Ian Morris
War! What is it Good For?
Ian Morris - War! What is it Good For?
- So thank you for having me back here on Lockdown University. I always think the big test is not whether somebody invites you to do something, it’s whether they invite you back to do something again. So I’m back here this evening to talk to you, it is the 80th anniversary, today, of the D-Day landings. And on D-Day, about 10,000 soldiers died on the two sides. And if the D-Day landings had not happened, maybe those 10,000 guys would’ve got killed in the course of the fighting anyway, maybe they wouldn’t; some of them would still be here with us today, even still alive, but a lot more than 10,000 other people would’ve been killed if the war had, as it would almost certainly would’ve happened. If the war dragged on longer, a lot more people would’ve got killed. And so this is actually basically what I want to talk to you about. Well, it’s in the morning here in California where I am, in the evening in London. I dunno where everybody else is. But what I want to talk to you about this morning, talk about something that I think everybody thinks important, which is how we make the world a safer place. How we make it so fewer people die violently. And particularly, I want to talk about what history teaches us about making the world a less violent place. And the answers, I think the answers are actually fairly clear when you look at historical evidence, but they’re a bit surprising and even disturbing. So that’s what I want to talk about today. In a sense, looking back to the D-Day landings, just how we weigh up what happened on a day like that. So my question’s then about how we make the world a less violent place.
This is an old question, obviously, and it’s taken a lot of different forms through the ages. And the form we mostly now think about goes back to the age of Thomas Hobbes; 17th century English philosopher, writing during the English Civil War, wrote bunch of famous stuff. But probably the most famous bit of writing out of all the work that Hobbes did comes from his book “Leviathan,” which came out in 1651. And in “Leviathan,” at one point, he’s speculating about the original condition of humanity; what it was like at the very beginning of the world. And he says, “Back in that original condition, every man is enemy to every man. Let men live without other security than what is their own strength. In such condition, there is no place for industry because the fruits thereof is uncertain; and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea. No commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force. No knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” So says Hobbes, life was terrible at the beginning for humanity. Everybody engage in a struggle all the time, against everybody else. And the only solution to this state of nature, said Hobbes, was the creation of what he called a leviathan, which is what he named his famous book after. And here, I dunno how well you can make it out on this slide, but on the top of the picture there, you’ve got Leviathan. Leviathan is actually a scary monster out of the Bible, out of the book of Job.
But Hobbes borrowed that name, Leviathan, to describe a ruler, a sovereign so powerful that he would terrify his people into doing what he the Leviathan said. And if you can see it on that picture of the sovereign at the top here of the cover of the first edition of Hobbes, Leviathan’s body is made up of hundreds and hundreds of separate people. And what Hobbes argued in his book, he said that the only way that we can stop everybody from using violence to pursue their own ends, to get their what they want in the world, is by coming together, banding together into a leviathan, a ruler. And the ruler will be so powerful, he basically scares people straight. So, says Hobbes, government is the answer to our problems. We get together, we create a government, the government creates laws, the laws prevent us all from killing each other to get whatever we want and that will drive down the rates of violent death; and we can all have a more sophisticated and happier world. Well, as you can probably imagine, this was a very controversial thesis even at the time when Hobbes launched it right after the English Civil War. Got himself in a lot of trouble with this argument. A lot of people pushed back against it. And about a hundred years later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Swiss philosopher, Rousseau started writing about some similar issues and kind of pulled together what a lot of other people were saying and thinking. Rousseau basically suggested the exact opposite of Hobbes. He says, the problem is not that we are created to be violent and aggressive by our nature.
