Peace in our time?

Waking up today and reading the news, any of us could easily be forgiven for thinking that we are bearing witness to the worst of times. A faltering economy. Rising food prices. Rising inequality. Racial injustice. Mass extinction. A war in modern Europe. A global pandemic that has claimed the lives of almost 6 million people. All against the backdrop of a raging, accelerating climate crisis that unchecked, threatens to render our home planet uninhabitable for human existence. These events got me thinking about one of the tomes currently sitting on my bookshelf, a book that even a decade after it was published, seems more relevant today than it was in 2011. There seems no doubt that as a species we are currently navigating our way through a cyclical period of chaos, yet contrary to popular belief, it is not unprecedented. In fact, as Yuval Noah Harari explains, despite the appalling nature of current events, we should not be surprised.

‘Most people don’t appreciate just how peaceful an era we live in. None of us was alive a thousand years ago, so we easily forget how much more violent the world used to be. And as wars become more rare they attract more attention. Many more people think about the wars raging today in Afghanistan and Iraq than about the peace in which most Brazilians and Indians live.’ Sapiens - A brief History Of Humankind, 2011

This speaks more to an unwillingness to see past our own lifetimes, either forward or back, than it does about the present state of humanity. It seems we are only able to view the world as it is today. We read the news (or rather scroll through it distractedly) and see the present as the only reflection of our combined existence. If we forget that countless societies and civilizations were lost to the ravages of war, invasion and colonialism previously then of course the Russian invasion of an independent, ‘European’ democracy like Ukraine strikes us as shocking. And amidst the resurgent wave of a planet wide pandemic, perhaps we could be forgiven for assuming we’ve been dealt a bad hand, historically speaking. But should we? I find it ironic that we’re at a point in time when our collective technological development means more people than ever have unprecedented access to previously unimaginable amounts of information. Want to know when the Ottoman Empire fell? Simply click Google. How many Jews were gassed or starved to death during WWII? Ask Siri. Did the Bubonic Plague really kill 200 million people? Fact check Wikipedia. It has never been easier to access information, yet somehow our human-centric point of view keeps us firmly rooted in the present. Why concern ourselves with the demise of the Anglo Saxons when it happened over a thousand years ago? As stated above, we don’t even need to go back a fraction of that timespan, many of us still have family members that lived through the second world war and still it fails to trouble our memories when faced with the barrage of current affairs, online reporting and social media. You’d think we’d at least find it easier to relate to the suffering of individuals rather than entire populations but again, only within our own sight lines. Perhaps the problem lies not in our memories but in our sense of perspective.

During the first year of the 21st Century, wars killed 310,000 people globally. Violent crime another half a million. As tragic as those figures are, that combined number of 830,000 victims represents just 1.5% of the 56 million people that died in 2000. Almost four times the number of people (1.26 million) died in car accidents than in the theatre of war. I understand that snapshots of statistics are by no means a measuring stick but they are an indication of how much our hysteria influences our outlook on the world. SARS-CoV-2 is a perfect example, and while I am not suggesting we should dismiss the seriousness of the Covid-19 pandemic or the memory of those who lost their lives, it feels like we need to apply a sense of perspective, in particular against the backdrop of history. In 2022 we feel aggrieved that we are still fighting a virus two years after it was discovered. We are tired of living with restrictions, precautions and mandates. We yearn for a return to normality (as if that’s a tangible thing). These are all a consequence of our inability to recognise that, far from being out of the ordinary, living through a pandemic is in fact part of the human condition. Those of us alive today simply haven’t lived through one before. If we compare Covid-19 to the two historical pandemics that most of us are familiar with, we can start to see where the faults lay in our lack of perspective.

Over the course of three major outbreaks that affected generations of people from the 6th to the 19th Century, Bubonic Plague is responsible for an estimated 75-200 million deaths. During the second plague pandemic that reached Europe in 1348 it proceeded to wipe out up to half the population of Eurasia in the next four years. Think about that for a second. Imagine if between 2018 and today, 374 million people died from a communicable disease. Compare that to the past two and half years, in which time SARS-CoV-2 has taken the lives of 5.97 million people globally. To paraphrase Yuval Noah Harari, that’s tragically almost 6 million ‘worlds destroyed’ but still a mere fraction of the misery that multiple generations before us had to repeatedly endure. Even the industrial and technological revolution that was to come with the turn of the 20th Century offered no rest-bite. The Spanish Influenza Pandemic lasted just two years but killed an estimated 50-100 million people. So here we are in 2022 and to many of us it still appears as if our world is burning, both metaphorically and physically, not just through the lens of sickness and climate change but war in Europe, a concept that seems so unthinkable to most of us it’s been treated with a sort of subconscious disbelief. The words ‘world war three’ and ‘nuclear’ have been bandied around the media almost flippantly for the past few weeks, words that for a large part of the past seventy years have formed nothing more than a backdrop to a joke, a satirical comment about the state of political or social relationships. Yet now we are using them in the very context they were designed for and we’re almost unaware of it, such is the strangeness of our collective world view. Have we again been blinded by our inability to reference the past? Or are the events unfolding in front of our eyes simply to outrageous? As Harari points out;

‘In most parts of the world, people go to sleep without fearing that in the middle of the night a neighbouring tribe might surround their village and slaughter everyone…With very few exceptions, since 1945 states no longer invade other states in order to conquer them and swallow them up.’

In that same time period since the end of world war II, no independent country recognised by the United Nations has been conquered and wiped off the map, yet for almost the entirety of human history, such conquests have been the standard by which political and social empires were forged. We should all be appalled at the situation unfolding in Ukraine but on the basis of history, none of us should be surprised or shocked. The acceptance of our own self destructiveness must be answered before we can engineer a solution to the conflict at hand or in the future. Only then do we have a chance at truly changing our own history.