The End of Politics: The Dawning Irrelevance of Obama and the GOP

Ralph Benko
Nov 16, 2011

This column debuted a year ago and proceeded to make a troubling announcement: World peace has broken out. The political implications of world peace are dramatic — but difficult to credit. http://www.forbes.com/2010/12/13/tea-pa ... benko.html

A year later, however, the Annunciation of the Peace has turned into something of a cottage industry. The AP’s Seth Borenstein reports: http://www.timesunion.com/news/article/ ... 231126.php

We’ve never had it this peaceful. That’s the thesis of three new books, including one by prominent Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. Statistics reveal dramatic reductions in war deaths, family violence, racism, rape, murder and all sorts of mayhem. In his book, Pinker writes: ‘The decline of violence may be the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species.’
The reduction in world mayhem seems alien. TV news and newspapers present freighted drama, not dry facts. That obscures the trend. Also, a dramatic peace trend sounds implausible to those habituated to war.

But scholars of such matters observe that the number of war battlefield deaths has dropped by a factor of 1,000, falling from 500 per 100,000 in prehistoric times, to 60-70 in the 19th and 20th century (notwithstanding epic wars) to… less than one such death per 300,000 now in the 21st. Genocide deaths have dropped by well over a factor of 1000 from 1942 to 2008.

The number of republics has quintupled in just 65 years, the number of authoritarian regimes has dropped from 90, 35 years ago, to 25. In England, murder fell by a factor of 100 from the Middle Ages until today. The trends are much broader than this and although a single nuclear exchange or terrorist incident could skew the numbers, even such a horrific tragedy, Heaven forbid, would not skew the secular trend.

Much of this is documented in Steven Pinker‘s book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Joshua Goldstein’s Winning the War on War, and in a new study by the Human Security Report Project. http://www.hsrgroup.org/

In short, it is becoming nearly irrefutable that peace has broken out. To proponents of human flourishing in liberty, dignity and prosperity, this is wonderful news. To the political class, not so much.

The late Randolph Bourne wrote an essay, posthumously published in 1918, entitled “War is the Health of the State.â€