[peter12]

Man is violent because we're status-seeking primates. The rate of violence among primitive people was staggering.

This assumption has recently been widely challenged.

He also documents the incredibly high level of day-to-day violence in pre-state peoples. Ever since Rousseau, thinkers in the West have been attractive to the myth of the noble savage. Of Eden before the fall. But it's nothing more than a projection of our desires. We're uncovering more and more evidence of systematic violence among our earliest ancestors. Heads stove in. Bones showing terrible trauma from weapons. Mass strangulation.

Once again, this is debatable.

http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.o.../12/3/20160028

Read up on the way Russian peasants lived before the revolution. It's as good a window into the Middle Ages as we have, and it was appalling. Brutal, ignorant people living in cramped and filthy conditions, the man of the house a vicious tyrant who routinely threatened and beat his children, spouse, in-laws, farm-hands. Disputes over boundaries and farm tools routinely leading to someone's head getting stove in with a rock. Drunken festivals devolving into family feuds with savage beatings and murder by knife or club

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So read Under the Old Regime, and find out why it was this way. Quite appalling, yes, but had a great deal to do with specific variables to a specific people at a specific time.

The murder rate in medieval London and Paris was twenty times what is it today. Affairs of honour, whether the crude disputes of gambling dens or the ritualized duels of gentlemen, routinely led to someone bleeding out on the ground. This sort of low-level violence is responsible for far more deaths than wars.

Yes, Nietzsche would call it honour.

Not on a per capita basis. The conquests of the Mongols in the 13th century, for example, left 40 million dead. That's the equivalent of 278 million people in the mid-20th century (55 million were killed in WW2). Pinker's stats rank WW2 as the 9th most lethal event in history. The most level event? The An Lushan revolt in China in the 8th century, which left an estimated 36 million dead (or the equivalent of 429 million in the mid 20th century). Our sense of scale when it comes to violent events has a strongly Western bias, the East being largely ignored by popular Western culture.

I'd be interested to the period of peace that followed the Mongol political consolidation? War is the Father of All, and almost inevitably leads to long periods of peace.

Rank ordering of violence events is highly suspect in itself. The historical consensus is that WW2 was the tail end of a half-century long conflict that began before WW1.

BTW the Lushan Rebellion figure has now been pronounced unreliable.