LAST week, the world marked the arrival of the seven billionth member of the human race. It’s an awe-inspiring figure, even frightening.

Despite all that mankind has done to bring harm to itself and the planet to which it remains bound, it would appear that the former, at least, is a very hardy species. The latter doesn’t seem to be faring quite so well. The rate at which Planet Earth’s resources are decreasing and its bounties dwindling is well documented.

The seas are systematically being emptied of fish, the land of its forests, the earth itself of oil, gas and minerals. Climate change, glacier-melt, global warming are all unwelcome realities.

The human race, remarkable for so many talents, is responsible for much of the damage. Of all the plant and animal species that cohabit, this species has single-handedly created the most long-term havoc, and often through ignorance.

Humanity also seems to have a predilection for waging war and perpetrating violence through the ages. Proximity brings things into sharper focus, so to many of us the past decade seems especially difficult in this regard.

The world stage was shaken by the 9/11 attacks and the extensive damage that was and continues to be wrought in its wake.

Some societies are closer to the theatre of war than others, so to speak — Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq being cases in point — and are more keenly, painfully aware of the suffering of millions of people as a consequence of the decisions taken by a few.

But war and violence are obviously not confined to a few countries.

To the violence perpetrated by humans against each other must be added the effect of famine, disease, poverty, natural disaster and so on.

Anyone who follows world news even cursorily can be forgiven for believing that we are living through times of turmoil of a scale that has never been experienced before, with millions of people eking out a living under the direst of circumstances.

Underdevelopment, terrorism, dwindling resources and opportunity appear to be the hallmark of the modern age, affecting millions even though the human race has never before been so technologically and scientifically advanced.

This impression, though, may be merely that. The news brings all the world’s bad news to us with such immediacy and in such vivid detail that it appears as though that is the only and most dominant reality.

But a study undertaken by a Canadian evolutionary psychologist, Steven Pinker, indicates that we are living through times of peace that are fairly unprecedented — that may indeed be the most peaceful in our species’ existence.

In a book called The Better Angels of our Nature — Why Violence has Declined, Dr Pinker has pulled together data available on war and violence over the past 15,000 years and presented the picture that is startling because it is rosy.

According to his calculations, in prehistoric and pre-modern times the odds that a person would die by violence ranged between five and 60 per cent but averaged at 15 per cent, meaning that more than one in six deaths were violent. In the 20th century, taking into account all wars and genocides, it reached a high of three per cent of the globe’s population; at the moment, it is a fraction of one per cent.

During the past century, though wars decreased in numbers, they grew in scale and deadliness. Seventy years ago, more than half of the world was at war; 40 years ago, Dr Pinker calculates, at least a tenth of the world was in conflict of one sort or another.

But today, lumping together all the conflicts of various sorts across the world (as disparate as Afghanistan and Iraq to the Arab Spring and Mexican drug wars), it seems that at the most four per cent of the world’s seven billion are familiar with war (this is an analysis of percentages of the world population, not to be confused with deaths in actual numbers.)

It would seem, from Dr Pinker’s research, that in most (lucky) places round the world, violence has become the exception rather than the rule, for he finds the same pattern of decline is all the categories of violence he examines, including hate crime, slavery, rape, racial tensions, domestic violence, judicial torture and so on.

Dr Pinker believes that Thomas Hobbes was right, when he argued in Leviathan that the natural state of mankind is that every man would be at war against everyone else, and that life would be, as he famously wrote, “nasty, brutish and short”.

Dr Pinker believes his research shows that the emergence of strong governments, laws and the societal interdependence indicated by Hobbes has civilised mankind; it has reduced the incentive for violence. Commercial interdependence between states has brought down the incidence of war, while communication and education have also played a role.

Though this rosy picture may apply to the majority of the world’s population, it does little to assuage the misery of those who live in societies beset by war and violence, including us unfortunate Pakistanis.

If the Hobbesian analysis is taken as viable, it would imply that violence begets violence. If strong government structures translate to peaceful societies, the light at the end of our particular tunnel appears still far away.

The writer is a member of staff.

hajrahmumtaz@gmail.com