The other comments are great and address some of the macro issues, but I feel like there’s something to be addressed here about the individual decision to fight, and even the individual’s willingness to fight, since although history is full of people who unwillingly fought as soldiers, it’s also full of people who chose on purpose to go to war and risk their lives on a gamble that gave better than even odds of their dying.
The modern world is very different than the world of the past. On a number of dimensions, our lives are worth more to us now than in the past. That is, I’m not saying non-modern lives are worth less than modern ones in some essential sense, but that the person living in the past likely valued their own life in various ways less than we do. The negative read on this is that we are more narcissistic and think our lives are more worth living than people were in the past.
Some dimensions along which we more value our lives, i.e. these things are more true for us than they were for people in the past:
we live in greater comfort
it was often a painful struggle just to stay alive in the past with no end in sight
we are more likely to be able to achieve more of our desires
most past people were constrained by their physical or political environment
we can have greater impact through our lives than our deaths
for many past people the most impactful thing they might be able to do is protect their kin’s land by fighting to the death
we have greater economic opportunity
for past people, their existence was a larger economic burden due to a subsistence level existence, so they might reasonable see good economic opportunity in fighting and dying if that would benefit their kin
we can better support our kin alive than dead
labor in the past didn’t produce large returns, often just barely exceeding the level needed to support a few people at subsistence levels, so dying fighting involved less loss of output for the family group
we can live more years
life expectancy in the past was shorter due to disease, malnourishment, and war coming to your doorstep even if you didn’t choose to go fight
our lives have more happy days
life in the past involved a lot of difficulty that made the average day simply less full of happiness and more full of pain
we are more individualistic
a big thing we can forget is that in the past most humans were situated in extended kin groups and those kin groups were the primary unit of social organization, not the individual, and so a person might reasonably identify more with the needs of their kin group than their personal needs
we are more atheistic
past people more expected an afterlife, possibly benefitted specifically by dying in battle
Additionally, inheritance practices tended to produce lots of male children who would inherit nothing, so for them the only avenue to prosperity (enough resources to marry and have a family) was often soldiering.
This all means we have a much harder tradeoff to make than ancient people did when it comes to choosing to fight.
Of course, standard caveats that I’m proposing a statistical model here. I have no doubt you can find exceptions to this story all over the place. What I’m proposing is that, on average, more people values their lives more now than in the past, and this accounts for our lower willingness to go to war. The incentives have changed, and dying fighting is less appealing on the margin.
The other comments are great and address some of the macro issues, but I feel like there’s something to be addressed here about the individual decision to fight, and even the individual’s willingness to fight, since although history is full of people who unwillingly fought as soldiers, it’s also full of people who chose on purpose to go to war and risk their lives on a gamble that gave better than even odds of their dying.
The modern world is very different than the world of the past. On a number of dimensions, our lives are worth more to us now than in the past. That is, I’m not saying non-modern lives are worth less than modern ones in some essential sense, but that the person living in the past likely valued their own life in various ways less than we do. The negative read on this is that we are more narcissistic and think our lives are more worth living than people were in the past.
Some dimensions along which we more value our lives, i.e. these things are more true for us than they were for people in the past:
we live in greater comfort
it was often a painful struggle just to stay alive in the past with no end in sight
we are more likely to be able to achieve more of our desires
most past people were constrained by their physical or political environment
we can have greater impact through our lives than our deaths
for many past people the most impactful thing they might be able to do is protect their kin’s land by fighting to the death
we have greater economic opportunity
for past people, their existence was a larger economic burden due to a subsistence level existence, so they might reasonable see good economic opportunity in fighting and dying if that would benefit their kin
we can better support our kin alive than dead
labor in the past didn’t produce large returns, often just barely exceeding the level needed to support a few people at subsistence levels, so dying fighting involved less loss of output for the family group
we can live more years
life expectancy in the past was shorter due to disease, malnourishment, and war coming to your doorstep even if you didn’t choose to go fight
our lives have more happy days
life in the past involved a lot of difficulty that made the average day simply less full of happiness and more full of pain
we are more individualistic
a big thing we can forget is that in the past most humans were situated in extended kin groups and those kin groups were the primary unit of social organization, not the individual, and so a person might reasonably identify more with the needs of their kin group than their personal needs
we are more atheistic
past people more expected an afterlife, possibly benefitted specifically by dying in battle
Additionally, inheritance practices tended to produce lots of male children who would inherit nothing, so for them the only avenue to prosperity (enough resources to marry and have a family) was often soldiering.
This all means we have a much harder tradeoff to make than ancient people did when it comes to choosing to fight.
Of course, standard caveats that I’m proposing a statistical model here. I have no doubt you can find exceptions to this story all over the place. What I’m proposing is that, on average, more people values their lives more now than in the past, and this accounts for our lower willingness to go to war. The incentives have changed, and dying fighting is less appealing on the margin.