“Something is happening to our species, and especially over the last 70 years. The years since 1945 have seen many horrors: the partition of India, China’s Great Leap Forward, the Vietnam War, the Biafran crisis, the Khmer Rouge and the Rwandan genocide, wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, mass slaughters, civilizational dictatorships, widespread famines and the grueling civil conflicts that have become watchwords for evil in our time. Today our screens overflow with chaos and hate, and today our screens follow us everywhere.

Yet this has also been the most prosperous time in human history by far. And by a long way the time with the greatest increase in democracy around the world. It has also been the most peaceful era in recorded human history. What Hegel called the slaughter-bench of history is becoming less bloody.

Humanity does learn, painfully and often only after thousands or even millions have died.

That thesis about ‘the most peaceful era in history’ is naturally the hardest to believe, yet it’s true. As Joshua Goldstein puts it in ‘Winning the War on War,’ ‘We have avoided nuclear wars, left behind world war, nearly extinguished interstate war, and reduced civil wars to fewer countries with fewer casualties.”