynicism among compassion-fatigued news readers who might otherwise think that poor countries are irredeemable hellholes. And a better understanding of what drove the numbers down can steer us toward doing things that make people better off rather than congratulating ourselves on how altruistic we are. Among the surprises in the statistics are that some things that sound exciting, like instant independence, natural resources, revolutionary Marxism (when it is effective), and electoral democracy (when it is not) can increase deaths from violence, and some things that sound boring, like effective law enforcement, openness to the world economy, UN peacekeepers, and Plumpy’nut, can decrease them.

THE TRAJECTORY OF GENOCIDE

Of all the varieties of violence of which our sorry species is capable, genocide stands apart, not only as the most heinous but as the hardest to comprehend. We can readily understand why from time to time people enter into deadly quarrels over money, honor, or love, why they punish wrongdoers to excess, and why they take up arms to combat other people who have taken up arms. But that someone should want to slaughter millions of innocents, including women, children, and the elderly, seems to insult any claim we may have to comprehend our kind. Whether it is called genocide (killing people because of their race, religion, ethnicity, or other indelible group membership), politicide (killing people because of their political affiliation), or democide (any mass killing of civilians by a government or militia), killing-by-category targets people for what they are rather than what they do and thus seems to flout the usual motives of gain, fear, and vengeance.78

Genocide also shocks the imagination by the sheer number of its victims. Rummel, who was among the first historians to try to count them all, famously estimated that during the 20th century 169 million people were killed by their governments.79 The number is, to be sure, a highball estimate, but most atrocitologists agree that in the 20th century more people were killed by democides than by wars.80 Matthew White, in a comprehensive overview of the published estimates, reckons that 81 million people were killed by democide and another 40 million by man-made famines (mostly by Stalin and Mao), for a total of 121 million. Wars, in comparison, killed 37 million soldiers and 27 million civilians in battle, and another 18 million in the resulting famines, for a total of 82 million deaths.81 (White adds, though, that about half of the democide deaths took place during wars and may not have been possible without them.)82

Killing so many people in so short a time requires methods of mass production