The Most Peaceful Era in Human History

I know. That one feels insane. With Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, and whatever crisis is dominating the news cycle this week, telling someone we live in the most peaceful era in human history sounds delusional. It shouldn't, because the data is unambiguous. The problem is that your perception of violence is shaped by media exposure, not by data. And those are two very, very different things.

Steven Pinker documented this exhaustively in The Better Angels of Our Nature, drawing on data from multiple conflict databases, and the numbers have held up across subsequent research. The per-capita rate of death from violence has declined enormously over centuries — and the decline is so large that it's not even a close call.

Pre-Modern Violence

In pre-state societies — the ones that "back to nature" romantics love to idealize — archaeological evidence suggests that 10–15% of all deaths were caused by violence. One in ten, at minimum. Tribal warfare, raiding, revenge killings, disputes over resources and territory. This wasn't aberrational. This was the baseline human condition before organized states with laws and law enforcement existed.

In medieval Europe, homicide rates were staggering by modern standards. The murder rate in England in the 1300s was roughly 30 per 100,000 people per year — and in some regions it was considerably higher. In parts of Italy, it was over 50 per 100,000. For comparison, the current U.S. murder rate — which Americans consider disturbingly high — is about 5 to 6 per 100,000. Medieval England was five to six times more violent than modern America. And medieval England was considered one of the more orderly kingdoms in Europe.

Violence was woven into the social fabric in ways that would horrify modern sensibilities. Public executions were entertainment. Torture was a legitimate legal tool. Blood feuds between families could persist for generations. Bar fights routinely escalated to stabbings and killings because everybody carried weapons and there was no professional police force. If someone wronged you, your options were basically "let it go" or "handle it yourself" — and cultural norms strongly favored the latter.

War Deaths

World War II killed roughly 70–85 million people — the deadliest conflict in human history. The Korean War and Vietnam War killed millions more. The 20th century was, in absolute terms, the bloodiest century in human history. But — and this is the critical distinction that most people miss — it was also the most populous century in human history. When you adjust for population, the picture changes dramatically.

The per-capita rate of death from armed conflict has fallen dramatically since 1945. The Uppsala Conflict Data Program — the gold standard in conflict research, maintained by Uppsala University in Sweden — shows that battle deaths per 100,000 people have fallen by roughly 90% since the 1940s. Wars still happen. People still die in them. But the probability of any given person dying in a war is a fraction of what it was for previous generations.

Between the great powers, there hasn't been a direct military conflict since 1945. That's 80 years. The longest period of great-power peace in modern history. Maybe in all of recorded history. For context: between 1500 and 1945, there was a great-power war going on somewhere in the world roughly 80% of the time. The current peace isn't normal. It's historically extraordinary.

Homicide in America

The U.S. murder rate peaked at about 10.2 per 100,000 in 1980. By 2014 it had fallen to 4.4 — a 57% decline. It spiked during COVID to about 6.8 in 2020 and has since been falling again. In most of Western Europe, homicide rates are between 0.5 and 1.5 per 100,000. Medieval peasants would think they'd died and gone to heaven.

But here's the kicker: despite this dramatic, well-documented decline in violence, Gallup polls consistently show that a majority of Americans believe crime is getting worse. Year after year, 60–70% of Americans tell pollsters that there is more crime than the year before — even during years when crime rates were dropping. This is the purest possible illustration of what happens when your perception of reality is shaped by media consumption rather than by data.

Genocide, mass atrocity, and state-sponsored killing are all less common than they were in the 20th century. Not gone. Not zero. But dramatically reduced by any honest measurement. The world your great-grandparents lived through — a world of total war, colonial massacres, industrial-scale genocide, and the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation — is not the world you live in now, even if CNN makes it feel that way.