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Forty or fifty years is a blip in the time-scale he’s using. He cherry-picked his starting point and his conclusion is nonsense.

There was nothing like the world-wide scale of violence, sadism, terrorism seen by the preceding forty years from the Russian Revolution through the Japanese terrorizing of China and Korea through Stalin’s monstrousness and Mao’s long march (and all the Soviet and Chinese satellite states, including the supposedly non-Stalinist Tito whose death island was as utterly sadistic and mindlessly cruel as anything Stalin or Mao did). Go back fifty years and the “enlightened” Turkish genocide against the Armenians can be added to the roster of infamy.

Even if one starts from 1950 (mid-twentieth century) we have Pol Pot, the Cultural Revolution in China, Mao’s deliberate wasting of millions of lives using the Koreans as proxies for his ambitions, Idi Amin, Rwanda, Darfur, the North Korean starvation and ongoing death camps—sadism is alive and well in each of those and was/is being used as means of political control exactly as it was in the past. Moreover, violent manipulation of people’s minds along the lines of Orwell’s 1984 is one of the reasons that overt violence has been dispensed with in some instances.

And no mention whatsoever of the millions of babies burned alive by saline, ripped limb from limb or just suctioned out of their homes into oblivion since 1973.

To tout the “decline” of the last fifty years or so as heralding a sea-change in human evolution is stupid, just stupid. Cruelty, terrorism as policy, sadism was used by rulers for thousands of years, to be sure. But those rulers lacked the sheer technical means to apply those methods to millions at a time. They relied on making brutal examples of a few in order to cow the rest.

Our sadists of the past 100 years—including the Jihadists of today—employ terrorism and sadism in order to control people but are capable of doing it to entire populations with an efficiency undreamed of by tyrants of a thousand or five hundred years ago.

Pinker is a fool, a naive fool, who plays into the hands of the next round of genocidal monsters.

The author points out, accurately, that had the 20th century seen an equivalent degree of violence as the average tribal society studied, we would have had 2B killed in warfare, not the ~100M we did see.

This does not leave out the first half of the 20th, during which most of the killing occurred.

You are conflating volume with incidence. More people were killed by violence during the 20th than any preceding century, but then there were a great many more people around to be killed. The incidence of violence went down, especially after the first half of the century.

Even long-ago “routine” wars had massive death rates. A recent study found the English Civil War, not one that is thought of as having massive atrocities, for the most part, leading to a decline in the populations of England, Scotland and Ireland of between 15% and 35%.

We see the horrifying events of our own time and don’t realize how awful the “primitive” wars of the past were.

For example, the Nazis were unbelievably inefficient when it came to killing masses of people. Their most efficient camp, Auschwitz, could handle maximum around 20k per day.

The Mongols routinely murdered 100k+ in well under an hour. Just distribute a half dozen tied captives to each man in your army, and on the appropriate signal everybody chops heads, with which you build a pyramid. Far more efficient than hauling people all over Europe. What the author of this piece was pointing out that such routine casual violence wasn’t practical even for a Nazi-indoctrinated society, forcing their leadership to resort to the very inefficient alternatives they used.

As another example, every time a dynasty collapsed in China, roughly half the population died in the ensuing disturbances.

You’re missing his main point. The Nazis hid what they were doing. They knew that what they were doing would shock the world. Stalin didn’t publicize his actions either. North Korea doesn’t brag about it’s camps either. They know that their actions would appall the world so they hide it behind closed doors and propaganda to distract. Several centuries ago, they would have done it in the open and no one would have been shocked. Such cruelty was expected of the strong towards the vanquished and weak.

Thanks to greater populations and modern technology, they can kill many more than in the past.

Africa is a good example of a harsher past. Many of the tribes still have the attitudes of the past, so they have no shame in beating to death thousands (ala Rwanda). But even there you can see changes as many Africans resist such brutality. Remember, the Rwandan genocide was stopped by Rwandans themselves.

Abortion? Do you think that unwanted pregnancies weren’t aborted in the past? If the right herbs weren’t available, then how many children were simply abandoned or exposed in the past? Today an abandoned newborn shocks us. But centuries ago, they were simply a fact of life.

Even the Muslims with their barbaric faith, hide some of the worst aspects of their culture (the massive molestation of young boys) in the face of condemnation. Still, they do represent the most backwards and heinous of modern cultures.