 Welcome to the New America Foundation. My name is Peter Bergen. I run the international security program here. It's with a lot of pleasure I get to welcome our speaker today, Dr. Ian Morris, who's a historian and archaeologist. The author of this excellent new book, What Is It Good For? The Edwin Star Song. Also the author of multiple other books, including most recently, previously Why the West Rules For Now, which I think you've done both of these books in the last couple of years, which is sort of astonishing. Dr. Morris is the Jean and Rebecca Wither Professor of Classics at Stanford. He's going to address some of the big themes of his book and then we'll open it up for questions. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Well, thank you for that very kind introduction and thank you to everybody for coming along today when I'm sure there are like a million other things that you can be doing. Okay, so yeah, it's a great pleasure to be here. It's the first time I've spoken at the New America Foundation, so that's really nice for me, too. So yeah, I'm here to talk about this new book that Peter just mentioned, War, What Is It Good For? And the title, of course, I have stolen from the classic 1970 Motown protest song taken to the top of the charts by Edwin Starr, although it was first recorded by the Temptations, which not a lot of people know that, because it wasn't really their kind of song. But okay, so the song, I'm sure everybody knows well, but no need to worry. I'm not about to start singing at you, but although if we'd done this 30 years ago, there would have been a risk that I would have started singing. Back in those days, all that I really wanted in the world was to be a heavy metal guitarist, and I was a heavy metal guitarist, and I played in a really bad band, and we made no money at all. What I discovered, though, was that studying history and archaeology came a little more naturally to me than being a heavy metal guitarist. And what I feel I've also learned over the last 30 years or so of doing this is that history and archaeology are actually better ways to approach this problem of war, what is it good for, than by being in a band. And I come to the conclusion from the work that I've done, that in long-term history in particular shows you that contrary to what the song says, the song of course says, yeah, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Contrary to what the song says, war does seem to have been good for something across the long run. Not good for everything, obviously, but good for certain things. I think the evidence points us toward this kind of uncomfortable and paradoxical conclusion. And this is what I argue in this book, that across the last 10,000 years, war has made larger societies that have made their subjects safer and richer. This is the basic argument in the book. And I think we can, if you're interested in making a safer and richer world in the 21st century, I think you have to understand what war has done in the past. If you don't understand that, you're never going to understand how to address the problem in our own times. So I think that the question I raise in the title of the book in some ways is the most important question in the world. I mean, we live in an age where weapons are more destructive than ever before, and yet the world is, in many ways, safer than ever before. So how do we continue living in such a world? However, as I said, the answers that I offer in the book are paradoxical and uncomfortable. So my plan for this lunchtime, I'm going to talk, there's sort of four main claims I make in this book. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about what these four claims are. Then I'm going to say a few words about why I think the world works in this uncomfortable way. And then I'm going to just close by saying a few words about what I think are the consequences of the claims that I make if I'm right. So the first of the four claims that I make in this book is that by fighting wars, people have created larger, more organized societies that have reduced the risk that their members die violently. And I think to see this, you have to go back 15,000 years, which I think is why a lot of people haven't seen this. 15,000 years ago at the very end of the Ice Age, everybody on Earth was a hunter gatherer living in societies that were normally tiny. I mean, the group of us in this room here, for most people, this would be the size of the group you lived in moving around the landscape a lot, going after wild plants and wild foods, very small groups of people, very few constraints on people, very little structure and organization in these groups. And because of that, and because we're human, we're animals that have evolved to have the ability to use violence to solve our problems if we think that that will solve our problems. People seem to have used violence a lot. And anthropologists argue over this extensively. But more and more anthropologists are now coming down and saying, oh, probably in stone age societies, your risk of dying violently was somewhere in the 10 to 20% range, which is an astronomical level of violence. Now, if we fast forward to the 20th century, you know, we fight two world wars, genocides are committed, nuclear weapons are used, somewhere between 100 million and 200 million people die violently in the 20th century, an astonishing number. But something like 10 billion people live during the 20th century. And that's a one to two percent rate of violent death. The surprising statistics, I mean, they suggested your risk of dying violently has fallen by 90% since the stone age. Surprising statistics. And the explanation is more surprising still. And this is what I try to explain in my book, of course, starting about 10 to 15,000 years ago, as the world warms up at the end of the Ice Age, agriculture begins, populations grow very rapidly. Before agriculture comes into the world, if two hunter gatherer groups go to war, and one starts losing, they've always got the option of moving away and hunting and gathering someplace else. The world is very empty, not many people around. As farming drives up the population, this gets harder and harder to do. More and more often, the outcome of wars will be that the winning group swallows up the losing group. It doesn't always happen, of course, but the long term trend is that this is what's going on. The societies get bigger and bigger. The people who run these societies find that there's only one way really to make these bigger societies work. And that is to develop stronger, more centralized government institutions of some kind. And they discover also that if you want to stay in power, one of the first things you've got to do is suppress violence within your own group. And this happens, not because these rulers are angels. I mean, they're not, they're politicians. And I assume in Washington DC, I don't need to elaborate on what that means for them. These people are not angels. What they want is people who will quietly get up in the morning and go out and work, generate wealth, pay taxes to the rulers so the rulers can spend it on really whatever ruling thing enters their heads. And they want people who won't give them trouble. What they don't want is people who every time they have an argument with their neighbor, pull out a knife and stab him or burn his farmhouse down and destroy his fields or something like that. If you're a ruler, that is a disaster. So there's a kind of selective pressure on the rulers to pacify the societies they rule. The more you do this, the more in the long run that that group flourishes. The less you do it, the less it does. And of course, again, lots and lots of exceptions to this generalization. In the book, I refer to this as the what about Hitler problem, because Hitler, you're a difficult guy to fit in under this rule. And he's not the only one. I mean, you can have the what about Stalin problem or the what about Idi Amin problem, you pick your favorite mad dictator, there's no shortage of them. But in spite of the people who obviously go against this trend, on the whole across 10,000 years, the end result, the unintended consequence has been that the rate of violent death has been driven down by 90%. As these societies get bigger and bigger and bigger, more and more internally pacified. I think in a way you can say the big story has been that war makes the state and the state makes peace. That has been the big story of history, I would say. So that's the first of my points, that they start making these bigger societies safer societies about 10,000 years ago, and that's driven the whole story. The second claim that I make is that there's actually more to it than that. In addition to making a safer, these bigger societies have made us more prosperous as well. That the peace creates the preconditions under which you can have more complex divisions of labor and more elaborate trade routes can develop and wealth can be driven up. Now, again, this is another paradoxical claim and war is about killing people and burning things down. I'm saying that killing people makes there be less killing of people and burning things down makes there be more things that don't get burned down. Again, a very, very paradoxical effect. For me, though, excuse me, the classic story I think that illustrates this really nicely. One I draw on the beginning of the first chapter in my book is one that the Roman historian Tacitus tells us about a great battle that takes place somewhere up in the north of Scotland in the year AD 83. Romans have invaded Scotland and this alliance of Caledonian tribes gets together to fight them. And Tacitus says, before the battle takes place, the Caledonian chief, a guy named Calgacus, comes forward and gives his rousing speech to his troops. And he tells us what this speech was. And the last couple of sentences have become very famous, what Calgacus says to his men. He says, they, it means the Romans, they call stealing, killing and rape by the lying name of government. They make a wasteland and call it a peace. I think this speech sums up the issues very, very nicely in a way. Because the Romans go on, they win this battle, they annihilate the Caledonians, they kill everybody, they burn everything. And Tacitus says, next morning the sun comes up and there's absolute silence across the landscape. Everything is dead. They make a wasteland. And yet after the battle, Roman army turns around, marches back south into England, into the areas it's conquered a decade or two earlier. The further south it goes into the areas it's conquered, the richer the landscape becomes. The bigger the farms, the higher