It’s what makes me laugh about Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature. He has a whole chapter about how terrible was the spanish inquisition and how life was much better after the enlightments. But if you plot the number of deaths of the inquisition (a few thousands over a century), then those of the french revolution (in the 100ks), napoleonic war, ww1, ww2 and nazism, and then the wider communism, I see an exponential increase. It’s only capitalism and nuclear weapons that brought peace to an otherwise out of control spiral of violence, caused by crazy ideologues.
I have read the book and your interpretation of what he says is extremely selective. Pinker doesn't deny any of the atrocities against human life that occurred during and after the enlightenment. Instead he numerically demonstrates that even with these murderous events, general levels of violence worldwide on a basis relative to a fixed metric of population (per 100,000 etc) decreased steadily leading up to modern times, and continue to be historically low. During the time of the Inquisition, it wasn't just those inquisitors and their few thousand victims that were the cause of human suffering in the world.
I'm pretty sure Pinker did that exact plot and demonstrated the rate of growth of violent deaths has been considerably less than the rate of growth of the population as a whole. I vaguely recall that deaths from wars (and genocide events) aren't even as big a contributor to the total number of violent deaths as most people assume (obviously in recent decades in developed countries only a tiny percentage of violent deaths have been due to war, but even historically it's not as high as you might imagine).
> if you plot the number of deaths of the inquisition (a few thousands over a century), then those of the french revolution (in the 100ks), napoleonic war, ww1, ww2 and nazism, and then the wider communism, I see an exponential increase.
That is of course very selective; I have no read Pinker's book, but I don't think he argues that horrible wars never occurred, just less so.
It's important to keep in mind that the population has also grown in the intervening period. For example, Caesar's conquest of Gaul cost the lives of about a million Celts, with a further million enslaved (estimates). While "1 million" and even "2 million" seems low compared to, say, the second world war, it was a huge percentage of the population, up to as much as ~25%.
There are many such truly staggering figures if you look at history. No one really remembers it in the same way as we do more modern atrocities, which is why we can have fun Asterix & Obelix cartoons about it, but the numbers of historical battles are often truly staggering.
I don't know if Pinker was right or wrong, but I do think you really need to actually look at the numbers to get a good overview throughout the centuries and you can't just rely on "armchair analysis" for this sort of thing, as there will be a strong bias towards more recent events.
The population didn't increase by 4 order of magnitudes over the same period. The population of france now is roughly double what it was at the french revolution.
I think the genocides of the XX century completely negate Pinker's entire thesis. I am not saying there were no genocide before, but I do not see a downward trend, and some of the largest contributors to these genocides are some ideologues that are the children of the enlightenments.
I think it only stopped because of 1) technological advancements, nukes in particular, that made a war between large powers unthinkable (if you look back at the XIX/XX century, every large war was an order of magnitude more destructive than the previous one because of technology), and 2) capitalism which created a large middle class (the XX century term for what would have been called bourgeoisie in the XIX century) who aspire to live peacefully and have the resources to ensure it happens.
> I think the genocides of the XX century completely negate Pinker's entire thesis. I am not saying there were no genocide before, but I do not see a downward trend
Sure, but I think you need to do a more detailed analysis that goes beyond "look at these horrible things that happened in the last 100 (or 400) years!" On the face of it Pinker's claim indeed seems very counter-intuitive, but sometimes counter-intuitive things are true. Pinker may very well be wrong, but I wouldn't dismiss his argument quite so quickly from my armchair.
