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“So when one adjusts for population size, the availability bias, and historical myopia, it is far from clear that the 20th century was the bloodiest in history. Sweeping that dogma out of the way is the first step in understanding the historical trajectory of war.”
― The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
― The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
“The military historian John Keegan notes that by the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE, the chariot allowed nomadic armies to rain death on the civilizations they invaded. “Circling at a distance of 100 or 200 yards from the herds of unarmored foot soldiers, a chariot crew—one to drive, one to shoot—might have transfixed six men a minute. Ten minutesâ€� work by ten chariots would cause 500 casualties or more, a Battle of the Somme–like toll among the small armies of the period.â€�14”
― The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
― The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
“Finally, power-law distributions have “thick tails,â€� meaning that they have a nonnegligible number of extreme values. You will never meet a 20-foot man, or see a car driving down the freeway at 500 miles per hour. But you could conceivably come across a city of 14 million, or a book that was on the bestseller list for 10 years, or a moon crater big enough to see from the earth with the naked eye—or a war that killed 55 million people.”
― The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
― The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
“In theory, Mars could oscillate, causing a war on 3 percent of his throws, then shifting to causing a war on 6 percent, and then going back again. In practice, it isn’t easy to distinguish cycles in a nonstationary Poisson process from illusory clusters in a stationary one. A few clusters could fool the eye into thinking that the whole system waxes and wanes (as in the so-called business cycle, which is really a sequence of unpredictable lurches in economic activity rather than a genuine cycle with a constant period).”
― The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
― The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
“But that could not have been the main cause of the carnage, because in subsequent centuries the technology kept getting deadlier while the death toll came back to earth. Luard singles out religious passion as the cause: It was above all the extension of warfare to civilians, who (especially if they worshipped the wrong god) were frequently regarded as expendable, which now increased the brutality of war and the level of casualties. Appalling bloodshed could be attributed to divine wrath. The duke of Alva had the entire male population of Naarden killed after its capture (1572), regarding this as a judgement of God for their hard-necked obstinacy in resisting; just as Cromwell later, having allowed his troops to sack Drogheda with appalling bloodshed (1649), declared that this was a “righteous judgement of God.â€� Thus by a cruel paradox those who fought in the name of their faith were often less likely than any to show humanity to their opponents in war.”
― The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
― The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Jack’s 2024 Year in Books
Take a look at Jack’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
794 books
|
45 friends
766 books
|
67 friends
389 books
|
106 friends
1,630 books
|
48 friends
663 books
|
106 friends
142 books
|
13 friends
409 books
|
52 friends
336 books
|
44 friends
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