No, says Rousseau. In a state of nature, people are very peaceful and cooperative. They then, though, get corrupted by ambition is the way Rousseau put it. States and governments are created and these become the source of oppression and they introduce violence into the world. If we could just get rid of the states and governments, then the world to be a very peaceful place. Now, Hobbes and Rousseau, they basically put a new twist on a very old debate, which is what is human nature? This goes back to some of the earliest writings that survive for us. What are we fundamentally like? Are we fundamentally self-serving and violent, or are we fundamentally altruistic and peaceful? So this argument has been going on in the Hobbes-Rousseau form for the last 250 years at least, but the thing with Hobbes and Rousseau, even though the way they framed the question, this has kind of set the parameters for the modern debate. For both of them, this was like 100% a thought experiment. They didn’t use any evidence whatsoever. They just reasoned back to what the world would be like in an imaginary state of nature, and then said, “What can we do to make the world now a better place?” The thing is now 250 years after Rousseau, 350 after Hobbes, now we do have a lot of evidence about this. And some of you, I’m sure, will be familiar with Steven Pinker’s book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” Pinker coming at it from a psychological angle. Many, many scholars in many, many fields have been accumulating evidence directly relevant to these questions for centuries now. And so now I think we can address the questions in a much better way than Hobbes and Rousseau did.
The answer, I think, as always with these big debates, the answer lies somewhere in the middle. But in this case, I think it is closer to the Hobbes end than the Rousseau end. And I think if we genuinely want to make the world a safer place, we have to act on the knowledge that we have historically about what has really happened in the past. So, okay, that is what I want to talk about. My feeling on this is that the biggest finding we’ve made, relevant to this question in the last couple of centuries, has been that rates of violent death have fallen quite dramatically across history and Hobbes was sort of right about this. And so one of the big starting points for understanding this was the discovery that archaeologists and anthropologists made in the nineteenth and 20th centuries. That if you go back to the stone age, stone age societies basically were almost always tiny groups of people. Here, a late 19th century drawing of an Australian aboriginal settlement. Very, very small groups of people who live by hunting wild animals, gathering wild plants. They tend to move around a lot. Very small communities, very low levels of formal structure and organisation within them. Well, what 20th century anthropologists found was that Hobbes’s picture of everybody going around basically sort of dusk to dawn, killing each other, whacking each other in their head all the time. This was pretty seriously wrong and off the target. People find many, many ways to prevent spiralling into violence, constantly. But even so, there is a lot of killing goes on, a lot of fighting, because there are a relatively few formal constraints. If you have an argument with somebody, relatively few formal constraints on escalating this argument.
And so here, a classic picture an anthropologist took in Venezuela in the 1960s. Arguments, they’re sort of ritualised, but one way you can solve the argument if it just totally gets out of hand, a lot more people get drawn in, is when these very ritualised club fights they call them. Where basically, guys hit each other on the head with these long tent poles that they’ve got. There’s very few restrictions on violence. And the killing always very, very small scale, but repeatedly anthropologists would find ten percent, even 20% in extreme cases, of people will end their lives violently in these small scale societies. Now if we fast forward to the 20th century, looking at it globally, terrible time. Two world wars. This picture actually was probably staged by Soviet propagandists, but doesn’t need to be a real one. Terrible time, two world wars, genocides committed, nuclear weapons get used. Something like somewhere between one hundred million and 200 million people die violently in the 20th century. So you know, we’re talking what, half of the population of the United States today, multiples of the population of the United Kingdom today, huge number of people die violently. But, that’s out of a population of about 10 billion people live during the 20th century. The rate of violent death is about one to 2% as compared to ten to 20% in the small scale stone age type societies. An order of magnitude decline. And this is something when I teach classes about the history of war, we’ll sometimes ask the students when we all sort of settle down and gotten to know each other a little bit ‘cause it’s kind of an uncomfortable question, but I’ll ask them: how many of you have actually lost friends or family to act of violence?
And usually, not always, but usually it’s a very, very small number. And this is this weird apparent paradox of the world that we live in. We’ve got the worst weapons ever, but they’re combined with the lowest rates of violent death ever. How does that happen? And in spite of horrific things like the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and Sudan, the rates of violent death just keep falling. And here’s a graph. What we’re looking at on this chart, on the vertical axis we’ve got the percentage of people who die violently and we’ve got error bars, somewhere between ten and 20% on the bottom left hand column of the stone age estimate, ten to 20%. In the 20th century, that’s fallen to one to 2%. In the early 21st century, it’s down well under 1%. It just keeps falling. So this seems to be this weird paradox combined with the worst weapons the world has ever seen. And yet if Hobbes was right, it’s actually not a paradox at all. We have much stronger leviathans than ever before and they get to be strong by being increasingly terrifying in their ability to deliver violence against people who disagree with them. And that ability is what makes them able to function as leviathans. The more power you have to scare people straight, the more you can drive the rates of violent death down. Now if that’s right, then the crucial question of course is well where do these stronger leviathans come from? How does this happen?
