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Comment by rgrieselhuber | Hacker News Reader

This reminds of a TED talk about the expansion of empathy throughout history and how the reduction in mass cruelty over the centuries correlates directly with our ability as humans to include others (other villages, cities, states, nations, ethnicities, religions) in the same sphere as themselves and are thus able to empathize.

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I wonder about that. If anything, it seems more like we've been quite destructive this past 100 years, from Hitler to the Stalinist purges. I'd love to claim there's some modern age of enlightenment, but the fact that there are significant conflicts every few years makes me question that.

I think the point made in that TED talk was that the numbers don't add up to that, though.

The figures I've seen put us as killing more than all previous generations combined. Granted, this is largely due to there being so many people, but the notion that the people so tormented are a smaller fraction of all people alive is scant comfort. Similar figures note that there are more slaves around (yes, in this day and age) than previously.

Better weapons and systems, wielded by a few.

Here's the talk referenced by WalterSear - The Surprising Decline in Violence:

http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen...

Seems pretty persuasive.

Seems like a problem of measurement. Do we care about how many suffer or what percentage of the world population they represent?

Really I think all civilians victims in the last 100 years beg to differ. We might not have had another massive world war in the last 69 years but there's been plenty of bloodletting and human savagery. Nothing to show that under the right circumstances humans don't fall back to basic tribal violence.

Certain medieval torture methods make me actually doubt that there is a person alive that could inflict it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_sawing

You might want to read up on some of the atrocities that have happened recently in tribal violence in Africa.

I find the medical experiments performed by Japanese and german doctors during ww2 to be more frightening because they where done in the name of medical science by "modern" humans completely capable of emphasizing with their victims.

The great lesson of the Nazis and the Milgram experiments is that all/most humans are capable of great evil when it is socially normalized.

To think that humans do these things out of hate and dehumanization puts the cart before the horse. Rather, there are cultural drives that incentivize certain behaviors, leading people then suppress and rationalize away their empathy in order to engage in those behaviors and reap the direct or indirect social benefits.

The most common pattern is devastatingly simple: hating an out-group is a powerful way to create an in-group bond.

Erm ,what about the videos where people have been beheaded? I have not and will not ever watch one, but its not some tidy guillotine. What about Lee Rigby, the soldier in England who was run over, then hacked to death in a London street? The murderers who did that certainly would have no problem with killing people in cruel ways, especially if they were given state sanction.

For other morbid Medieval executions, read about being broken on the wheel. It's hideous.

I've puzzled over this and it seems like even though the european age of discovery spread out with a shockwave of death due to various factors, the world left in its wake was more homogenous and connected and so genocide came to be less frequent.

I'd love to have a link to that talk, by the way.

I would argue the age of discovery can not be compared to another shockwave of death that came before, namely Genghis Khan.

Here's the link:

http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen...

You might also enjoy Jeremy Rifkins' Empathic Civilisation stuff. Here's the RSAnimate version of his talk:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7AWnfFRc7g

Nice. I'll check it out, thanks.

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