Today is the 30th anniversary of the International Day of Peace as established by the United Nations. Despite the United States’ involvement in three different military conflicts, this 2009 article by psychologist Steven Pinker points out that the current era has seen less armed conflict than almost any in human history.
As Pinker says, it’s the relatively broad success of the liberal values espoused in the post-WWII period that deserve the credit for reducing the scourge of war. The present revitalization of the extreme right in governments across Europe and here in the United States does not necessarily mean a reversal in that progress, but nationalism, economic upheaval, and resource scarcity are the traditional engines of war, and the conditions once again exist for the return of extensive violence.
It is likely that humans will never manage to rid themselves of the deeper motivations for killing one another, but it’s still worth the effort to try. The swinging pendulum of politics will continue in the wrong direction for some time to come, and as long as it does the threat will increase, but the outcome is not guaranteed.
