https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ian-morris-big-picture-history/#transcript **Ian Morris:** It sounds like a weird thing, but when I started working on the long-term historical problems, one of the things I realised more and more the further I got into it, was how much my research, the principles guiding it, how much they were coming to resemble the way biological evolutionists work. So I’m not having to become a biologist, I’m not crawling around on my belly studying ants in the desert or anything like that, but the principles guiding it were starting to resemble evolutionary principles. **Ian Morris:** What I mean is that what people at the time think is going on is not necessarily what’s going on. Just like bunny rabbits evolve into new forms, but the bunnies don’t have to understand DNA to do this — this happens because of the interaction between sex and natural selection, the environment around you — and realising that that was kind of the principle driving what was happening in history. This idea that geography drives history, but history drives what geography means: this is very similar to what biologists mean when they talk about an idea they call “[niche construction theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niche_construction).” **Ian Morris:** Say that the environment changes. It changes the pressures of natural selection to being exerted on an animal’s reproduction. Different qualities about that animal start to be adapted, to give it fitness for the next generation. Something changes, and now running faster becomes a big advantage for survival for the next generation. So the bunnies that have mutations on their genes which make them run a little bit faster, their genes are going to spread to the gene pool. Bunnies are going to evolve in a new direction, and this is all done without anybody really understanding what’s going on. **Ian Morris:** Then as the bunnies run in the new direction, that starts to feed back into the environment, because now all the slow-moving foxes can’t catch the bunnies anymore. They die of hunger. So now foxes evolve toward running faster as well. There’s constant feedback between the environment and the behaviour of the animals. **Ian Morris:** This, I realised, was the story driving what had happened to the long-term history of violence. Initially, I hadn’t really planned to write a book about the long-term history of war. As you might know, writing about war has become very unfashionable among historians. There’s a feeling in the academy, if you write about war, you must be a warmonger, you’re a wicked person. So I hadn’t planned to go down this path. What happened? **Ian Morris:** While I was writing _Why the West Rules_, I was giving chapters to various people to read for advice. I gave a chapter to my wife, who read it, and I was asking, “What do you think of it?” She said, “Oh, I liked it.” But I could tell there was a “but” lurking somewhere in the background here. So I get her to tell me what the “but” is. She says, “Well, but, boy, there’s a lot of killing in this story.” This is really true. I think, “Oh God, have I got it wrong? Am I overemphasising the violent part of the long-term story?” I go back and read it over. I realise, actually no, I don’t think I am. I think that I got the violence in more or less the right place. You can’t understand long-term history without coming to terms with the problem of violence. **Ian Morris:** Why have the attempts to resolve so many of our problems in history been through recourse to violence? The minute I realised that, I realised I’ve got to write something about this. This is clearly one of the burning questions of our age. What made it more burning was I started rooting around in the literature on the long-term history of violence, and realised there’s something profoundly weird about the human animal. Lots of species of animals have evolved in directions that make them less likely to use violence. They change into new kinds of animals. **Ian Morris:** Chimpanzees are the ones we know most about. Chimpanzees and this sub-kind, the bonobo chimpanzees, both evolved from a shared ancestor. Chimpanzees have turned into very violent animals, bonobos turned into extreme — compared to chimps — very nonviolent animals. Journalists often call them the “hippie chimps” — they’re make-love-not-war chimps, because rather fighting each other, they resort to group sex. It’s quite extraordinary what they get up to. **Ian Morris:** This is something that goes on all the time. Environmental pressures push your biological evolution toward more or less different kinds of violence. Humans, we have not changed biologically all that much in the last 10,000 years. There are people who dispute this, but the evidence seems to strongly suggest that our rates of violent death have come down by 90% since the Stone Age. If you lived in the Stone Age, you would’ve been 10 times likelier to die violently than you are now, which is hard to get your mind around. Actually, _The New York Times_ had a big feature on this just last week, trying to explain to people how this can possibly be — when we’re seeing stuff like the war in Ukraine on the news all the time — that this is the case. But it does seem to be the case. **Ian Morris:** We are the only animal in the history of the world that’s evolved to be able to change our own culture through our acts of will. One of the things we’ve done is our cultures have evolved toward generally using less violence, and that has dramatically reduced the amount of violence in the world. **Ian Morris:** So your question, how can war drive there being less war? Well, you look at the long-term history and ask yourself, what is driving this decline in the use of violence? Overwhelmingly — again, all these things are debated, everybody’s had a different theory — but it seems to me overwhelmingly the big force driving down rates of violent death is the creation of governments, powerful governments that can provide incentives to people not to use violence. This is not an original idea. A lot of your listeners, I’m sure, immediately recognise that [Thomas Hobbes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hobbes) floated more or less this idea in the 17th century. I think Hobbes basically got it right. This has been the driver overwhelmingly driving down the rates of violent death. **Ian Morris:** If you want to put it bluntly: governments scare their people straight. Why do governments do this? It’s not because governments are run by saints. Far from it. The people who create the governments are the masters of violence: people who are really, really good at using force. What the government does is it says, “I want you to shut up and go out there and plough your fields and pay your taxes. I do not want you killing your family, burning down your neighbour’s farm and stealing all his crops and not paying taxes.” This is the recurring theme. “So if you go and burn your neighbour’s farm down, I’m going to come down there with way more force than you can muster, I’m going to murder you, I’m going to sell your family into slavery, and I’m going to desolate your farm so that no one will ever live there again. That’s the offer I am making you.” **Rob Wiblin:** And it’s a strong offer. **Ian Morris:** People generally say, “When you put it like that…” So this is what governments do. Our own governments, they don’t say it quite so bluntly, but this is what it’s about. Ultimately, men with guns will come to your house and kill you if you don’t do what the government says. The way this works, where do these governments come from? The governments come from violence. The governments come from people using force to set themselves up above everybody else, and then say, “I alone have the legitimate right to use violence within this territory.” Which is a kind of nasty way to think about history. I think you have to focus on the nasty stuff sometimes. **Ian Morris:** We are the ultimate beneficiaries of a really, really long history of violence. As people in the past used violence and created these larger governments, they changed the environment in which we live and made it into one where using violence on a casual basis becomes less and less profitable, and drives the violence down. It sounds like a paradoxical idea — that force has created these institutions, which then leads to there being less force — but to any evolutionists, they’ll say, “Yes, of course, that’s how evolution works.” **Rob Wiblin:** Exactly. Basically, there are particular times in history where you get an agglomeration of a massive empire. Like the Roman Empire, for example, which is formed through absolutely brutal violence that we could never stomach. Yet, once the Roman Empire is formed, once people are subject to this leviathan, to this immensely powerful government, then that government — in the interest of maintaining the empire, raising the taxes, and having a powerful army to defend itself and go and conquer other groups — strongly prevents quarrelling between people within the empire. And even between nobility within the empire, who typically tend to feud an awful lot, and kill one another terribly frequently when there isn’t an emperor and a strong military to stop them. **Rob Wiblin:** You call those “constructive wars” or “productive wars,” where an empire and a strong government is formed. Of course, there’s lots of other wars where empires fall apart. There, you get not only the immediate death and destruction caused by the war, but then also the loss of order afterwards, which results in kind of a double blow, where people are both dying during the war, then afterwards as a result of the political consequences. It’s a very interesting way of looking at things.