The argument offered by Snyder, in my opinion, hits the argument of Pinker (2011) and co. in its weak spot. In their failure to differentiate between different types and social contexts surrounding the existence of violent death, Pinker (2011) lumps all instances together in order to paint a picture of a past rife with violence: “Nasty, Brutish and Short”. It was only the Leviathan state forcibly monopolizing the legitimate use of violence, which caused violence among humankind to decline. Based on the two following doubtful notions addressed in this thesis, namely that:
(1) The Hobbesian model of “state power” sufficiently explains the decline of homicide rates all across Europe after the 15th century and onward.
(2) Non-state societies necessarily engage in more and deadlier types of warfare than do state societies.
Rests notion (3) stating that—espoused by Gene Callahan—the state doesn’t cause violence due to notions (1) and (2). However, even the doubtful correctness of notion (1) and (2) wouldn’t justify (3) in any real or ethical sense. Pinkerian analysis, based essentially on de-contextualization of violence, would view a medieval village with a population of 500 in which two men die in public knife-fighting during a drunken quarrel over insulted family honor—cheered on by much of the surrounding village—as necessarily worse than a nation-state with a population of 100,000,000 in which 350,000 ethnic minorities are systematically mass murdered by the ruling party. This conclusion would be reached simply and solely because one’s likelihood of dying a violent death is higher in the former case.
It is essentially the former case—drunken brawls or duels over honor going too far—that typify the type of violent death in medieval Europe. It is in contrast; exactly the systematic and organized mass murder of thousands of “public enemies” that typified the 3% of the world population killed by states during the 20th century. Contextually, it is therefore completely unfounded—as Mr. Catalan does—to claim that the state does not cause violence, murder, and bloodshed based on the doubtful notion that its bureaucratic monopolization of justice also prevented sporadic, widely-distributed homicides.
The organized displacement and murder of thousands by the decree of a small elite is not only something made possible by the infrastructure that statehood necessitates for its own survival, but also by the multitude mutually-exclusive egalitarian ideologies that sprang out of Enlightenment thought (Malesevic, 2013). In our current day and age, violence might not be as cruel and openly-displayed as in medieval times. Instead, it is hidden from public view, externalized, and most importantly; more organized and dehumanized than ever.