Agreed on infant mortality: ‘life expectancy’ is an incredibly misleading term, and leads to any number of people thinking that anyone over 40 was an old man in previous centuries, when a lot of the difference can be explained by infant mortality.
On human tribes, I don’t think slaughtering an entire other tribe is a particularly shocking thing for a tribe to do. I’ve read things suggesting that 20th century rates of personal homicide and deaths in war per person are both actually low by previous centuries’ standards, so the popular idea of the Holocaust and Communist purges as making the 20th century the century of war or atrocity is flawed. But agreed this doesn’t make Holocausts ‘typical’.
Isn’t the 20th century’s apparent low death toll from homicide and war just a matter of percentages? The absolute number of deaths from these things is much greater in the 20th century. I think the absolute number matters too.
Agreed on infant mortality: ‘life expectancy’ is an incredibly misleading term, and leads to any number of people thinking that anyone over 40 was an old man in previous centuries, when a lot of the difference can be explained by infant mortality.
On human tribes, I don’t think slaughtering an entire other tribe is a particularly shocking thing for a tribe to do. I’ve read things suggesting that 20th century rates of personal homicide and deaths in war per person are both actually low by previous centuries’ standards, so the popular idea of the Holocaust and Communist purges as making the 20th century the century of war or atrocity is flawed. But agreed this doesn’t make Holocausts ‘typical’.
Isn’t the 20th century’s apparent low death toll from homicide and war just a matter of percentages? The absolute number of deaths from these things is much greater in the 20th century. I think the absolute number matters too.