And the answer Hobbes gave seems to be more or less right, that leviathans get created by people fighting against each other. And in the long run, over 10,000 years, violence has driven the creation of stronger leviathans. Stronger leviathans have driven down the rates of violent death. And in a sense, you can say violence puts itself out of business over the very, very long run of history. As we do more violence, create stronger leviathans, drive down the rates of violent death. And it’d taken 10,000 years to do this. It’s a very, very long-term process. And 10 years ago, I decided I was going to write a book about this and I took the title of my book from one of the great protest songs of all time. Edwin Star’s “War, What is it Good For?” And you probably all know the answer that Star gave, “Absolutely nothing.” But archaeology and anthropology and history suggests that’s not exactly true. That the effects of war over the long run have made a world with less war. And that’s an uncomfortable observation, if it’s right. But if we want to save the world then if that’s right, we’ve got to understand that, not wish it away and say we would like to pretend the world works differently. And it’s something that people have known for a really long time, like 2000 years ago, the Roman politician Cicero says, “Si vis pacem, para bellum.” “If you want peace, prepare for war.” So what I want to do this evening, I’m going to focus on three main claims that I make in my book, then look at four observations that come out of those claims and then wrap up and you can all tell me where I went wrong. So okay, first of these observations. In the long term, what drove rates of violent death was ultimately war itself, or the side effects of war itself; which created these larger, more sophisticated leviathans able to pacify their societies internally, reducing the risk that the members would die violently.
Now this happens not because the rulers that get created in these conflicts are saints or like holy men who want to prevent violence. Sort of actually quite the opposite of that. The people who are the masters of violence, who create the leviathans, these people are hard, ruthless men interested overwhelmingly in their own interests. And what is their own interest? Overwhelmingly, it’s to have taxpayers who quietly go about their business, go off and work their farms and don’t go over to the next farm every time they have an argument with his owner, and burn the place to the ground and kill him. That is the absolute last thing these guys want. So they will spend heavily to create forces that prevent that from happening. Now, there’s lots of exceptions. It’s easy to think of exceptions. And this is what I call the “What about Hitler?” question, although you could equally easily make it the what about Stalin, what about Mao? What about Idi Amin? There are a lot of genocidal maniacs who’ve been in charge of leviathans, who have emphatically not made their society safer places. Some leviathans are better than others. And this, I think, is a very obvious point, but it’s one that’s easy to forget. And if we approach the problem by just going through history, picking out particularly bad leviathans or particularly good ones, we’re not going to get anywhere with this 'cause that’s not what we’re looking at here. We’re looking at a long-term overall process. And I like to call it kind of Truman’s law after Harry S. Truman, the the American president, who one time, Truman, he’s asked my a journalist: “President Truman, what would you say makes a great president?”
And Truman says, “A great president is one who is right 51% of the time.” And I think that’s the sort of thinking we’ve got to apply here. Not can we think of terrible rulers who were genocidal maniacs, but over the long run, have the rulers who drove the rates of violent death down being even slightly more common than the ones who have the opposite effect. Because that’s what we’re looking at to explain this 10,000 year process that I’m talking about. That over the very long run, this declining in rates of violent death seems to be unmistakable. Took 10,000 years, but nowadays globally, people are 10 times less likely to die violently than we would’ve been back in the stone age. So that was the first claim I make in the book. The second claim: war is a terrible way to create larger, safer societies. And it’s not the only way that people have found, but it’s pretty much the only way that people have found. It’s difficult to find good examples of people giving up the right to use violence to resolve their disputes, without them being either the victims of or fearing the use of even more violence against them. And Hobbes is very clear in “Leviathan,” he says, it is possible to persuade people to form a leviathan, but it does tend to be done by force. And you just think about the difficulties that have beset organisations in our own time that have tried to get people to cede sovereignty, to give up the use, the right to use force without themselves having more force to apply. So organisations like the International Criminal Court or the European Union, or the League of Nations, they have great difficulty doing this.