the standards of agriculture, the higher the standards of living, the less violence is going on. So we've got this kind of paradox. On the one hand, the conquests create wastelands. On the other hand, the aftermath seems to be, in effect, a kind of wonderland, a more peaceful, more prosperous world. And so the obvious question, which of these views is true, the Calgacus view or the sort of the wonderland view. And it seems to me that the pattern we see repeated over and over again through history is that both are true. That conquest tends to drive a spike in violence and destruction. But if you come back to a place that's been conquered and absorbed into a larger society, you come back a century or two later, regularly, what you find is that the place is more peaceful and more prosperous. So by creating bigger societies, stronger governments, greater security, war indirectly has enriched the world across 10,000 years again. So that's the second of the claims I make. The third claim, which I think is very important for the argument as a whole, is that war seems to be the worst possible way to do this, to make these bigger, safer, richer societies. And yet it seems to be pretty much the only way people have found. People hardly ever seem to be willing to give up their freedom, which is, of course, what you do when you're incorporated into one of these bigger groups, give up freedoms, including the freedom to kill and impoverish one another, hardly ever seem to be willing to do this without somebody forcing them to do so and using coercion. And obviously there must be exceptions to this rule across the last 10,000 years, across the whole of history. But I found it really difficult to find convincing cases. And the ones that seem to me like sort of obvious potential exceptions, like the European Union or the early period in the history of the United States or some of the European dynastic marriages that go on in the middle ages, all of them turn out to have violence driving the story kind of behind the scenes. So as far as I been able to tell, there's this line in the original song, War What Is It Good For, says, Lord knows there's got to be a better way. As far as I can see, there really isn't a better way. We have not been able to find one. And I want to be clear what I'm saying here. I'm not saying that democracy and commerce and the peace movement and soft power that are all irrelevant to making the world more peaceful. Clearly, that's not the case. But I think they're always secondary factors. They're driven by the deeper primary force of war itself, creating these bigger societies. So, OK, all of these three claims in different ways, all of them are very old claims. I hardly the first person to see this stuff. And most of them in one way or another. In fact, go back to Thomas Hobbes' famous book, Leviathan, published in 1651, which I'm sure everybody will be familiar with, and the basic idea, because Hobbes' famous line is about how in the state of nature, in the Stone Age, the life of man is nasty, poor, brutish and short. And he says, what changes that is Leviathan, which is a monster that you encounter in the book of Job in the Hebrew Bible. Well, we're told Leviathan, he says, on earth there is no thing like him. He beholds every high thing. He is king over all the children of pride. I find it impossible to resist slipping into my monster voice when I read that passage out. The idea is Leviathan is government. Government is so scary that it intimidates everybody else and basically scares them straight. This is Hobbes' argument. This is the only way to have a more peaceful, more prosperous world. And I guess, you know, my book is just, I think, the latest round in this 400-year-old war of words over what makes for more peaceful world. And I think Hobbes and his great nemesis Rousseau in the 18th century, when they were writing, basically, we didn't know anything. They knew a lot about recent, their recent European history. They knew nothing about prehistory, almost nothing about anthropology. They reasoned and guessed their way toward the conclusions they reached. Now I would say the difference is we actually have some evidence now. And now I think we're in a position where we can ground these claims on something a bit more factual. Well, anyway, so those are the first three claims. If they're true, I think there is only one conclusion we can reach, which is that war has been good for something. And in fact, I suggest in the book it's been so good for something, for making the long run, making peace and prosperity, that it's now beginning to put itself out of business, that we have weapons so destructive, organizations so effective, that another great war could potentially destroy humanity altogether. A war, in a sense, is putting itself out of business. That's why the rate of violent death has fallen so sharply. So in the book, basically what I do is tell this 10,000 year long story, tracing the rates of violent death and what's been going on. The way that people nowadays love to talk about revolutions in military affairs. But I suggest in my book that this is actually, this is a concept that goes all the way back. That history has basically been driven by these revolutions in military affairs since the Stone Age. And I suggested, there's sort of three phases we can look at the history of violence and war in. The first, the longest goes from the Stone Age, basically down to about 1 BC, for as good a date as any. And by then, the old world, China to the Mediterranean, dominated by great, peaceful, prosperous empires, the Roman Empire, the Maurians in India, the Han dynasty in China, they've driven rates of violent death down massively from Stone Age levels. I suggest by about three quarters they've come down from Stone Age levels. But then the rates spike back up again in the early 1st millennium AD as a new great revolution in military affairs, which is the rise of really effective cavalry, which shifts the balance of military power to nomads living on the steppes. And basically I'm talking here about the period sort of sandwiched between Attila the Han and Genghis Khan. And with them as your book ends, obviously we're talking about a period when rates of violent death spike back up. I suggest that the rates perhaps double as compared to what the ancient empires had seen. And this observation, I think, is important in two ways for what I'm saying. One is the way that it illustrates it while I'm making this general claim that the overall effect of war has been to create the biggest, safer, richer societies, obviously not all wars do this. And sometimes not only do not all wars do this, but you can get very long periods, a thousand year long period in this case when exactly the opposite is the big trend. The wars of the periods say 80, 200 to 1400 roughly. In Eurasia instead of building up bigger safer societies, they break them down into smaller, more violent, poorer ones because the nomads are able to destroy the great empires, but not really replace them with anything. This trend, I suggest, is then reversed after about 80, 1400. A new great revolution in military affairs, which is the invention of really effective guns, which gradually allow the great empires to close down the step nomad highway, shut the nomads out. Europeans put these guns together with ships, export violence all around the world and wage war in my book I call a 500 years war from roughly 14, 15 to 1914. By the end of that 500 years war, Europe and its colonists like people in the US control 84% of the surface of the world. Mind boggling number. So that I think is one important thing about seeing this whole story, seeing the variations that go on. The second way it's important, I think, is what it tells us about causation. While there's increasing agreement that rates of violent death have come down dramatically across history, there's no agreement over what causes this trend. And I think the big problem has been that the people doing the work have mostly been social scientists who tend to look just at fairly recent history or say in case of some of the recent studies by, say Steve Pinker and Jared Diamond in their recent books, they look at recent history, but also jump back to the stone age and sort of look at this long trend from the stone age. But what they see because they go about it this way, what they tend to see is a single thing, the decline in rates of violent death, because they haven't approached it really sort of historically looking at it as a continuous story. I think they've missed this sort of this bulge back up again in the middle. They've missed the fact this is a more complicated story with you've got three phases that ancient decline, medieval rise, modern decline, having three phases allows you to contrast and compare the three phases and start to identify what variables run across all three cases, which don't. And I think that shows you that in fact, we can cut through a lot of the clutter about all the different variables that might be relevant to this story. And the one that we see running through all the cases is the wars driving the building up or breaking down of larger societies and the rise and fall of peacefulness driven by that. Okay, well, I could happily go on all afternoon about the history, but I assume you don't want me to do that. So I will move on quickly to what I would say is kind of the obvious question that comes out of this, which is why is this happening? Why does history work in this perverse and paradoxical way? I think to answer that question, you've got to look beyond just the long term history of the last 15,000 years and set this human story into a much larger biological story, which basically goes back 3.8 billion years into the evolution of violence. And we've seen enormous advances in the last 50 years in this field. And I think what most biologists would now say is that pretty much every species of animal uses violence in some way, but of course they vary enormously in how they use violence, which suggests that violence has an evolved adaptation. That each species has evolved to use violence because in certain ways violence is good for passing your genes on to the next generation. And what we see are each species has a totally different way of using violence, like lambs and lions say use violence very, very differently from each other. Each species has its own kind of equilibrium point. There's a sweet spot for the use of violence for an animal with those particular attributes living in that particular environment with those particular rivals and predators and so on. Each has its equilibrium spot. And each animal in the species