Eran wrote:Pinker would disagree (based on deaths databases) and I tend to agree with him.
There is a major bias for over-counting recent deaths relative to ancient ones. The obvious reason is that we know more about modern wars than we do about ancient ones. The secondary reason is that much of the world has become more consolidated in the 20th century relative to ancient times. There have been fewer (but larger) military conflicts in the 20th century than in previous ones. Historians tend to be ignorant of, or merely ignore relatively "minor" armed conflicts (e.g. those between barons in Feudal societies) because they aren't "historically significant", even while the total deaths rate they are responsible for may well exceed that of larger but rarer modern wars.
I'm not discounting the murder rate amongst hunter gatherer communities, I'm just saying you're comparing apples to oranges.
My definition of a government would be an institution that imposes law. Meaning you have a ruler or group of rulers who create laws by decree.
People had already left hunter gatherer communities behind and formed systems of law, including judges, etc, BEFORE the first governments started popping up. It's when laws began to emerge that murder rates began to drop.
That was post hunter-gatherer and pre-government. Most people have the perception that if there were laws, there must have been governments, and that is where the confusion comes into play, because if you look at it that way then, yes, it would seem that humanity started behaving itself at the same time the first governments sprang up.
The argument is that murder rates have declined once a stable central government emerges. I think that's both plausible and neutral with respect to the anti-government argument.
That is only if you exclude democide, which wouldn't make any sense. If we were to quantify the death and destruction seen in just Europe in the last 100 years, it exceeds every murder in the last thousand years, and that is without counting people killed in combat.