So if this is right, then we do have to conclude war has been good for something, even if in a truly terrible way. It’s been the main way in which we created larger, more organised societies that have driven down the rates of violent death. And at doing that specific thing, war has in fact been so good that my third claim is that war is, in effect, putting itself out of business. And this is why I would say current conflicts like the ones in Ukraine, potential ones in Taiwan and so on. Why these are so important, that I think one of the big lessons of the 20th century has been that military aggression does not pay in the long run; that you will suffer if you try to use violence to solve your problems. Things like Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, that lesson has got to be driven home. We cannot allow people to start concluding that war is once again starting to be a useful tool of state policy. Now one conclusion from these three points, which I think is a slightly alarming conclusion, maybe what we need is one more truly great war, unify the world to have a world government, drive rates of violent death down toward absolute zero. But the problem here, of course, as I’m sure you’ve all figured out, we’ve now got so good at fighting, things like this. So good at fighting that such a war has actually become impossible. We could destroy the entire planet if we fought another total war. The good side of this, so there is a good side, what I’m going to show you now, this is what I like to call “the happiest graph in history.” This is a graph of the total number of nuclear warheads in the world since 1945.
And actually, I need to update it. It’s gone down a little bit further since then. And what you see, total number of nuclear warheads in the world, peaks in the 1980s, the height of the Cold War, little over 70,000. And Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet physicist, calculated that had all of those had been used at the same time, it would vert probably have ended all life on earth. Now however, the number of nuclear warheads has fallen by more than 90% since the year 1986. Now it’s a little less than 4,000 nuclear warheads in the world, which is still terrible. I mean, if those all got used at once, the blast of them would be, I, it’s difficult to calculate these things. But, ballpark equivalent to having World War II in one day, which is really bad, but not enough to destroy humanity completely; probably. So this is like the happiest graph in history. I’m going to come back to this at the end. But what it seems to imply is that even the threat of violence, if the amount of violence being threatened is sufficiently high, can be self-defeating, can lead people to back away from the brink. So those are the three claims I make in the book. It’s a 10,000 year story, though, full of twists and turns and complications and there’s a lot of exceptions to this story. And so what I want to do now is move on to talk about four complications to this story. I’ve made the story extremely simple so far. Four complications to the story, but in some ways kind of, it’s like the exceptions prove the rule of what I’ve been saying and some ways don’t. So, this it is actually a rather complicated story.
So first thing I want to talk about, if we follow our story starting back in the stone age, moving forward through history, as you go from about say 10,000 BCE through to about 200 CE, you move from a world of these very, very small hunter gatherer bands constantly moving around, to great ancient empires like the Roman Empire in the western old world, the Hun Chinese empire in the eastern end of the world, each of these 2000 years ago rules about 60 million people. They’ve become great, powerful leviathans that have driven down the rates of violent death. Now it’s very difficult to calculate exactly how much they drove down these rates of violent death, basically because our evidence is all impressionistic. And I spent a chunk of my book talking about how we can use that evidence to turn it roughly into numbers. There’s a lot of room to argue about this, I’m happy to talk about the evidence more afterwards. Basically, there’s impressionistic stuff like skeletons with traces of lethal trauma, fortifications that people are building, literary accounts of violence; but my estimates is that between the stone age and the ancient empires, you move from a world where you’re talking about ten to 20% likelihood of violent death for any individual to a world where it’s more like two and a half to 5%. So like 75% fall, three quarters decline in the rates of violent death around the world. And these wars, the wars that created the ancient empires, you could say that they’re sort of productive wars in the sense of producing larger and safer societies. But then, something happens at this point roundabout the year 200 CE. War turns counterproductive.