is different from every other animal. But say you're a lion and say you're a particularly violent lion and you fight even more than regular lions do. You are going to have less chance of passing your genes on to the next generation than the average fighting lion because you're going to get injured more quickly. If you're constantly fighting in really stupid circumstances you will drop out of the gene pool faster. If you're a pacifist lion who never fights, same problem because of the reason because you're going to be sort of pushed aside in the race for food and mates and so on. Same with lambs, same with humans. We are just like all the other animals in that we have evolved biologically to have a specific equilibrium use of violence which is what we see back in the Stone Age the 10 to 20% rate. So we're just like all the animals except for the one detail of course that we are completely unlike all the other animals. That our biological evolution gave us the miracle of nature that you all brought along this lunchtime, pulsing away at the top of your body, the human brain and nothing else like it so far as we know in the entire universe. What that allows us to do is as well as evolving biologically, like other animals as the environment changes, we change biologically very slowly into new animals. We also evolve culturally. We can change our institutions, have cumulative learning, respond to the changing environment very, very rapidly. And this, I say this is something no other animal can do. This is what has driven down the rate of violent death by 90%, our cultural evolution. At the end of the Ice Age as people start forming these bigger societies governments raise the costs to using violence, the payoffs from violence decline. Humans responded by using less violence and over 10,000 years these cultural changes drove the rate of violent death down by 90%. And that I would say that that's the big lesson we get from history that what Hobbes called the Leviathan, this is the mechanism which has basically scared us straight, driven down the rates of violence. This seems to be the one answer to the problem of violence. Okay, well to start moving into a conclusion then, if this is a correct understanding of the shape of history, are there lessons we can learn from it for the 21st century? I think the answer is yes. And I'm going to pick up my story where I left off the historical story with the Europeans swallowing up the world when they get the ships and guns. I just try to draw out what I think is one, I think quite serious lesson if this reconstruction of history is correct. So if we pick up the story back in the 18th century, at that point Europeans are creating these vast intercontinental empires. So vast people start to see in the 18th century and particularly Adam Smith is the guy who theorizes this. So vast that the source of the wealth of nations is increasingly not what it used to be where the Romans go out and they conquer somebody, they plunder them, they tax them heavily as subjects in the empire. Now Smith realizes, now the way to make your nation rich is to back off, to let people truck and barter in their natural way, let the markets grow as big as possible and extract your wealth from the biggest possible markets. Instead of trying to monopolize a market and tax it heavily, extract your wealth from the biggest possible market. And Smith's famous insight, of course, is that markets work best when governments get out of them. But the other insight he made that people often tend to gloss over, he said also markets only work at all if government gets into them, that the government provides the playing field, enforces the rules, punishes the bullies who use violence, the markets don't work at all without the government keeping them going. And Smith seems to have been moving toward a conclusion that what the world needs is not a leviathan policing its own trade routes, but some kind of super leviathan that acts like a global cup, kind of overseeing the whole system. That's what the world needs. And basically, this is what the world gets after about 1815, with the fall of Napoleon. Britain is the only industrialized power. It bestrides the world like a colossus. And although the 19th century continues to see savage wars, the rates of violent death fall lower and lower than ever before. Prosperity increases more, as does inequality. Britain generates its wealth from selling goods and services overseas. In order to do that, it needs safe, secure sea lanes. So it tries to intimidate other governments that might disrupt the British system. But it also needs wealthy customers. You've got to have people able to buy the goods and services. So the British find themselves in this weird paradoxical situation of encouraging other countries to industrialize and get richer so they've got big overseas markets. And it quickly becomes clear. Economically, this is a triumph. Strategically, it's a disaster. And by the 1870s, the US and Germany in particular, industrialized, become so powerful, they're beginning to turn into serious rivals to the British global cop. And what people discover is that, basically, the more successful Britain was at being the global cop, the harder the job becomes. It becomes less and less clear to people that there really is a global cop anymore by the late 19th century. And in the 1870s, when the pattern first appears, no one is going to directly challenge Britain. Nobody is that crazy. But 40 years later, in the 1910s, the situation has changed quite a lot. And more and more governments are starting to feel that Britain, nobody, is in a position to raise the costs of violence high enough that violence will never be the solution to your problems. And of course, particularly, there's a faction within the German government that starts to feel that you have this horrible strategic situation trapped between Russia and France. Maybe violence is the answer with results, of course, that we are all familiar with. Now, since at least 1989, the US has been operating a system that, of course, in many ways, totally different from the British Empire. But there are some, I think, significant similarities, a huge wealth that depends very much on global trade, global finance. The US police's the roots, keeps the playing field level, at least looks level from our perspective, anyway, encourages other countries to get richer so they can trade with the United States. And of course, China has been the obvious beneficiary in many ways of some of these policies. And since 2000-ish, a lot of people have started to say that the People's Republic is now emerging as a great rival to the United States. Now, in the 2000s, almost nobody was crazy enough to challenge the US order directly, I mean, the Taliban and arguably, Saddam Hussein do, and the results are very obvious, because that was the same in the 1870s with the British, too. Seems to me that if present trends continue, it's not impossible that in 40 years' time, we'll be dealing with a world very like the 1910s, where there's a global cop, but it's not clear to anybody whether it's raising the costs of violence high enough to make it unthinkable. And if that is where things are going, then I think we will inherit the worst of all possible worlds, a one as unstable as the run-up to World War I, with weapons even worse than the weapons of the Cold War. And again, if that's the case, I think the next 40 years promise to be the most dangerous in history. So, okay, the big lesson then I'd say is that peace and prosperity depend on Leviathans and global cops. If we want a safer, richer world, we need to keep a global cop, and really the only applicant for the job in the world at the moment is, of course, the United States. The alternative, I think, is a breakdown that will mean something like the rerun up to World War I, but this time with nuclear weapons. Now, obvious question to close with, can something like the U.S., global hegemony, global coppery, can that continue forever? Is it reasonable to think we can just go on and on and on in this state? And I think the obvious answer has to be no. I mean, nothing in history has ever lasted forever before. It would be slightly surprising if this did. When the book, my book came out in Britain at the beginning of this month, and when I was over there at the beginning of the month talking about the book, I would ask the audiences, imagine World War I hadn't broken out 100 years ago, in 1914, imagine that hadn't happened. Do any of you think Britain would still be running the world? And after a week of these talks, I must have talked to close to 1,000 people, and nobody ever said, yes, I think Britain would still be running the world. So does this mean that we are, in fact, all doomed? There's bound to be a decline of the U.S. global cut. We're bound to rerun the script. Are we all doomed? Well, I have some thoughts on that too, but I've talked too much already. So for those, you're going to have to read my book. So thank you very much for listening. Thank you. Thank you very much, Dr. Morris. Well, that was a brilliant synthesis of a lot of so much history and thinking about history. I guess you had a what about Hitler question. What about a Cuban missile crisis that sort of didn't turn out the way it did? I mean, I guess human nature being what it is, things go wrong. Yes, yeah, this is one, just to the chair, this is one of the more worrying things in the world is that a Cuban missile type scenarios. And I guess it seems to me, and I'm sure that there are probably people in the room who know a lot more about nuclear strategy than I do, but it seems to me that the nuclear balance, the deterrence was a really important part of keeping the world so peaceful during the Cold War. But I think also that there was this famous speech Ronald Reagan gave in 1983 where he compared the Cold War, the balance of terror, compared it to two gunslingers standing in a saloon where they're six guns pressed against each other's temples forever. And he said, yeah, this is great. This works just fine. So long as neither gunslinger ever has a bad day. I think that, of course, is the bad day issue is the problem with the nuclear standoff. Well, and Reagan went to Reykjavik and sort of had the conversation with Robert Scheven basically did the right thing. Just give the whole thing up. So I mean, and today we have the news that for the first time in American history, the American middle class is getting poorer than a lot of other middle classes in the industrial world and the American poor are significantly poorer than a lot of Western countries. And at the same time, we can see that the India