Less well known, but equally profound: the decline in violence. Foraging societies waged war less brutally than industrial societies, but more frequently. Typically, archaeologists believe, about a quarter of all hunters and gatherers were killed by their fellows. Violence declined somewhat as humans gathered themselves into states and empires, but was still a constant presence. When Athens was at its height in the fourth and fifth centuries BC, it was ever at war: against Sparta (First and Second Peloponnesian Wars, Corinthian War); against Persia (Greco-Persian Wars, Wars of the Delian League); against Aegina (Aeginetan War); against Macedon (Olynthian War); against Samos (Samian War); against Chios, Rhodes, and Cos (Social War).
In this respect, classical Greece was nothing special—look at the ghastly histories of China, sub-Saharan Africa, or Mesoamerica. Similarly, early modern Europe’s wars were so fast and furious that historians simply gather them into catchall titles like the Hundred Years’ War, followed by the shorter but even more destructive Thirty Years’ War. And even as Europeans and their descendants paved the way toward today’s concept of universal human rights by creating documents like the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, Europe remained so mired in combat that it fought two conflicts of such massive scale and reach they became known as “world” wars.
Since the Second World War, however, rates of violent death have fallen to the lowest levels in known history. Today, the average person is far less likely to be slain by another member of the species than ever before—an extraordinary transformation that has occurred, almost unheralded, in the lifetime of many of the people reading this article. As the political scientist Joshua Goldstein has written, “we are winning the war on war.” Again, there are multiple causes. But Goldstein, probably the leading scholar in this field, argues that the most important is the emergence of the United Nations and other transnational bodies, an expression of the ideas of peace activists earlier in the last century.
As a relatively young species, we have an adolescent propensity to make a mess: we pollute the air we breathe and the water we drink, and appear stalled in an age of carbon dumping and nuclear experimentation that is putting countless species at risk including our own. But we are making undeniable progress nonetheless. No European in 1800 could have imagined that in 2000 Europe would have no legal slavery, women would be able to vote, and gay people would be able to marry. No one could have guessed a continent that had been tearing itself apart for centuries would be free of armed conflict, even amid terrible economic times. Given this record, even Lynn Margulis might pause (maybe).
Preventing Homo sapiens from destroying itself à la Gause would require a still greater transformation—behavioral plasticity of the highest order—because we would be pushing against biological nature itself. The Japanese have an expression, hara hachi bu, which means, roughly speaking, “belly 80 percent full.” Hara hachi bu is shorthand for an ancient injunction to stop eating before feeling full. Nutritionally, the command makes a great deal of sense. When people eat, their stomachs produce peptides that signal fullness to the nervous system. Unfortunately, the mechanism is so slow that eaters frequently perceive satiety only after they have consumed too much—hence the all-too-common condition of feeling bloated or sick from overeating. Japan—actually, the Japanese island of Okinawa—is the only place on earth where large numbers of people are known to restrict their own calorie intake systematically and routinely. Some researchers claim that hara hachi bu is responsible for Okinawans’ notoriously long life spans. But I think of it as a metaphor for stopping before the second inflection point, voluntarily forswearing short-term consumption to obtain a long-term benefit.
Evolutionarily speaking, a species-wide adoption of hara ha-chi bu would be unprecedented. Thinking about it, I can picture Lynn Margulis rolling her eyes. But is it so unlikely that our species, Canbys one and all, would be able to do exactly that before we round that fateful curve of the second inflection point and nature does it for us?
I can imagine Margulis’s response: You’re imagining our species as some sort of big-brained, hyperrational, benefit-cost-calculating computer! A better analogy is the bacteria at our feet! Still, Margulis would be the first to agree that removing the shackles from women and slaves has begun to unleash the suppressed talents of two-thirds of the human race. Drastically reducing violence has prevented the waste of countless lives and staggering amounts of resources. Is it really impossible to believe that we wouldn’t use those talents and those resources to draw back before the abyss?