Instead of creating bigger leviathans, larger and safer society, it starts breaking these up into smaller, more violent societies. And this is an example of what I’m talking about. I like to call this spaghetti graph. Spaghetti graphs are where you’ve got lines going absolutely all over the place, as we can see we’ve got here. What we’re looking at here, this is a graph showing you this claim about how wars start breaking up the larger societies. The size of something is relatively easy to quantify. And so here we’ve got, you can see on the right hand side of my graph here, four different regions of the old world in four different colours, vertical axis measuring the physical size of the largest empire within each of these regions. Across the bottom, we’ve got the dates CE from one through 1400. And basically what you see here is wild variation around different parts of the old world. Although, I should say the red line, I think I can get a pointer here. The way the red line spikes up in the middle, this is slightly misleading 'cause the Abbasid Caliphate in the Middle East, it’s not exactly an empire like the other ones. Also, a large part of the land it controls kind of got nobody living in it; so that’s slightly misleading. But general impression, stuff going on absolutely all over the place. But the purple line is a regression calculated of the typical size of the largest empires in each period.
You see this steadily going down and as these big empires break up and get smaller, the amount of warfare between them goes up. Their ability to control the populations inside goes down, the rates of violent death go up. And I should say, actually, I could make this graph a lot more complicated still 'cause this is just looking at the old world. So Europe, North Africa, Asia. If we look to the rest of the world as well, it would be even more complicated, but the states would be even more complicated. But the area we’re looking at here, this is what drives the numbers in my other graphs that I’m showing you, 'cause this is where roughly seventy to 80% of the population lived in this old world area from Europe out to China. So this is the kind of thing I’m talking about, the creation of smaller, more violent societies. And my estimates are that rates of violent death roughly double from the ancient empire to what I call the age of migration. So it’s gone down from here to the ancient empire, it goes up again and subsequently comes down again. And if you think, is that sort of thing plausible? What we’re talking about here, this is the period of history basically from the age of Atilla The Hun through to Genghis Khan, which puts it in some perspective right there. When you get these horse riding nomads striking out from Central Asia, levels of mobility that the great empires just cannot control, and here you see the Mongolian Steppes down at the bottom. Here, a picture of mediaeval Mongol horse archers up at the top, and here they are fighting European knights at the top left.
The great states just cannot control these raiders and the states start to come to pieces. Everything falls apart, basically. After about the year 1400 CE, this begins to get reversed again. Gun powder armies from the great agrarian states running from China out of the Mediterranean world, these start getting control over the Steppes. They start projecting power even further afield. They start waging what I like to call the 500 years war; the war of Europe against the rest of the world. And I talk to a bit last time I was here at Lockdown University, if any of you saw that, about how Europeans put together this combination of guns and ships, and are able to project their power all over the planet, first time anyone has ever done that, starting in the sixteenth, 17th centuries. By the eighteenth and 19th centuries, Europeans are creating these great global empires. They create great new leviathans, particularly the British empire, ultimately the United States of America as well. For the industrialised parts of the world, at least, the planet becomes vastly more linked together than ever before. Here’s just a modern map of the scale of trade routes now linking the globe together. Increasingly, the world is kind of being drawn into one organisation. And this, we see in this, we see this collapse of rates of violent death.
And for what happened in the last 500 years, our evidence is much, much better than what happened earlier. And there’s a certain amount of agreement, it would be going too far to say it’s consensus, but certain amount of agreement among social scientists that we’ve seen is 90% decline in rates of violent death since prehistory. However, there’s almost no agreement over what the causes have been. And I think this is because most scholars have not really looked at this historically. There’ve been social scientists just looking at relatively recent times, the last 500 years or so, and particularly in Europe. And basically, they’re looking at one case study and then trying to generalise from that to what has happened globally. And that, I think, is a mistake. It makes it very difficult to isolate cause and effect. When you look at the long run continuously across the whole world, what we see in a graph like this one is we don’t just have this continuous decline of rates of violent death from prehistory to now, we’ve actually got a much more complicated path and that’s when we begin to be able to explain things. We can look at the different variables, hold things stead.