and the Chinese economy is gonna be larger than the US economy and fairly soon. And of course, India and China had that disagreement. So I mean, one thing that I found surprising is I haven't read the whole book was your conclusion about this in the next 40 years being the most dangerous. I mean, I guess one difference between this period and World War I is that there was a set of a kind of, I mean, I don't think the outbreak of World War I was not necessarily inevitable. You know, one would hope if we are a learning species that some of the same sort of sets of, well, we'll make different sets of mistakes. But so, you know, that you're in, it's a very optimistic projection, the book overall, but the next 40 years isn't. So sketch out how you think it might develop in a non-optimistic fashion or how it might continue on its sort of upward trend. Yeah, I think it's a lot easier to make pessimistic projections than optimistic ones. There's just so many horrifying, terrifying things that you can focus on. But yeah, I mean, your initial point about the new arguments about the American middle class no longer being the richest middle class in the world and stuff. And again, this is another one of the sort of structural things where I think there are really striking parallels with what's happened to Britain at the end of the 19th century where very, very similar things are going on there. But as you say, I mean, World War I is in no sense inevitable. And the specific way that it broke out in 1914, of course, some of you will probably have read Chris Clark's book, Sleepwalkers, about the outbreak of the war, which is basically this long list of all the ways this could not have happened. There is overwhelmingly bad luck that what did happen did happen. And I think one of the big lessons of doing this long-term history stuff that I like to do is you learn really quickly to say, you never use the word inevitable. You never talk about anything being inevitable. All you can talk about is probabilities of things. And so as sort of larger balances shift, and they're very like evolution in that way. Larger forces shift around the probabilities of some events go up and down, even if we can't quantify them with any real precision. And I think the more we are rerunning the script of a pre-World War I, the higher the probability of coming to a similar, but of course, far more disastrous ending. And of course, you may well be right that we have learned enough at this point to be able to avoid that. And of course, I think the obvious cause for optimism there is looking at the end of the Cold War. We've been here 50 years ago, and I'd said it was 1964, right after a couple of years after the Berlin crisis and the Cuban Missile Crisis. And I'd breezed in and said, hey, you know, 25 years from now, those Russians are gonna wake up one day and say this, this whole communism thing, it's not working for me anymore. I'm gonna stop doing it. I'm gonna tear down the Berlin Wall. I'm gonna get rid of 95% of my nuclear weapons. It's gonna be a bit uncomfortable. A couple of hundred people will get shot in Romania, but there will not be hundreds of millions of deaths from nuclear war. And the world after this will become so much richer and safer than it's ever been before. If I'd walked in and said that stuff, you would have thought I was stark staring mad in 1964. And yet, of course, that is more or less how things play out. And you know, contrary to what a lot of people expected, by the 80s, a significant faction in the Soviet leadership is looking at their problems and saying, you know, force can't solve these problems. Sending the tanks into Poland isn't gonna solve our problems. Invading West Germany is certainly not gonna solve our problems. And what Gorbachev does, of course, has these catastrophic effects for the Russians, as Putin quite rightly pointed out. But it was way less catastrophic than it could have been. And so I think that we do learn from the past. We are capable of evolving more effective institutions. The fact that we've driven down rates of violent death by 90% is, I think, cause for tremendous optimism about our ability to carry on doing this. My main reason for pessimism, I would say, is that when you look back over how this story has gone in the past, what you see is that in the past, there's always been multiple natural experiments running. And what I mean by that is, say, back in the Stone Age, you've got thousands of separate little bands of anti-gatherers in the age of great farming empires. You've got dozens and dozens of great powerful states. They're all running this experiment, sort of pacifying themselves and fighting fewer wars. And almost all these societies break down in the end and come to an unhappy ending. But there's enough that figure out the ways to do things that the story keeps moving, the rates of violence keep coming down. Now I think we're in a world where there's really only one experiment running. And if we screw this up, then, of course, we do have the potential to destroy everything. And so the reason I drifted toward an optimistic ending is that I think there are just a lot of potential game changes out there. And I... What are they? Well, I think the big one that I focus on in the book, a lot of people think I'm just completely insane, but is the technological changes, which I think one of the big things we see driving down the rates of violent death has been the way that Leviathans in the past have kind of integrated more and more people together into, very loosely, but into what we can call a kind of super organism, the state functions as a larger group that the individuals are part of this. And as time has gone on, the ways these super organisms have been integrated have changed. And I was talking about Adam Smith's observation of the 18th century that, increasingly, the world has now become so pacified, the organization's so big, that now things like commerce start to become important. Democracy takes off, that becomes important. Seems to me that the biggest hope for a sort of rapid jump in these kinds of integration is some of the technological trends to where people merging both with and through their machine, with their machinery and through their machinery with each other, which, again, I talk about this at some length at the end of both of these books that you showed at the beginning. So I think it is one of the big game changer, in a way. And I live on the edge of Silicon Valley. So I'm surrounded by these rather wild-eyed techno gurus who are always telling me that, you know, next week we will solve all the world's problems. And I've heard enough predictions now to become somewhat skeptical about these. But the big direction that the developments are taking us, I think this does seem to be fairly clear. And the analogy a lot of the techno gurus like to say is that this is a little bit like the evolutionary story that I was telling, that about, gosh, I'm sure I'll get all the dates wrong here, but about a billion and a half years ago, the earliest life forms, these little globs of carbon-based globs that replicate themselves, a little tiny bit of information and then replicate themselves asexually, these start to merge together into larger, simple, single-celled organisms. They give up their blob-ness and merge together through a process of competition and cooperation to become single-celled organisms. About 700 million years ago, those start to merge together, giving up their cell-ness to become multi-celled plants and animals. And one of the ways that techno geeks like to look at what's happening now is to say that, well, basically, we're at the very beginning of a new process where individual humans are giving up more and more of their individual-ness and merging into this much more tightly-integrated super-organism. And I think the further we do move in that direction in the 21st century, the more that using violence to solve problems will literally be a matter of cutting off your nose despite your face, that the payoffs from violence will continue to go down and down. And so I suggest at the end of my book that perhaps the big issue in the 21st century is going to be a kind of race between a transformation of this kind and the breakdown of the current global order, made even more complicated by the way that a lot of the short-term implications of the technological changes actually seem to be driving some of this increasing inequality and surging wealth in some parts of the world and growing instability. So this is why I say I think the next generation is probably the most dangerous in history, but why I also remain reasonably confident it's all going to have a kind of a happy ending. So you say the war makes a state and the state makes peace. So it's not the state makes peace, obviously, internally, but also it makes peace with other states and creates a set of rules by which the rules of the road and the United States is doing that right now and the UK did that in the past. That's part of the argument, right? Yes. Yes, I think the states make peace internally because what they also do, I steal and distort this line that war makes a state and the state makes peace from a very famous essay by a sociologist named Charles Tilly and his argument, looking at the last 400 years of European history, was war makes a state and the state makes war because as these states get bigger, they wage ever fears of wars against each other and he's absolutely right about that. But I think what he missed because he just wasn't looking at a big enough chunk of history was that the overall effect in spite of war making states that make more war is toward less and less violence because the states get bigger and bigger and the internal pacification more than outweighs that the more people are getting killed in the wars. The wars of course get bloodier and bloodier but the populations grow and grow and grow until when I say that the Roman Empire, you've got 60 million people probably in the Roman Empire in the second century AD. The armed forces are roughly 350,000 men, even the most disastrous campaigns, talking like military losses of in the 20, 30,000 range and civilian losses that we can't quantify but probably higher, maybe three, four times higher but out of a population of 60 million people. So it's again this paradoxical thing that it's your scant consolation if you happen to be living in the path of the Roman army and they come down through and burn down your village and kill you and not much consolation to be told, well, oh well, the big story but the big story is still there and I think the war makes the state, the state makes peace