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Our civilization is one worth celebrating because we have engaged in progressively less war. This, not our use of one evil to flail against another evil, is the cause of our success. If you haven't read Steven Pinker's essay A History of Violence (or seen the related TED talk at http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen...), I would recommend taking a look.

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I would be careful about taking Pinker's argument too uncritically. It relies on a very particular selection of secondary academic sources, such as Keely's "War Before Civilization." But Keely's book, while a reasonable response to the "myth of the peaceful savage", has been criticized for creating a "myth of the warlike savage".

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a791...

Yes, war is one of the evils which we have reduced. But I don't think we would have gotten to this state by being pacifists.

The world is a complex place, full of little contradictions.

Indeed not; the pacifists would simply have been exploited and killed or enslaved by others.

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