Our record of success is not that long. In any case, past successes are no guarantee of the future. But it is terrible to suppose that we could get so many other things right and get this one wrong. To have the imagination to see our potential end, but not have the imagination to avoid it. To send humankind to the moon but fail to pay attention to the earth. To have the potential but to be unable to use it—to be, in the end, no different from the protozoa in the petri dish. It would be evidence that Lynn Margulis’s most dismissive beliefs had been right after all. For all our speed and voraciousness, our changeable sparkle and flash, we would be, at last count, not an especially interesting species.
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Contributors
ROGER ANGELL has been a contributor to The New Yorker since 1944. He became a fiction editor in 1956 and is now a senior editor and staff writer at the magazine. His first contribution to the magazine was a piece of fiction titled “Three Ladies in the Morning.” While stationed in the Central Pacific during the Second World War, where he was the managing editor of the air force enlisted-man’s weekly TIG Brief, he wrote an article for The New Yorker about a bombing mission to Iwo Jima. After his work on Brief, he became a senior editor at Holiday magazine, where he remained from 1947 to 1956. Once on the New Yorker staff, he continued to contribute stories, casuals, and Notes and Comment pieces to the magazine and began reporting on sports. Since 1962 he has written more than a hundred Sporting Scene pieces, mostly about baseball but also on tennis, hockey, football, rowing, and horse racing. In addition, he has written film reviews and, for many years, the magazine’s Christmas verse, “Greetings, Friends!” He continues as one of The New Yorker’s fiction editors, editing the stories of John Updike, William Trevor, and Woody Allen.
Angell’s writing has appeared in many anthologies and has been collected in nine of his own books. The first, The Stone Arbor and Other Stories (1960), is a selection of short stories. A Day in the Life of Roger Angell (1970) is a book of casuals and parodies. His most recent, Let Me Finish (2006), is a collection of his memoir writing. His baseball books include The Summer Game (1972), Five Seasons (1977), Late Innings (1982), Season Ticket (1988), Once More Around the Park ( 1991), A Pitcher’s Story (2001), and Game Time (2003). In February 1997, Random House published Nothing But You: Love Stories from The New Yorker, an anthology of fiction selected by Angell.
Angell has won a number of awards for his writing, including a George Polk Award for Commentary. In 2011 he was the inaugural winner of the PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing. He is a longtime ex officio member of the council of the Authors Guild.
Angell lives in Manhattan.
TA-NEHISI COATES is a senior editor at The Atlantic and the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle. He lives in New York with his wife and son.
PAMELA COLLOFF is an executive editor at Texas Monthly and has been writing for the magazine since 1997. Her work has also appeared in The New Yorker and has been anthologized in three editions of Best American Crime Reporting as well as the e-book collection Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists. Colloff is a four-time National Magazine Award finalist. She was nominated in 2001 for her article on school prayer and then again in 2011 for her two-part series, “Innocence Lost” and “Innocence Found,” about wrongly convicted death row inmate Anthony Graves. One month after the publication of “Innocence Lost,” the Burleson County district attorney’s office dropped all charges against Graves and released him from jail, where he had been awaiting retrial. Colloff’s article—an exhaustive examination of Graves’ case—was credited with helping Graves win his freedom after eighteen years behind bars.
In 2013 she was nominated twice more, for “Hannah and Andrew” and “The Innocent Man,” a two-part series about Michael Morton, a man who spent twenty-five years wrongfully imprisoned for the brutal murder of his wife, Christine. The latter earned Colloff her first National Magazine Award.
Colloff holds a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Brown University and was raised in New York City. She lives in Austin with her husband and their two children.
SABRINA RUBIN ERDELY is an award-winning feature writer and investigative journalist based in Philadelphia. Her work has appeared in Glamour, GQ, Men’s Health, Mother Jones, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and Self, among other national magazines. Her articles have been anthologized in Best American Crime Reporting and have received a number of awards, including a National Magazine Award nomination.
Erdely specializes in long-form narrative writing, especially about crime and health. She has written about con artists, murder investigations, vicious divorces, power brokers, lovable eccentrics, bioweapons, cults, sexual violence, medical ethics, forgotten artists, and teachers who have affairs with students—among other subjects.