because the scale because of the bigger organizations, the scale goes up and up and up and the pacification outweighs the more violence. Talking about the United States is sort of the global cop at the moment and we have a sort of we're in an interesting analogous situation in the sense with drones and cyber warfare that we were which we sort of have a monopoly on that's evaporating. What is the responsibility of the global cop in that environment in terms of making rules of the road for these kinds of new forms of warfare which by the way will kill less people preventing the cyber attack and maybe kill no one. Yes, yeah, I think in the past we've seen global cops or leviathans when you get back before the 18th century but trying to establish rules on how people fight wars. I think one of the things you see over and over again when these great powers break down, again, when you talk about the Roman Empire or not that very often part of the reason they break down is that there will be some kind of revolution in military affairs going on which is one that doesn't work to their advantage. I mean because of the recent history we tend to think that these RMAs are always driven by the richest most advanced technologically sophisticated parts of the world and then not. That I'd say, the example I mentioned when I was talking about the collapse of the great ancient empires this is driven by this revolution in military affairs that's created not in Rome or China but out on the steps where pastoral nomads out on the steps are breeding bigger and bigger horses. And this is something I think often we don't think about much today but if you lived in 1000 BC there was no horse anywhere in the world that you could get on the back up and ride around all day long. They just were not big and strong enough. You could yoke a couple of them to a chariot like wicker chariots and that could pull you around. And but if you've gone back before about 4000 BC you couldn't do that either. They just weren't big and strong enough. And the guys out on the steps breed these bigger and bigger horses and then discover, hey, this is great. I mean we step guys are totally outnumbered by the great empires. They have these fantastic Roman and Han armies way better than us. But a few hundred of us can ride in burn down these villages steal everything we want and ride away again. And there's really very little the empires can do about this. The empires actually, they quickly come to the realization that the only way you can stop this from happening is by paying people not to raid you. You say you do this, they do these really colds cost-benefit analysis. They say, well, you know, those Huns they're burning down our frontier villages and that costs us X talents of gold in revenue every year. How about if we pay the Huns X minus 10 talents to stop it, just stay home. Because the problem is the Huns take the gold and then raid anyway. So they then find, okay, we've got to have a stick and carrot thing, we pay the Huns. But then every so often the Huns just annoy us too much. We're going to go down there and we're going to kill a lot of Huns. We can never beat the Huns, but we can kill a lot of them. But the long-term trend in that case though was that the balance shifts more and more toward these step guys, the disastrous results of the empires. And actually I've now completely forgotten what the question was. So who are the step guys in the present environment, if anyone? I mean Osama bin Laden obviously tried, but without much success. Yes. Yes, I guess I would say the best analogy for the sort of asymmetric wars the US has been fighting in the last few years is not with the fall of the Roman Empire at all, but with the kind of wars the British Empire got into in the mid and late 19th century. When it was fairly effectively deterring other powers from doing things that would disrupt this British dominated system. And famously Abraham Lincoln's big worry during the Civil War is that Britain will recognize the Confederacy because that just will be a total game changer. And before the Prussians attacked the French in 1870, they make very sure that the British are okay with this. And the British are actually really keen on it. They think it'd be great to see the French taken down a peg or two. And then it turns out they didn't quite have this many pegs in mind. They were a bit of a shock to them. But so they create this world where there are very few real frontal challenges to the British order. And what you get instead is these much smaller actors, saying, well, okay, Germany or the US is not going to go to war with Britain, but we can. And they get it in a series of wars in basically the same parts of the world that the US has been fighting in against basically the same people, Islamist terrorists in the Sudan. The British get, there is an Islamist rising in the Sudan. Takes over the whole country. The British go down there, fight the Battle of Omdomen, overthrow this, this Caliphate. And they end up saying that it's in 1956 to prevent it happening again, which of course is rather chilling analogy for some of the things we've been involved in. I think that is the obvious analogy here. I suspect that the phase where in them, although all military predictions are always wrong, but mine is that the phase we're in at the moment, in fact, the RMAs are currently being driven by the big powerful states. And that it is the computerization roboticization. I don't know if that's a word, but these things happening in war are the next new big thing. And right now, I mean, I would agree with you completely that the short-term effect seems to have been driving down the numbers of deaths we get in the wars. And of course, it's the computerization had a big part to play in the reduction of the number of nuclear weapons, because you now, if you can land your missile within 10 feet of your target on the other side of the planet, you don't need a multi-megaton bomb to make sure you blow stuff up. You can hit the things directly. But I guess less sanguine that the long-run effect is going to be such a, is to drive the rates of death down if major wars break out. Yeah, one final question. You know, I think in life, when you say the sky isn't gonna fall in the long run, that a lot of people don't like to hear that. I mean, you've been on your book tour already now. I mean, because there's lots of people saying, I mean, Graham Allison wrote a book a decade ago saying there would be a nuclear attack in the United States by terrorists. There's no evidence of anything like that. And that was treated very seriously. He's a serious guy. But when you go out and you say, well, look in the long run, things are just getting much better. What's been the reaction? Yeah, mixed. Definitely mixed. I think there are some people who don't like the idea that the world might be getting better. And I've never understood why anybody would feel that way. But there are people who are strongly emotionally committed to that. And just like other people on the other side who are emotionally, so emotionally committed to the idea that everything is getting better and better, that they just don't want to hear any suggestions about things actually getting worse. So I think there are always some people who it doesn't much matter what you say. They just don't wanna hear it. But I've found that pretty much everywhere I've gone, there's been sort of three sets of responses. And one is from the people who say, well, no, this wheel that you're saying is just absolutely horrible. And I am completely unwilling to believe that war kind of actually had this sort of constructive, unintended side effect. Then the other extreme, there are people who I'll give my spiel and say, well, duh, this is completely obvious. You're nothing new, we all know this already. And then there's the group in the middle who say, well, okay, we'll listen to what you say. And some of them will conclude, oh yeah, maybe you're right. Some will conclude, no, you're a complete idiot. So you have these three different groups. And what I found is in different settings, the proportions, how the proportions break down between the three varies. And so in most academic settings, there's a lot of people in the first group who really, really don't want to talk about this. One of the big developments in history departments in the last 30 years has been the military history has been virtually wiped out in academic history departments. People just don't wanna talk about it. And I think their feeling is that by talking about war and treating it as a serious topic, you're somehow legitimizing it, saying that this is a really good thing for us to be militaristic. And also when I talked about my book in Germany, there was just a lot of people who just think that we really don't want people talking this sort of way. That may be a good thing. Yes, yes, you can see historical reasons for this. So yeah, it sort of varies from place to place. It's like when people complain about the Japanese not doing enough in Panasonic. Yeah, well. Do you really want me? Yes. Well, let's open it to questions. And if you have a question, can you identify yourself and wait for the mic? And we'll start with this gentleman here. Thanks very much. First, thanks for the engaging talk. A question. If you take it back to where you were and you're talking about evolutionary and you've gotten better, all right? And government has done that in that sense, okay? I was sitting here thinking, say, that's in the macro world. In the micro world, you've got in Chicago this week 45 people shot on Easter. And you look at that and you say, oh my God, but if you take your theory and do it, a lot of those I work with inner cities, they don't feel a connection to government. So would you be willing to take it down that way and say that that's part of it too? Or are they two totally unrelated issues? So the macro and the micro? Yeah, great question. I think this macro-micro thing is just hugely important in the sort of work that I've been doing the last few years. Because I guess one of the things that keeps striking me is how often the micro-experience that produces the macro outcome is completely different than the actual macro outcome. Because this is something that natural scientists have gotten really into in the last 30 or 40 years, especially the physicists, how what's going on at the subatomic level is entirely different from the way that the universe appears to work, which I don't think it's kind of cool but there are these similarities between all these different fields. But yeah, I think that the macro and the micro, though, are very tightly