Most people look back upon the 20th century as the deadliest in human history, with scholarly estimates suggesting that close to 200 million people died in all the wars, revolutions, genocides and totalitarian purges of those bloody decades. As a result, we regard the entire century as the age of total war, even though we have not experienced great-power war since 1945. Even more telling,
state-based war almost completely disappeared as the century drew to a close, leaving us with primarily civil strife, failed states, and the transnational bad actors they both spawn.
But instead of celebrating the peaking and subsequent eradication of state-based war across the 20th century, many insist that humanity is now living in the most dangerous era of its history, rather than its most peaceful. Moreover, because of our tendency to view history in terms of killing and death, we remain stubbornly blind to our own collective progress -- namely,
the preservation and extension of life. ...