DEXTER FILKINS joined The New Yorker in January 2011 and has since written about a bank heist in Afghanistan and the democratic protests in the Middle East. Before coming to The New Yorker, Filkins had been with the New York Times since 2000, reporting from Afghanistan, Pakistan, New York, and Iraq, where he was based from 2003 to 2006. He has also worked for the Miami Herald and the Los Angeles Times, where he was chief of the paper’s New Delhi bureau. In 2009, he won a Pulitzer Prize as part of a team of New York Times reporters in Pakistan and Afghanistan. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 2006–07 and a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in 2007–08. He has received numerous prizes, including two George Polk Awards and three Overseas Press Club Awards. His 2008 book The Forever War won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Nonfiction Book and was named a best book of the year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, and the Boston Globe.
A teenage finalist for the American Poet’s Prize and former medical student and researcher, CHARLES GRAEBER is an award-winning journalist and contributor to publications including GQ, The New Yorker, New York, Vogue, Outside, Bloomberg Business-week, the New York Times Magazine, and Wired, for which he is a contributing editor. His journalism has received honors such as the Overseas Press Club Award for Outstanding International Journalism and the New York Press Club Prize for Spot News Reportage and has been anthologized in The Best American Business Writing, The Best American Crime Writing, The Best American Science Writing, The Best of Ten Years of National Geographic Adventure, and The Best of Twenty Years of Wired. Born in Iowa, he is now a resident of Nantucket, Massachusetts, but spends his summers in Brooklyn, New York.
CHRIS HEATH has been working since 2004 as a correspondent at GQ, where he has written countless cover stories as well as reported features on Iraqi refugees, post-Katrina New Orleans, and the devastating Japanese tsunami. In 2006, he was nominated for a National Magazine Award in the Profile Writing category for his story about country legend Merle Haggard. He has previously written for Rolling Stone, Details, Telegraph Magazine, and The Face. He is also the author of Feel: Robbie Williams, the best-selling 2004 book about the British pop superstar.
CHRIS JONES is a writer at large at Esquire and the back-page columnist for ESPN The Magazine. He has won two National Magazine Awards for his feature writing, but Robert Caro is much better at writing than he.
STEPHEN KING was born in Portland, Maine, in 1947. He made his first professional short story sale in 1967 to Startling Mystery Stories. In 1973 Doubleday accepted his novel Carrie for publication. In the years since he has written more than fifty worldwide best-sel
lers, most recently Doctor Sleep (2013), Joyland (2013), The Wind Through the Keyhole (2012), and 11/22/63 (2011). In 2000 he published On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. He and his wife, novelist Tabitha King, live in Maine and Florida.
DAHLIA LITHWICK is a senior editor at Slate. She writes “Supreme Court Dispatches” and has covered the Microsoft trial and other legal issues for Slate. Before joining Slate as a freelancer in 1999, she worked for a family law firm in Reno, Nevada. Her work has appeared in Elle, The New Republic, the Ottawa Citizen, and the Washington Post. She is coauthor of Me v. Everybody: Absurd Contracts for an Absurd World, a legal humor book. She is a graduate of Yale University and Stanford Law School.
CHARLES C. MANN’S first feature for Orion, “The Dawn of the Homogenocene,” appeared in the May/June 2011 issue. His book 1493 is now out in paperback.
DAPHNE MERKIN is a cultural critic and a contributing writer to Bookforum, Elle, the New York Times Magazine, T, Tablet, and Travel + Leisure. Formerly a staff writer for The New Yorker, where she wrote about film, books, and figures as varied as Sigmund Freud, Marilyn Monroe, and Kurt Cobain, her current work continues to span topics both high and low—including, most recently, living with regrets, Kim Kardashian, her love of Cornwall, and designer Jason Wu. Daphne is the author of a novel, Enchantment, and a collection of essays, Dreaming of Hitler. She lives with her daughter in New York City and is at work on a memoir, The Dark Season.
Best American Magazine Writing 2013 Page 53