interlinked. And it even seems to me, and again, I'm sure there's people in this room who know a lot more about you in particular, you know, a lot more about what's going on in the cities than I do, although we used to live on the south side of Chicago. But I would say to some extent that the pockets of relatively high violence that we continue to get are largely because of the failure of governments to penetrate these regions. And as you said, when we lived on the south side of Chicago, it wasn't like law and order had broken down or anything like this. But if you call the cops, you're going to be waiting a while before anybody shows up. And actually, where I live now in the Santa Cruz mountains in California, it's very different from the south side of Chicago. But a similar sort of thing, there's very few police out where we are. You call the cops, it will be a really long while before they show up. And consequence of this is there are a lot of people just assume we do need to take things into our own hands. And it's a very heavily armed population where I live. Everybody has dogs, almost everybody has guns. And I think this is one reason I would say why gun ownership is so popular in the US. I think a lot of people, even if they live in very sort of heavily government penetrated, very police and safe areas, there's a strong belief that government shouldn't be doing a lot of these things and you should be doing them yourselves. So yeah, I think the two are very strongly linked. John, right here. Have you ever thought as to why the violence against women in warfare? Yeah, and this again, you know, sort of horrifying, but once you start studying it kind of obsessively sort of takes over when you start studying, it's just sort of obsessively interesting problem. I mean, it's so horrifying. Yeah, and this has always been a big part of war. And you read the ancient literature, they are absolutely unambiguous. You go to war to kill the men and rape the women. That's what you do. And this is something where I think the sort of evolutionary perspective is extremely useful. This has been a huge bone of contention in feminist history over just where does rape fit into large-scale historical story. And one of the big, the point of which, I think, understanding the biological evolution of violence really changes is 1973, when Jane Goddall was out at a Gombe research station in Tanzania studying chimpanzees. And up to that point, the general pictures of the chimps are these lovable, lovable creatures. And she's made chimpanzees famous to these National Geographic shows about them. And in 1973, they discovered that the two communities they're studying, two chimp groups, have just gone to war with each other. And one of the groups over the next four years, they systematically beat to death all of the males in the other group. They beat and rape all of the females. They kill some of the females, kidnap the others and bring them into their own group. They kill all the children in the other group. And they take over the hunting range of the other group. And this set off this uproar in evolutionary biology. What does this mean? Some people say this means humans are hardwired for violence. We share 98% of our DNA with the chimps. It means we're just hardwired for violence. And then in the 1980s, people discovered that the Bonobo chimpanzees, like pygmy chimps, very closely related to regular chimps, also have 98% DNA overlap with us. They almost never use violence. And the implication of this difference seems pretty clearly to be that the two groups are separated by the Congo River. They've been separated about 1.3 million years. And across this period, they're in slightly different environments. And they've evolved off in wildly different directions. And the Bonobos lived in an environment where violence just paid less. They moved toward using less of it. And I think what we learn from this is that even though violence against women has been such an integral part of war, as far as we can tell, as far back as war goes, because we're able to evolve culturally as well biologically, there is no reason why violence against women has to be a hard-wired part of the human story. And of course, even though we hear all these just horrifying stories, like all the rapes committed by the Red Army at the end of World War II or by in the Indian-Pakistani wars in the 1970s, the amount of rape that goes on in wars seems to have declined quite sharply. And I say seems to because this is something that is really, really difficult to quantify. The stuff that I'm doing, one reason why I concentrate so much on violent death is that this is something you can, up to a point at least, trace back a very long way through the skeletal record of lethal traumas on the skeletons and how these increase and decrease over time. Whereas something in ways almost as horrifying and effective war, the rape, that is something you're entirely reliant on the written record. And of course, most of the time, you can't believe what's being written. I think it probably would be fair to say we can't trace this back statistically much beyond the 20th century, frankly. So I think this is a big part of the story, but it's a part I actually say rather little. I say a bit about it in my book, rather little, because using the methods I use, I think it's rather hard to say a lot about it. John, in here. Thanks again. It is fascinating. Thank you. Can you compare war with sort of non-war catastrophic events like the Black Death or crop failures? When an empire fails to maintain the waterworks that support that? Yeah, that's an interesting question. I mean, one of my colleagues at Stanford actually brought this up with me just recently. I was telling him about what this book was about. And he says, oh, you're just jumping onto the same bandwagon the economists have been on for ages. Because our big thing is that the worse something appears to be, the better it is. This is what economists appear to think. The Black Death example you use is the classic example for the economists. Because one of the big arguments in economic history that's developed across the last 30, 40 years is that the most important thing for raising standards of living and reducing inequality ever in European history was the Black Death. It kills half the population in the space of a couple of decades. And it wildly changes the labor to land ratio. And so suddenly now there's a lot of land available relative to the population. So people don't have to work these crappy little fields that their fathers and grandfathers worked. They can just concentrate on the good stuff. Wages go up enormously for ordinary people. Inequality declines sharply. But then as the population grows over the next few centuries, it all kind of goes back downhill again. And so this guy was saying, well, you're just saying the same things we're saying. Terrible things tend to drive good consequences. And yeah, I don't really know if this is true as a sort of all-embracing generalization or not. But I think certainly it is sometimes true. And I mean, one, something that struck me just a couple of weeks ago is reading this new book that's making a lot of headlines. I mean, Thomas Piketty's book, Capital in the 21st Century. His big argument is that it's inherent in the nature of capitalism. That the rents extracted by the owners of capital are greater than the rents extracted by the sellers of labor. So the gap between the rich and the poor inevitably widens and widens. And he says, the only thing that ever turned out around really was World War II, which wiped out a lot of the equity of the rich and forced societies to change in ways which closed the gap between the rich and the poor. And then by the late 1970s, the effects of World War II are beginning to wear off. And that's why we now see widening inequality. And another colleague of mine at Stanford is now writing a book trying to extend this argument back right to the times of the Roman Empire. Say, hey, we see the same thing over and over again. It's not just wars. Famines, great way to lessen the inequality. So yeah, I don't know, maybe this is true. I kind of hope not. I think it has a very gloomy implications if it is true. Mr. Solomon here. My name is Javier Rupert. I was the Spine Ambassador to the United States some years back. If I may go back to the Hitler question. I hope there are not many Germans around. Well, you know very well then these last few weeks after Putin's grabbing of Crimea. There's been a lot of temptation to compare Hitler with Putin and draw in some comparisons between what happened in the 30s and what is happening right now. And in drawing the conclusions, after all, we might be seeing something similar in terms of appeasement, in terms of people criticizing appeasement and so on and so forth. Can you tell us how do you see the situation, whether there is something to be compared, whether we can't learn from history, where history is going to repeat itself? Yeah, yeah, because people love making these Munich analogies. And they're making many, many things. And most of the time, the analogies are kind of silly. I think that Putin and Crimea, the analogy, this time it is a very tempting analogy to make. The big difference I would see is that Russia in 2014 is not Germany in 1938. And Russia, I don't think, in any realistic scenario, I don't think Russia poses the same sort of threat to the global order that Nazi Germany did. Because the caveat has to be that Russia is still the world's biggest nuclear power, if their missiles actually work, they're the world's biggest nuclear power. And so potentially they could do more damage than anybody. But I think a scenario in which a nuclear war breaks out over Crimea is so wildly unlikely that we can, I hope we can probably safely discount that. And I guess where I see the analogy with Sudetenland, maybe not being totally ridiculous, is in thinking of the possible consequences of Putin getting away with what he's doing. Which I think a few years ago I was invited to a conference in Canberra in Australia where, by a group that had been responsible for drawing up the 2009 Australian defense white paper, talking about what their long-term strategy would be. They said in this white paper, the big challenge facing Australia is that we have to make a choice of some kind. We might have to make a choice of some kind between our strategic partner, which is the USA, and our economic partner, which is China. And the paper sort of implied that the choice would be to lean toward America. Then the whole white paper had been about how we can avoid offending the Chinese. And so these