systematically reversed, and from where we sit on the time line, most trends point peaceward. We may not be entitled to a theory of everything, but we do need a theory that explains why so many somethings point the same way.
IMPORTANT BUT INCONSISTENT
Let me begin by noting a few forces that one might have thought would be important to the processes, peaces, and revolutions of chapters 2–7, but as best I can tell turned out not to be. It’s not that these forces are by any means minor; it’s just that they have not consistently worked to reduce violence.
Weaponry and Disarmament. Writers who are engrossed by violence and those who are repelled by it have one thing in common: they are fixated on weaponry. Military histories, written by and for guys, obsess over longbows, stirrups, artillery, and tanks. Many movements for nonviolence have been disarmament movements: the demonization of “merchants of war,” the antinuclear demonstrations, the campaigns for gun control. And then there is the contrary though equally weaponcentric prescription according to which the invention of unthinkably destructive weapons (dynamite, poison gas, nuclear bombs) would make war unthinkable.
The technology of weaponry has obviously changed the course of history many times by determining winners and losers, making deterrence credible, and multiplying the destructive power of certain antagonists. No one would argue, for example, that the proliferation of automatic weapons in the developing world has been good for peace. Yet it’s hard to find any correlation over history between the destructive power of weaponry and the human toll of deadly quarrels. Over the millennia weapons, just like every technology, got better and better, yet rates of violence have not gone steadily up but rather have lurched up and down the slope of an inclined sawtooth. The spears and arrows of pre-state peoples notched up higher proportional body counts than has anything since (chapter 2), and the pikemen and cavalry of the Thirty Years’ War did more human damage than the artillery and gas of World War I (chapter 5). Though the 16th and 17th centuries saw a military revolution, it was less an arms race than an armies race, in which governments beefed up the size and efficiency of their armed forces. The history of genocide shows that people can be slaughtered as efficiently with primitive weapons as they can with industrial technology (chapters 5 and 6).
Nor did precipitous drops in violence, such as those of the Long Peace, the New Peace, and the Great American Crime Decline, originate with the antagonists melting down their weapons. The historical sequence has usually gone the other way, as in the dismantling of armamentaria that was part of the peace dividend after the end of the Cold War. As for the nuclear peace, we have seen that nuclear weapons may have made little difference to the course of world events, given their uselessness in battle and the massive destructive power of conventional forces (chapter 5). And the popular (if bizarre) argument that nuclear weapons would inevitably be used by the great powers to justify the cost of developing them turned out to be flat wrong.
The failure of technological determinism as a theory of the history of violence should not be that surprising. Human behavior is goal-directed, not stimulus-driven, and what matters most to the incidence of violence is whether one person wants another one dead. The cliché of gun control opponents is literally true: guns don’t kill people; people kill people (which is not to endorse the arguments for or against gun control). Anyone who is equipped to hunt, harvest crops, chop firewood, or prepare salad has the means to damage a lot of human flesh. With necessity being the mother of invention, people can upgrade their technology to the extent their enemies force them to. Weaponry, in other words, appears to be largely endogenous to the historical dynamics that result in large declines in violence. When people are rapacious or terrified, they develop the weapons they need; when cooler heads prevail, the weapons rust in peace.
Resources and Power. When I was a student in the 1970s, I had a professor who shared with anyone who would listen the truth about the Vietnam War: it was really about tungsten. The South China Sea, he discovered, had the world’s largest deposits of the metal used in lightbulb filaments and superhard steel. The debates on communism and nationalism and containment were all a smokescreen for the superpowers’ battle to control the source of this vital resource.
The tungsten