And so in the early part of our graph, as we move from the stone age down to the age of ancient empires, you’re getting much, much bigger empires, much stronger leviathans, and you’re getting falls in the rate of violent deaths. Then you move from the age of ancient empires, age of migrations, much smaller empires, things break down, rates of violent deaths spike up. You look at modern , modern history coming down here, again, much more integrated globe in almost every conceivable way, rates of violent death steadily falling. And this graph, this doesn’t prove my argument, but I think it makes a much stronger argument than any of the ones that have previously been out there. It suggests leviathan is driving everything. This is what is driving the decline in rates of violent death. Well, okay, now I would be happy to go on about the history for the whole of the hour, even more than the hour, but I want to move on to some more of the consequences of this argument. And if this is right, obvious next question is, well, why? Why does history work in this unpleasant and paradoxical kind of way? And I think to answer that question, you’ve got to go beyond even the long-term history that I’ve been talking about and look at the biological evolution of violence, particularly among our nearest biological kin in the animal kingdom: the other great apes in the world. And it’s the sort of evidence that was utterly unknown to Hobbes and Rousseau. It’s actually really surprising how recently our knowledge of our biological close kin, how recently that knowledge has accumulated.
If you go back to 1960, year I was born, the beginning of 1960. Nobody has ever gone into the African forest to study the great apes in their natural habitat. 1960s when Jane Goodall sets up the first observation statement in Tanzania, in Gombe Park. Here you see her in 1965. And that has led to this tidal wave of extraordinary information, and sort of jump started a new way of thinking about violence in the animal world. And this new way of thinking suggests every species of animals has evolved to be able to use violence in some, well almost every species of animals, evolved to be able to use violence in some way in pursuit of what it wants. Violence is an evolved adaptation. Different species use it in different ways. Hey, no two animals are the same. I’ve got four dogs and these four dogs, very different personalities, very different attitudes toward violence. I can tell you that as well. No two animals are the same. But within each species, the species as a whole has evolved toward what you might call the right amount of violence. The one that is most likely, if you hew closely to that level and form of violence, that is the one that is most likely to lead you to pass your genes onto the next generation and allow them to spread through the gene pool. That is the genetically, biologically, most successful form of violence for that animal given the biological endowment it’s got in its own body, given the prey it has, given the predators that are after it, given where it lives in the world.
This is what works best. So, consider the lion. The lions, stereotypically violent animals. They’re carnivores. If they’re not at least a little bit violent, they’re going to starve to death. Lions have evolved to have a sort of a best level of violence that they pursue. If you were a pacifist lion, relatively speaking, pacifist lion and you don’t like to kill stuff, you are less likely to pass your genes onto the next generation 'cause you’re more likely to starve. If, on the other hand, you are a homicidal maniac of a lion, a psychopath, you think every single interaction is solved by violence, you are unlikely to pass your genes onto the next generation 'cause you’re going to keep killing the lioness you mate with or they’ll kill you. Either way, your chance of passing your genes on is diminished. Same with every kind of animal. It’s the same with us. In this sense, we are exactly the same as all the other animals on the planet. And we evolved, you know, as I’m sure you all know, we evolved into our modern form over the last few million years, basically around the edges of the green splotch you see here. The Central African rainforest. Adapting to our environments, growing bigger and bigger brains, we are just like all the other animals in this way. We have evolved to have what you might call, what biologists call our evolutionarily stable strategy for violence. Rates of violent death in the ten, 15% area, which is roughly the same as chimpanzees, actually. We evolved like other animals to have an evolutionarily stable strategy for violence. Exactly like all the other species, except for the fact we’re also completely different from all the other species.
And the difference is that biological evolution has produced the human brain. 2.7 pounds, roughly one kilogramme of magic, that all of you have brought along here with you this evening conveniently for us. 'Cause this lump of magic at the top end of our bodies, this makes us alone in the world capable of cumulative cultural evolution. In addition to evolving biologically, we evolve culturally. We think of new ways of doing things. So let’s say when mammoths colonised Siberia hundreds of thousands of years ago, they come to the edge of Siberia and then they’ve got to stop there until they’ve evolved biologically to have more wool, more fur, that allows 'em to live in colder climates. We come to the edge of Siberia about, I’d say about forty five, 50,000 years ago? We don’t have to wait to evolve biologically to be hairier. We evolve culturally, we kill the mammoths and steal their fur. That’s what we do because we can in a way that they can’t. We are the only animals that can do this kind of thing. We change our behaviour to maximise our payoffs in the world, in a way that other animals cannot do. And that is the answer to the whole question that I wrote about in this book. That’s why rates of violent death have fallen by 90% over the last 10,000 years, with us still being fundamentally the same animals that we were 10,000 years ago. We alone can create bigger societies with stronger governments that change the payoffs for everybody. We’ve learned to respond to these different payoffs.
