The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,37

hunter-horticulturalists) and nine that are ruled by states. The average annual rate of death in warfare for the nonstate societies is 524 per 100,000, about half of 1 percent. Among states, the Aztec empire of central Mexico, which was often at war, had a rate about half that.62 Below that bar we find the rates for four state societies during the centuries in which they waged their most destructive wars. Nineteenth-century France fought the Revolutionary, Napoleonic, and Franco-Prussian Wars and lost an average of 70 people per 100,000 per year. The 20th century was blackened by two world wars that inflicted most of their military damage on Germany, Japan, and Russia/USSR, which also had a civil war and other military adventures. Their annual rates of death work out to 144, 27, and 135 per 100,000, respectively.63 During the 20th century the United States acquired a reputation as a warmonger, fighting in two world wars and in the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. But the annual cost in American lives was even smaller than those of the other great powers of the century, about 3.7 per 100,000.64 Even if we add up all the deaths from organized violence for the entire world for the entire century—wars, genocides, purges, and man-made famines—we get an annual rate of around 60 per 100,000.65 For the year 2005, the bars representing the United States and the entire world are paint-thin and invisible in the graph.66

So by this measure too, states are far less violent than traditional bands and tribes. Modern Western countries, even in their most war-torn centuries, suffered no more than around a quarter of the average death rate of nonstate societies, and less than a tenth of that for the most violent one.

Though war is common among foraging groups, it is certainly not universal. Nor should we expect it to be if the violent inclinations in human nature are a strategic response to the circumstances rather than a hydraulic response to an inner urge. According to two ethnographic surveys, 65 to 70 percent of hunter-gatherer groups are at war at least every two years, 90 percent engage in war at least once a generation, and virtually all the rest report a cultural memory of war in the past.67 That means that hunter-gatherers often fight, but they can avoid war for long stretches of time. Figure 2–3 reveals two tribes, the Andamanese and the Semai, with low rates of death in warfare. But even they have interesting stories.

FIGURE 2–3. Rate of death in warfare in nonstate and state societies

Sources: Nonstate: Hewa and Goilala from Gat, 2006; others from Keeley, 1996. Central Mexico, Germany, Russia, France, Japan: Keeley, 1996; see notes 62 and 63. United States in the 20th century: Leland & Oboroceanu, 2010; see note 64. World in 20th century: White, 2011; see note 65. World in 2005: Human Security Report Project, 2008; see notes 57 and 58.

The Andaman Islanders of the Indian Ocean are recorded as having an annual death rate of 20 per 100,000, well below the average for nonstate peoples (which exceeds 500 per 100,000). But they are known to be among the fiercest hunter-gatherer groups left on earth. Following the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, a worried humanitarian group flew over to the islands in a helicopter and were relieved to be met with a fusillade of arrows and spears, signs that the Andamanese had not been wiped out. Two years later a pair of Indian fishers fell into a drunken sleep, and their boat drifted ashore on one of the islands. They were immediately slain, and the helicopter sent to retrieve their bodies was also met with a shower of arrows.68

There are, to be sure, hunter-gatherers and hunter-horticulturalists such as the Semai who have never been known to engage in the protracted, collective killings that can be called warfare. Anthropologists of peace have made much of these groups, suggesting that they could have been the norm in human evolutionary history, and that it is only the newer and wealthier horticulturalists and pastoralists who engage in systematic violence. The hypothesis is not directly relevant to this chapter, which compares people living in anarchy with those living under states rather than hunter-gatherers with everyone else. But there are reasons to doubt the hypothesis of hunter-gatherer innocence anyway. Figure 2–3 shows that the rates of death in warfare in these societies, though lower than those of horticulturalists and tribesmen, overlap with them considerably. And as I have mentioned, the hunter-gatherer groups