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Comment by retrogradeorbit | Hacker News Reader

The world can "fall apart" without people dying. For example, the ongoing currency wars.

You can also have violence without death. Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are examples. Because these people are only tortured, and not murdered, is that considered "peaceful"?

And it also would depend on how far back you draw the data from. Is the Stalin famine of the 30s modern, or ancient? If we cast the data back to the 1600s, it's new. If we cast the data back to the 1920s, its old.

Some data sets in this article go back to the 60s, some go back to the 30s, some only back to the 90s. Maybe we need more data. Lets cast all the data sets back a few hundred years and look again.

Consider me unconvinced.

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Steven Pinker has done a fairly deep study of the long run decline in violence: it is real, it is over centuries, and it is dramatic. But it is not guaranteed to last. I highly recommend his book as it provides a lot of data on the topic (and is quite a good read too).

"The decline in violence, he argues, is enormous in magnitude, visible on both long and short time scales, and found in many domains, including military conflict, homicide, genocide, torture, criminal justice, treatment of children, homosexuals, animals and racial and ethnic minorities."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature

Seconded. Although, given the length/depth of the analysis, be prepared to commit more than one sitting to finish the book.

Is finishing a full-length non-fiction book in one sitting common?

> Pinker uses the phrase as a metaphor for four human motivations that, he writes, can "orient us away from violence and towards cooperation and altruism,"[2] namely: empathy, self-control, the "moral sense," and reason.

All of which are contrary to religious fundamentalism... which worries me as a US citizen.

Why? Fundamentalists are noisy, but they aren't a majority. Catholics are the largest group, probably followed by the various types of non practitioners (I'm including atheists and people that "aren't sure" together there, I think it's fair to say that "not sure" is a ways away from fundamentalist). It's harder to sort out the protestants, but the more moderate "mainline" groups certainly have more influence than the fundamentalist groups, even if they don't quite outnumber them (but they are at least similar in number).

The type of news that fundamentalists end up making also isn't all that discouraging, they are usually losing court cases where they tried to inject their beliefs into public life.

If you've been watching Pope Francis lately, it's providing a strong contrast against fundamentalism, which he has even decried as a disease in the church that needs to end.

I guess it depends on where you draw the line on fundamentalism. I live in the Bible Belt and I'd argue that, at least, the Southern Baptists should be seen as a Fundamentalist organization. That locks down the majority of the people in the SE-quadrant of the continental US.

Also depending on how you draw your lines, the Catholics aren't even remotely close to #1 status. About 24% of Americans are Catholic while about 51% are Protestants. I'll agree that it's a little iffy, but I'm willing to count the Protestants as a singular group.

Perhaps I'm just jaded because I live in the land of "lets turn the US into a Christian theocracy".

Yeah, the first step of the discussion is drawing some lines.

When I said the Catholics were the largest group, I was treating the protestants as separate groups. Mostly because if you are treating "fundamentalist" as an axis, the protestants don't really group together. They even tend to be somewhat polarized across that axis.

Self-control is contrary to religious fundamentalism? The "moral sense" is contrary to religious fundamentalism?

I mean, sure, there have been some pretty horrible things done in the name of religion, often by fundamentalists. There have been some even more horrible things done in the name of atheistic philosophies, too. But religious fundamentalism should give one an idea that certain things really are morally wrong, and that you're therefore not supposed to do them. That sounds like "self-control" and "moral sense" to me...

Please cite an "even more horrible thing done in the name of atheistic philosophies" (I'm actually curious about this, even though I'm going to argue with you in a sec...).

The premise that religiosity in any way influences morality (or "self control") is a joke. We live in a world where religious people are performing (or attempting to perform) genocides, who rape children (and adults), and who are subjugating the current out-group. We also live in a world where non-religious people are providing healthcare to the poor, counselling to the abused, and food to the needy. There are, of course, plenty of counterexamples where religious people are acting morally, and non-religious are acting amorally... all this just goes to show that there are moral people and those who are not moral, not that religion has any influence over that morality.

To further the point, the vast majority of religious people (at least in the "Western Religion" sense) go out of their way to cherry pick which of their holy book's rules to adhere to. This is because they have decided to act in a way that they, and their society, have deemed moral; despite what the book has told them was.

> Please cite an "even more horrible thing done in the name of atheistic philosophies" (I'm actually curious about this, even though I'm going to argue with you in a sec...).

Pol Pot killed one quarter of Cambodia's population in the name of communism, which was explicitly atheistic. So far as I know, that is the ruler that killed the single largest fraction of his own population. (Stalin killed more people, but he had a much larger population to work with. And, surprise, Stalin also did it in the name of communism.)

I think the global decline in viable arable land and fresh water are the most likely factors to cause the world to 'fall apart', which I take to mean; the collapse of many industrialised societies and countries, and the collapse of much of international trade.

Indeed.

Death by war has been on the decline since after World War II - the most violent war in our history? That's not exactly exciting news.

The first half of the twentieth century revealed the contradiction of modernity: the terrible brutality of the industrial processes (including mechanized war) which underlay a system that on the surface had brought forth so much prosperity. The period since has been an attempt to resolve this contradiction through new tactics (specifically information and communication technologies) which allow the 'necessary' application of power's blunt end to be as precise as possible.

"Wars were never as bloody as they have been since the nineteenth century, and all things being equal, never before did regimes visit such holocausts on their own populations. But this formidable power of death – and this is perhaps what accounts for part of its force and the cynicism with which it has so greatly expanded its limits – now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations. Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital." - Michel Foucault

This is actually not entirely true. Although WWI and WWII were large spikes, death rates for many wars before the 20th century – both in terms of combatants and civilians – were significantly higher and have generally been on the decline throughout human history. See Pinker's "Better Angels of Our Nature" for a detailed analysis of this exact issue.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/149151...

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