Kevin McGeary

    THIS week sees Remembrance Day (Veteran’s Day in the United States) in which citizens worldwide honor those who have given their lives in wars. The past century saw some of the bloodiest wars in human history and the recently published photographs of the raped and battered corpses of Moammar Gadhafi’s female bodyguards are an indication that war and human cruelty are unlikely to go away in the near future.

    The war memorial as a means of commemorating the dead, as opposed to simply celebrating victory, is a relatively new phenomenon. The choice of 11 a.m. on Nov. 11 every year as a time for remembrance derives from the moment Kaiser Wilhelm II announced the armistice that ended World War I. After that war, most countries involved saw the erection of memorials that included the names of the dead, a practice that was no more than 30 years old. During the Napoleonic Wars a century earlier, the dead were thrown into unmarked mass graves, and according to playwright Alan Bennet, the remaining bones were swept up by a U.K.-based firm and sold as fertilizer.

    Psychologist Stephen Pinker argues in his recent book “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” that humans as a species have been getting progressively less violent for centuries. If you take your mind off rolling news and look briefly at what happened on this day in history, Pinker appears to have a point.

    On Nov. 7, 1941, a German pilot ignored the white crosses on the side of Soviet hospital ship Armenia, killing an estimated 5,000 to 7,000 people, almost all of whom were refugees or wounded soldiers.

    After the Fukushima earthquake this year, minutes of silence were held throughout football stadiums in England, whereas just 56 years before, the killing of innocent Japanese in Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave way to VJ (Victory in Japan) Day celebrations.

    Pinker quotes philosopher Peter Singer as saying over the course of history, people have enlarged the range of beings whose interests they value as much as their own. He considers the role of literacy as a way of raising awareness of the suffering of people who might otherwise have been ignored. He points out that the heyday of the Humanitarian Revolution, the late 18th century, was also the heyday of the epistolary novel. And throughout the 20th century, novels such as “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “To Kill a Mocking Bird” continued the process.

    One of the most elegant critiques of Pinker’s thesis came from philosopher John Gray who argued that since the end of World War II, superpowers have avoided fighting each other directly by exporting their conflicts the same way rich countries export pollution and cheap labor. For example, the United States did not go to war with the Soviet Union but invaded Vietnam. The Soviet Union did the same in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

    But Pinker responded in the Prospect magazine by claiming to see an even bigger picture in which deaths in warfare have decreased since 1950. Deaths from terrorism are less common in today’s “age of terror” than they were in the 1960s and 1970s, with their regular bombings, hijackings, and shootings by various armies, leagues, coalitions, brigades, factions and fronts.

    As the world welcomes its seven billionth human inhabitant, are we overpopulating an already unmanageably volatile world, or is it a case, as Pinker says, that market forces in the media favor pessimism and sensation? After all, if every profit of doom had been right, we would already have gone the same way as the dinosaurs.

    (The author is a Shenzhen Daily senior copy editor and writer.)