I think that humankind evolves towards less violence and suffering.1 This is a bold interpretation, obviously; one could rightfully object that there is a lot of evidence to the contrary. Not only the world is still disfigured by wars and infected by numerous forms of violence, we humans are fiercely on track to actually destroy the planet. This clearly suicidal path doesn’t fit well with the idea of a species turned towards peace. And yet, I’m going to argue the slightly insane hypothesis that humankind tends to evolve towards less violence.2
It’s tempting to consider violence as a natural part of the cycle of life: predators eat preys, etc. It’s fair to assume that humans belong to this “natural order” of things where violence is an essential component. Humans even reproduce and extend the patterns of violence: military domination, slavery, economic inequalities, racism, gender-based violence… Nevertheless, one has to admit that humans don’t like violence: they tend to avoid it if they can, and are often disgusted by it. Across the evolution of humankind, there is a clear trend for the most cruel forms of violence to become less and less tolerated and disappear progressively. For example the killing of a “criminal” (often sentenced on very light grounds) used to be an entertainment for the people. Nowadays, many countries don’t even kill their criminals, it’s considered too cruel. Among those which still do, very few would consider the killing as an entertainment. The same goes for slavery, racism, and even wars: somehow, in the modern world, a very large proportion of humans is disgusted by the idea of such cruel violence against other human beings. Sure, violence still rages and even has some supporters, but a majority refuses it, or is at least reluctant to it.
The Overton window is also moving progressively towards accepting less and less forms of violence. Only a few decades ago, nobody would have thought anything of making fun of fat people or people with glasses, for instance. It was fair game to mock any kind of physical anomaly; to encourage racial stereotypes; for a man to aggressively pursue a woman who expressed her non-interest. These types of behaviour are not acceptable anymore because the violence that they inflict of the victim is now perceived as unfair and cruel. The same violence which was once seen as harmless is now seen for what it really is, as if it has been revealed to society. Of course, it’s the human society which has changed: the threshold on the level of acceptable violence has been lowered.3
Scientific and technological progress also made random natural violence much less likely to hit people. Death and suffering caused by diseases, hunger or natural disasters have drastically decreased. The value of a human life has increased a lot and consequently is worth much more effort to preserve it. There is clearly a lot of room left for improvement, inequalities in this domain are staggering, but there is little doubt that the level of human suffering has been reducing globally.
It looks like a lot of this evolution took place quite recently, in the past century or so. That is, together with the dramatic increase in education, new ideas, understanding, technology… In fact, it looks like as the collective intelligence grows, violence becomes more and more avoidable… and, consciously or not, most people are happy to avoid it.
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To be honest, this is one of these cases where I hesitate between saying “I think” and “I would like to believe”. But let’s be confident: I do think so and I stand by it! ↩︎
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Ironically, I’m a rather pessimistic person in general. ↩︎
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What about those people who complain about “wokeness”, who regret that “we can’t say anything anymore”, etc.? Well it’s obvious, isn’t it: they haven’t accepted yet that some types of violence are not acceptable anymore, in the same way that a lot of people did not accept the end of slavery, a lot of people did not accept that one can’t beat their children or their wife, etc. In other words, these people need more time to understand this evolution at their own pace. As individuals, they might not even have enough time and thus they may never accept, but nature has a way to make societies evolve anyway: old generations die, and new generations are less likely to be nostalgic of an old form of violence. ↩︎