Are we living in the most peaceful era in history?

In thousands of years of recorded history, have we never really been so prosperous? What are we talking about when we say peace is war? Crime? General satisfaction with the world?

War

In Western Europe, we can easily say that war is a thing of the past. Western Europe clearly has the lowest military era ever. In the rest of the world, the situation is more complicated. Even the United States does not enjoy an era of historic peace; its involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan has killed thousands of people in the war and the conflict continues to be healthy and healthy. In Africa, recent years have seen countless major conflicts (the Tigray War, multiple wars in Libya and Sudan, the Boko Haram crisis, Islamist rebellions in Algeria, and the Second Congo War), and the Arab Spring has led to devastating unrest and violence across the region, including civil wars in Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen. The Taliban took over Afghanistan, Egypt replaced tyranny with more tyranny, Palestine and Israel again in a deadly conflict; even invasion returned in Ukraine and Russia. When the Cold War ended, there was relative peace in the Middle East between the Gulf War and Iraq/Afghanistan. If we look at everything, that period was historically peaceful but lasted about ten years, a passing statistical period, and now we are already back to normal levels of violence.

Crime

Accurate data on medieval crimes defies any serious analysis. We do not even have reliable estimates of the population of medieval societies. The general scientific consensus is that crime was higher in medieval Europe than it is today, though not on a large scale. Major cities in the United States or Russia are as dangerous as medieval England, and the safer parts of medieval England were probably as safe as the middle city in France or today's England. In medieval Europe, we must bear in mind that although the best data relate to cities (thanks to union registration, voting taxes, and centralized recordkeeping), very few people lived there. Today's societies are largely urban, with most of us living side by side with tens or hundreds of thousands of other people, but the vast majority of people in the Old World were farmers, living in very small communities, such as villages or small villages today. No doubt bandits patrolled rural roads in search of merchants and pilgrims, but we must imagine that petty crime was very low in these small communities, perhaps even less than in today's big cities. As for China and the Middle East, we can argue that levels of petty crime are very low today (certainly much lower than, say, the United States), so they are unlikely to be much lower in the past.

A broader definition of peace

Peace is more than not being challenged. Peace must also be a state to which calm is aimed; it is the absence of tension, fear and existential boredom. The industrial and digital revolutions have reduced the amount of time we spend on hard work; even supposed manual jobs like being a car mechanic involve many computer programs such as wrenches and wrenches. Most of us are well aware of the ways in which life was worse for ancient humans, such as the lack of political freedom; but we are very bad at appreciating the advantages of their way of life. People had fun a thousand years ago in Europe, China, Peru or...... They enjoyed deep relationships with their families, knew most of their neighbors well; were fitter; didn't worry about man-made climate change, terrorism, school shootings, traffic jams, or urgent emails to work late at night. We are not here to question whether the old people were freer than us; we are here to wonder if they enjoyed a more peaceful life, and in many respects we think they did. She may have been slower, more gloomy, poorer, and perhaps even more violent; but she also possessed a daily beauty and tranquility that we cannot imagine today. Human happiness did not begin in the twenties, and it would be a mistake to ignore thousands of years of human experience with the occasional disregard we tend to show towards ancient humans. "Didn't everyone die from cholera, hunger or war? Wasn't everyone executed if they made a joke about the church or their loyal master? Didn't they cut off your arm if you stole a loaf of bread?" There is no doubt that the old life had serious problems, but the truth is that most of our ancestors did not work 15 hours a day and did not spend their entire lives in abject misery. They enjoyed good food and drink, joked, enjoyed sex, hiked, pointed butterflies to their children, stopped to look at beautiful buildings, sang in the fields, and generally lived full and meaningful lives. We should be proud that today we have societies with relatively low crime and conflict. We may brag about this, but perhaps it is better to remain humble and thoughtful, to think about how we can make our lives more peaceful, and to learn valuable lessons from the past about how we can do it, while accepting that industrial modernity may have taken us too far from the roots of luxury.