[PHOTO] The Iris

After the daffodils, the tulips, and the crocuses, the irises were the next flowers to catch my attention. The irises are also going now, but at least I took some photos before they began to leave.

Iris (1)
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Iris (2)
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Iris (3)
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Iris (4)
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Iris (5)
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

[LINK] "A History of Violence"

I forget whoever pointed me towards Steven Pinker's essay of the same name, originally published in 2007 in The New Republic. I'm sorry that I can't thank that person, since it's one of the more thought-provoking essays that I've come across recently, tackling the myth of the noble peaceful "savage" and arguing that the 20th century has actually been much less violent than most. Some excerpts are below.

In sixteenth-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. According to historian Norman Davies, "[T]he spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized." Today, such sadism would be unthinkable in most of the world. This change in sensibilities is just one example of perhaps the most important and most underappreciated trend in the human saga: Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth.

In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion.

Some of the evidence has been under our nose all along. Conventional history has long shown that, in many ways, we have been getting kinder and gentler. Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as the major form of conflict resolution—all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. But, today, they are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light.

[. . .]

At the widest-angle view, one can see a whopping difference across the millennia that separate us from our pre-state ancestors. Contra leftist anthropologists who celebrate the noble savage, quantitative body-counts—such as the proportion of prehistoric skeletons with axemarks and embedded arrowheads or the proportion of men in a contemporary foraging tribe who die at the hands of other men—suggest that pre-state societies were far more violent than our own. It is true that raids and battles killed a tiny percentage of the numbers that die in modern warfare. But, in tribal violence, the clashes are more frequent, the percentage of men in the population who fight is greater, and the rates of death per battle are higher. According to anthropologists like Lawrence Keeley, Stephen LeBlanc, Phillip Walker, and Bruce Knauft, these factors combine to yield population-wide rates of death in tribal warfare that dwarf those of modern times. If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million.

[. . .]

At the century scale, it is hard to find quantitative studies of deaths in warfare spanning medieval and modern times. Several historians have suggested that there has been an increase in the number of recorded wars across the centuries to the present, but, as political scientist James Payne has noted, this may show only that "the Associated Press is a more comprehensive source of information about battles around the world than were sixteenth-century monks." Social histories of the West provide evidence of numerous barbaric practices that became obsolete in the last five centuries, such as slavery, amputation, blinding, branding, flaying, disembowelment, burning at the stake, breaking on the wheel, and so on. Meanwhile, for another kind of violence—homicide—the data are abundant and striking. The criminologist Manuel Eisner has assembled hundreds of homicide estimates from Western European localities that kept records at some point between 1200 and the mid-1990s. In every country he analyzed, murder rates declined steeply—for example, from 24 homicides per 100,000 Englishmen in the fourteenth century to 0.6 per 100,000 by the early 1960s.

On the scale of decades, comprehensive data again paint a shockingly happy picture: Global violence has fallen steadily since the middle of the twentieth century. According to the Human Security Brief 2006, the number of battle deaths in interstate wars has declined from more than 65,000 per year in the 1950s to less than 2,000 per year in this decade. In Western Europe and the Americas, the second half of the century saw a steep decline in the number of wars, military coups, and deadly ethnic riots.

Go read the whole thing.

[META] Blogroll Addition, and Gibbon

Thanks to dignam for pointing out his own article on the steadily decreasing rate per capita of violence, "Talkin' Gibbon in the Hypercloud" at the excellent group blog 3 Quarks Daily, which is incidentally now on my blogroll. Go, read!

[LINK] Two links from The Globe and Mail

Two articles stood out for me in today's paper.

• Les Perreaux's "PQ plans campaign for independence" examines the plan put forward by Parti Québécois leader Pauline Marois to make Québec an independent state by baby steps, by steadily transferring powers from the federal government to Québec's. Taking the referendum fatigue of the Québec population into account, this may well be a more likely way for Québec to become independent, with a bang instead of a whimper. Question: Will other Canadian provinces follow suit?


• Over in Alberta, Adam Radwanski interviews former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed in the article "'The people of Alberta are the owner of the resource'". In this article, Lougheed lambastes Alberta's complete willingness to let oil companies do what they please, to the long-term detriment of Alberta as a whole.

[LINK] Belarus vs. Russia?

The Wall Street Journal and The Moscow Times, among other news sources, have both covered the news that the Belarusian government is starting to distance itself from its long-time partner Russia despite Belarus' desperate economic plight, with massive budget deficit and the possibility of a loan default. If anything, Lukashenko now seems to be moving towards the European Union orbit with haste.

Analysts said that despite Belarus' dire financial situation, Lukashenko was in a comfortable position because both Russia and the EU could not afford to let the country's economy collapse.

The Europeans fear a domino effect that could send shockwaves across the continent, said Tomas Valasek, a director with the Center for European Reform, a London-based think tank. In addition, a lot of Western investment in Belarus would be at risk, he said.

Belarus has seen a surge in foreign direct investment since opening up its economy in 2007, following a gas dispute with Russia that increased the amount it paid for gas by more than 170 percent.

Russia, on the other hand, is ready to go to great lengths to tolerate Lukashenko in order to maintain its influence in the so-called near abroad, said Masha Lipman, an analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center.

"Lukashenko is still much closer to Moscow than to Europe, and the Kremlin is extremely sensitive to Western influence encroaching on Belarus," she said.

Lipman added that despite Lukashenko's recent maverick behavior, he will not cross any red lines to alienate Moscow. "After all, his well-being depends on relations with Russia."

Valasek said the main difference between the Russian and Western approach to bail out Lukashenko was that Moscow would like to control Minsk's foreign policy, while the IMF and Western donors just wanted their money back.

Thoughts, anyone?

[DM] "Go read 'The World's New Numbers'"

Over at Demography Matters, I've a post up briefly summarizing Martin Walker's excellent article on world demographic trends, "The World's New Numbers". I encourage you to go read it, too.