The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria [6]
What explains this mismatch between a politics that spirals downward and an economy that steams along? First, it’s worth looking more carefully at the cascade of bad news. It seems that we are living in crazily violent times. But don’t believe everything you see on television. Our anecdotal impression turns out to be wrong. War and organized violence have declined dramatically over the last two decades. Ted Robert Gurr and a team of scholars at the University of Maryland’s Center for International Development and Conflict Management tracked the data carefully and came to the following conclusion: “the general magnitude of global warfare has decreased by over sixty percent [since the mid-1980s], falling by the end of 2004 to its lowest level since the late 1950s.”1 Violence increased steadily throughout the Cold War—increasing sixfold between the 1950s and early 1990s—but the trend peaked just before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and “the extent of warfare among and within states lessened by nearly half in the first decade after the Cold War.” Harvard’s polymath professor Steven Pinker argues “that today we are probably living in the most peaceful time in our species’ existence.”2
One reason for the mismatch between reality and our sense of it might be that, over these same decades, we have experienced a revolution in information technology that now brings us news from around the world instantly, vividly, and continuously. The immediacy of the images and the intensity of the twenty-four-hour news cycle combine to produce constant hyperbole. Every weather disturbance is “the storm of the century.” Every bomb that explodes is BREAKING NEWS. It is difficult to put this all in context because the information revolution is so new. We didn’t get daily footage on the roughly two million who died in the killing fields of Cambodia in the 1970s or the million who perished in the sands of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. We have not even seen much footage from the war in Congo in the 1990s, where millions died. But now, almost daily, we see live broadcasts of the effects of IEDs or car bombs or rockets—tragic events, to be sure, but often with death tolls under ten. The randomness of terrorist violence, the targeting of civilians, and the ease with which modern societies can be penetrated add to our disquiet. “That could have been me,” people say after a terrorist attack.
It feels like a very dangerous world. But it isn’t. Your chances of dying as a consequence of organized violence of any kind are low and getting lower. The data reveal a broad trend away from wars among major countries, the kind of conflict that produces massive casualties.
I don’t believe that war has become obsolete or any such foolishness. Human nature remains what it is and international politics what it is. History has witnessed periods of calm that have been followed by extraordinary bloodshed. And numbers are not the only measure of evil. The nature of the killings in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s—premeditated, religiously motivated, systematic—makes that war, which had 200,000 casualties, a moral obscenity that should register very high on any scale. Al Qaeda’s barbarism—cold-blooded beheadings, the deliberate targeting of innocents—is gruesome despite its relatively low number of casualties.
Still, if we are to understand the times we are living in, we must first accurately describe them. And they are, for now, in historical context, unusually calm.
The Islamic Threat
Islamic terror, which makes the headlines daily, is a large and persistent problem, but one involving small