guys get just torn apart at the press. So they say, OK, we'll have another conference. We're bringing in different people this time and talk to them about what we should do. So they do this. And then this is in 2011, just around the time of when Obama announces the pivot toward Asia. And the Australian government announces, yes, we're definitely leaning even more strongly toward America now. But then they published a new defense white paper last year, which says exactly the opposite. It's all about scaling down Australia's commitment to armed forces even more about leaning toward China. And I think the governments in the West Pacific are just in a very difficult position. And I think you do sort of have this choice to make. Are we going to gravitate toward Beijing now while we still think we can get a pretty good deal from the Chinese? Or are we going to wait to be disappointed by the Americans? And my suspicion is that if there are really serious consequences come out of the Crimean episode, it's going to be this sort of ripple effect of people saying the US and Britain guaranteed the integrity of Ukraine's borders 20 years ago and have done nothing when it's been violated. And if I were in Seoul or Tokyo, I know what conclusions I would draw from that. So I mean, I guess I think there are ways in which the analogy can be taken way too far. But I think it's not entirely a ridiculous analogy to make. John, over here. Thank you, Matteo Faini, I'm a graduate student in international security. I was wondering what your thoughts are on the effects of war on the rise and fall of societies within the international hierarchy. So the most common explanation as to why European countries were able to conquer the rest of the world starting in the 15th century is that they competed so much, one with the other, that they were able to develop technologies that then allowed them to conquer the Mogul Empire, the Chinese Empire, the Maya Empire, and so on. At the same time, however, the war which brought Europe up arguably brought Europe down in the 20th century. So do you have an explanation as to when war leads to a rise in international hierarchy and when it does the opposite? Yeah, that's a great question. I guess I haven't really given it much serious thought on the sort of generalizing theoretical level. So I will have to do that so the next time people ask me, I have a good answer to give instead of rambling on, which is what I will now do for a moment. So yeah, I think in the 15th century, I think there is a lot of truth in this. What I think has now become the most popular theory, that what drives Europe's military success is the fact that it's broken up into all these separate states and constantly fighting against each other and pushes the Europeans to improve on the firearms technology and the ships. Because the great irony of the Europeans' world takeover story is that the guns and the ships that the Europeans rely on are actually invented in China. And the Chinese are the first ones to develop ocean-going ships. They can reliably cross oceans. And real guns, by which people normally mean a weapon with gunpowder, where the gunpowder explodes so fast you can fire a projectile out of it. The Chinese invent all this stuff. But then it's the Europeans who really ramp them up and make them actually very effective weapons. And I think part of it is definitely this thing of Europeans fighting each other. Part of it I think is also geographical, though. And there's a great book written on this, a book that got almost totally ignored by a man named Kenneth Chase. The book is just called Fire Arms. And what he points out is that China, in the early 14th century, China ramps up gunnery technology really quickly, because there's a big civil war going on. And a lot of it has been fought in the Yangtze Valley by ships in very confined spaces and a lot of sieges going on. All these are contexts in which gunnery becomes a decisive weapon really quickly, a lot of pressure to make better guns. Once the civil war is over, the main military threat China faces, it tends to be these step nomads. And the guns in the 15th century are just very, very slow firing, which doesn't matter if you're shooting against a fortress, because it's not going anywhere. But if you're shooting against cavalry, the guns are not much use in the 15th century. Whereas the Europeans are fighting wars much more like the ones in the Yangtze Valley in China. And so the Europeans keep fighting these wars and they keep getting driven, the technology gets driven up and up and up in Europe. And it's not really, I mean, until really 1650, 1700, you get to the point you've got guns that can actually shoot down cavalry. You can reload quick enough to shoot the cavalry when they're charging you. And at that point, the Chinese and the Japanese and Koreans all begun in the 16th century, began glomming very hard onto the European technology. And the Japanese, I mean, by the late 16th century, the Japanese are making the best guns in the world. So yeah, it's a fascinating story. But I tell the story basically because I don't have a good answer to your question, but I will go away and think about it. Lady here. Thank you. I haven't heard you say anything about the role of religion in wars. And it seems to me that they go back way, way back, and that they dominated so many wars. Yeah. Yeah. I think religion is a huge part of the story. And I say quite a lot about religion in my book. But I am one of the people who think that religion is a secondary factor in all these stories. I'm one of the die-hard materialists in the world. There's still a few others left. And in fact, I mean, I would extend this more generally to culture of almost all kinds. Cultural changes, I feel strongly are driven by changes in the material world. In the book that Peter mentioned, Why the West Rules for Now, one of the things I keep saying in that book is that each age gets the thought it needs. As geography and material factors of various kinds force new questions onto people, people start thinking about these questions. And if the questions can be solved, people tend to start solving them. And like in the Why the West Rules book, I suggested the reason are you get a scientific revolution in Europe. Not because Europeans are smarter than the Chinese or the Arabs or the Indians or anybody like this. But because by 1600, Europeans are beginning to confront a new kind of problem that nobody else in the world has had before, which is driven by this stuff I was just blathering on about with the ships and the guns. Europeans, once these new ships arrive, the Atlantic Ocean is suddenly transformed from being a barrier which cuts Europe off from the rest of the world because you can't do anything with it's too big. To being a kind of super highway. And now Europeans are able to develop these. There's North Atlantic trade. You're zipping around the North Atlantic. And historians like to call it the triangular trade. I'd say you would start off in Liverpool, say, with a shipment of blankets and pipes and guns and manufactured guns. You sail down to West Africa. Exchange these for profit for human beings. Then you ship the human beings across to the Caribbean. Exchange them again for a profit for sugar or rum. You ship that back to England. Sell it again for a profit. And then use the cash to buy more blankets and hats and everything. Off you go again. This turns into the biggest money generating machine the world has ever seen. And by 1600, a lot of European intellectuals are starting to say, you know, if we could just figure out how the stars move in the skies and how the winds and the tides really work, there is no limit to what we can now do with this knowledge if we can figure these things out. And the people in India, China, the Muslim world, they've been asking similar questions for a long time. But nowhere in the world has it ever been so pressing as it now becomes in Europe. And so in the 16th, 17th century, you've got all these European intellectuals who, for 2,000 years, the biggest deal has been studying the Bible or studying the Greek Roman classics or whatever. And you've got a big chunk of them starting to say, no, that's not a big deal anymore. The big deal is explaining the natural world. That's why you see that change. And I think I would claim you can generalize this to the story of cultural history, religious history more generally. And so I tend to feel that what the religion does is it performs the tasks people need to perform under any given situation. And so I mean, take Christianity. In the Roman Empire, Christianity is on the whole, I think it is a force for pacification. The lesson of Christianity, you know, turn the other cheek, do unto your neighbor, all these things. This is exactly what the Roman upper class wants to hear. And initially, they oppress Christianity because it's seen, you know, probably rightly as a challenge to the established order. Then they really get a hold of it in the 4th century and say, wow, this is fantastic. This is encouraging everybody not to be violent. We love this. But then once the ancient empires come to bits, you move into the Middle Ages. And there's still plenty of Christians saying non-violence is the way forward. But you also get stuff like the Crusades. I think when you live in a more violent world, religion tends to get used for more violent ends. And I suspect my feeling is this has a lot to do with the history of fundamentalisms around the world. This is the world the fundamentalists generally tend to live in. So I would say it's very much driven by the material forces. But it's just like a super big part of the story. Two quick follow-ups. So was given right that Christianity was sort of the death knell of the Roman Empire? And secondly, do you think non-religious ideologies, I'm thinking, you know, communism, fascism, extreme forms of nationalism, are actually more damaging than religious beliefs in terms of creating conflict? Yeah, the given thing, I guess I would put it the other way around. It's more of the fall of the Roman Empire was responsible for the success of Christianity is my feeling. But yeah, with non-religious type beliefs, my feeling is that the dangerous thing about belief systems of whatever kind is that to some people, you will interpret this belief as saying that I now know the secrets of the world and I now know how to make the world a perfect place. And if you just do what I say the interpretation as belief system is, the world will be a perfect place. And if I am able to tell you what to do to perfect the world, then really, I mean, you were talking about perfecting