Zero-Sum Thinking Makes Our Fights Much Nastier

Remember “war”? That thing where countries (or kings, or religions) would gather up a bunch of people, give them weapons, and have them slaughter each other and pillage the countryside? For most of the past 3,000 years, war was a more-or-less constant feature of human life. Psychologist Steven Pinker, in his book “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined,” chronicles the transition from a world where violence was the norm to one where it’s a startling, even shocking rarity.

That doesn’t mean war is over, as gruesome examples such as Syria attest. And a giant nuclear war could wipe us all out tomorrow. But the disappearance of war as a normal part of daily life poses a great mystery. It might be that modern weapons are so destructive that they deter countries from embarking on war. True, wars before advanced weaponry were brutal too: As a percentage of population, the Thirty Years’ War in the 1600s was more lethal than World War II. It might be because modern populaces are too rich and satisfied to fight. But another reason might be that in the modern age, war doesn’t pay. Agricultural land -- the objective of most territorial grabs in pre-modern times -- just isn’t that big a source of wealth anymore. Even if your enemy has rich oil fields, seizing and exploiting them generally isn’t worth the cost of the war itself.