the world here. So it doesn't matter. I suppose this is actually what I'm saying my book sort of as well. It's scarier. It doesn't matter how bad the thing is I'm telling you to do. And so Hitler tells you, just gas the Jews and the world will be perfected, but we'll get rid of the corruption in the world. And because you have lots of other genocidal maniacs who had similar sort of ideas, you just hack these tootsies to pieces and Rwanda will be perfected. I think it's a really old story. And this, I guess my gut feeling would be in this regard, it sort of doesn't matter whether it's a religious creed or not. If it's telling you that it's OK to do anything, no matter how awful it is, then this is a really bad thing. Maybe over here. Terribly sorry to have come late to your talk, but I actually came from a meeting with a bunch of warriors, a bunch of generals. And in order to maybe explain my observation to you, I just need to tell you a wee bit about what I've done in the last few years. I am a cross-border Pashtun. I literally come from the worst part of the AfPak region, the south of Afghanistan and the northwest of Pakistan, family divided by the border, et cetera. I've been a senior advisor and a tactical instructor on counterinsurgency on the front lines with the US Marine Corps. And I've come back after 12 years. I think one of the most difficult observations for me to make in both Iraq and Afghanistan working really closely with the American military and then NATO and Allied forces, et cetera, has been that a lot of men, a lot of really civilized men, gentlemen, intellectuals, this, that, and the other come to that environment and become rampant misogynists. It absolutely stunned me. They ignore women within the communities who have been really successful and might focus on sort of very, very weak women, very oppressed women, but only as a means to putting down the men of the other side. Look at how they treat their women. Look at what uncivilized pigs they are, that kind of thing. Yet women who could actually give them something they totally ignored. And I actually had a very nice Canadian civilian telling me, well, basically, women are irrelevant. We only address women's issues. Once we have the peace and stability and we have the environment in which to do it in. So I don't know what your thoughts on that is, but I feel that counterinsurgency should be a woman's domain. They do it more effectively when they're allowed to and whether or not you've had to deal with that. Yeah, yeah, that's a really interesting observation. And thank you for telling me that. Because what the Canadian guy was saying to you, this is sort of the conclusion that I found myself drifting toward as I was writing this book, that most military histories tend to be about boys. There are very few girls in them. And in fact, your most history that gets written about periods before roughly 1800 in the West tends to be about boys again. All of the sources from the medieval and ancient worlds tend to be written by and for men. And I think there's a reason for this. And I got very interested in this as I was writing the book. Because I'm sure many of you will have come across Steve Pinker's book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, which I think is a great book. One of the best descriptions of this decline in violence across the last 500 years has ever been published. It's a great book. But one of the big differences between my book and Steve Pinker's book is that I think that by looking at this continuous narrative across 10,000 years, you get to see, as I was saying, these three separate periods of what happened to the rise and fall of violence and compare and contrast them and identify a single force in the history of war that's driven the whole thing. Whereas Pinker is more interested in producing a large set of variables that have influenced the decline of violence in recent times. And one of the variables he talks about is feminization. And what he suggests, I think, quite sensibly, he says, well, you read the literature produced through most of history. Now, you pick up a play by Shakespeare or something. It's all about one guy says something about how some other guy's cloak looks weird. And so the second guy pulls out his dagger and stabs the first guy to death. And everybody says, good work. That was exactly what this guy was asking for. And it goes through so much of history. The definition of being a man of honor means you're a man who will violently defend his honor against insults. But it goes more recently, that has changed dramatically. And now, if somebody in the audience asked me a question I really didn't like, and I leapt up and random and punched you in the face, people would say, well, that is not the behavior of a man of honor. A man of honor now is one who controls these what we now think of as stupid, destructive emotions. And one of Pinker's suggestions is that this has really been driven by a kind of feminization of values, that as women have become more empowered and had a bigger voice in politics particularly, but in the culture more generally. We've gone from saying that these very male ways of behavior, you look at police blotters really anywhere in the world. You see that 90% to 95% of the violent crime is committed by young men. You look at chimpanzees, 90% to 95% committed by young males as well. This is an evolved male way of solving arguments is to attack the other person. It's not a way that females in humans or chimpanzees have normally evolved to deal with things. And so what Pinker suggests is that perhaps part of the reason males evolved this way is a kind of psychological rush you get from using violence. There's a reward from using violence in your brain. It kind of almost has a drug effect from using violence to solve your problems. And he suggests that one of the things that happened in the last 200 years is we've seen macho go from being generally admired and praised to being sort of ridiculous. If you act too violently or do a dinner party and behave violently again, everybody's just going to stare at you, and they're never going to ask you back again. And he suggests that this has actually changed the ways our brains work. I was thinking about this as I did in my book, because I felt that if you look back at the previous occasion on which there was a great pacification in the ancient world, you see some writing a little bit like some of the things people say currently about values and about the impact of women on their values. See something a little bit like that in the Roman Empire. And you see things a little bit like what people currently say about, say the role of commerce in making violence less attractive. See little traces of these same things 2,000 years ago. Then they sort of disappear completely again in the Middle Ages. And my hunch, although we've only got three cases to compare here, so it can only really be a hunch. My hunch is that the feminization of society and the appeal to reason rather than force and the impact of commerce and democracy and dissuading people from acting violently, these are things that only really kick in when the level of violence has been driven below a certain level. And then when it's like the world has to be made safe enough for these values to start influencing people. And then they do in a big way and clearly in our own world. These are all really important forces. So I mean, again, my highly uninformed opinion and it would be that probably this guy you were talking to, maybe he's right, that only when a certain level of law and order has been put in place can we get the sort of transformations you're talking about. So you mean we have to continue to sort of trow out to a patriarchal figure until we're actually recognized as an entity in our own rights. It's really terrible. I don't know whether that is the only way to do this. But I guess my hunch from the history that I've read would be something has to be done to create a secure environment before the sort of changes you're talking about are likely to be very successful. And whether that means coutowing to the patriarchs or whether it means taking the patriarchs out and shooting them or something else. Do we have time for one more question? Gentleman here. Yes, there was a book written in the 60s by Conrad Lorenz about onaggression and territorial imperative. I guess, are we still wired that way? Yeah, we've moved the biologists. Obviously, I know nothing about this field. All I know is from talking to experts and reading what they've written. The biologists have moved on a very long way since then. Back in the 60s, before the biologists had really begun to collect good data on patterns of violence in other species, there was a really widespread assumption that lethal violence that humans commit was almost unique in the animal kingdom. And particularly group lethal violence, where a whole community of humans get together and attacks another community. This is pretty much unique in the animal world. And now we just know so much more about this. And I think, again, this is just my sense of where the biologists are. My sense of it is that the consensus is that Lorenz was absolutely right to put his finger on territoriality, he's one of the big drivers in this. But it works in rather more complicated ways than what Lorenz was suggesting. And there are a number of species that will use lethal violence, a number of species that use group violence. And lethal violence, if you discount sort of accidental killing of other animals, you fight one gets injured and then goes off and dies from infection or something. Deliberate killing between species is pretty much limited to social animals that can cooperate as groups. And pretty much limited to situations where a group of animals will encounter an isolated individual, a very small number of the other and can attack safely knowing that the risk of they themselves getting injured is really, really low. And what is unique with humans is this thing where we have been able to train young men, or we train young men to go right up to large numbers of people who are trying to kill them and to stand there and duke it out. So that is really, really unusual. And I suggest in the book that in some ways it's like the invention of discipline is the thing that really makes the biggest success story of Leviathan's. Getting young men, training them, imbuing them with the military arts and virtues and drawbacks too. To actually walk up to guys armed with really sharp spears and just stand there and keep stabbing until your side wins. That is unique to us. What on that? We will, thank you very much, sir.