Now, we can’t wave a magic wand and wish war away, but in a sense, we don’t have to because we are so good at responding to cost-benefit analysis. And this I think is the big lesson here, that strong government, leviathan, is the main tool for scaring us straight. Okay, third of my four consequences drawn out of this book, so we’re coming toward the end now. If this is right, what are the lessons for us? So we’ve evolved to be able to produce leviathans and persuade us to use violence less. Leviathans lower rates of violent death, but this is not free, it comes at a cost. We trade freedom for safety and Rousseau was basically right about that. And I think the philosophical question is, is that what we want? How much of that do we want? How much safety do we want, and what are we willing to give up to get it? Because sometimes really nasty governments are very good at lowering rates of violent death. There’s a reason why we call them police states. The history is clear. People giving up their weapons, giving up their right to use their weapons in pursuit of solving their own disputes, this is one of the absolutely central thing for lowering rates of violent death. Is that what we want? And I think when you think about it, is there nothing for which you would be prepared to kill or be killed? Do you hold no value so dear that you would kill or be killed for them? Is there nothing so precious to you that you would use violence to protect it? Would you strangle the baby Hitler, if you were beamed back to the end of the 19th century, and you had the chance to do so?
So there asks these questions connected with these arguments. Okay, final point. I want to close my talk up with something now coming down from the philosophical level, to something a bit more practical. Where is all this going, if I’m vaguely right about these things. And I want to pick up where I left off the historical story with Europeans swallowing up the world back in the eighteenth, 19th centuries, creating these global empires. By 1815, when the British defeat Napoleon in the Battle of Waterloo, wars have made the British leviathan so strong that historians sometimes like to refer to it as the Globo-Cop. It bestrides the world like a colossus. And the period 1815 to 1914, this seems to see fewer interstate wars in any earlier period for which we’ve got documentation. And some of these wars are still horrific, particularly the Taiping rebellion in China. Tens of millions of people die in that. But rates of interstate warfare, rates of violent death fall sharply during the 19th century. And some of them, again, some of them are absolutely horrendous. What European empires did in places like the the Belgian Congo, absolutely horrendous. And yet, globally the 19th century is the safest and richest century the world has seen up till that point. And this happens not because the British have conquered the world and created global government, it’s because they’ve tied the world together through trade networks and they use their navy and their wealth to police open markets, open sea lanes, free movements of people, all the things that the British want to see. They use naval power and wealth to make the costs of challenging the British dominated global order sufficiently high that most governments conclude that the benefits of going along with it are higher than the costs of challenging it. They don’t want to go to war, if it’s going to alienate the British empire.
Trade makes the British rich in doing this, but this is where the great paradox comes in. Trade makes the British rich in doing this, but it actually makes some of their trading partners richer still. And the logic of course is people can only buy British goods if they’ve got the wealth to buy them in the first place. And so the British will regularly help the other countries become wealthy enough to buy British goods. Other people around the world become richer, certain other people. And by the 1870s, what we’re looking at here, vertical axis is GDP measured in this sort of accounting unit of 1990 international dollars, historians call them. On the bottom, we’re going from 1820 to 1913, different coloured lines for different rich countries around the world. And you see the blue British line goes up at a rate that is unprecedented in history. Britain gets richer so much faster, but, other trading partners get richer faster still; above all, Germany and especially the United States. And this is the great paradox of the order the British creates. The more successful the British Globo-Cop is at doing its job, the harder it becomes to do that job. And back say in the 1870s, nobody is really willing yet to directly challenge the British global order and say we want to be the top dogs in the global order. But 40 years later, by the 1910s, you’ve got to the point where the British can no longer raise the costs of challenge sufficiently high to deter absolutely everybody. And the German leadership in particular was willing to risk violence. They’re not pursuing war, but if it comes, that they think is better than not having the war. Results, of course, the British Globo-Cop just unravels over the next thirty, 40 years.
Two world wars are fought, more than a hundred million people are killed in these world wars. Now since 1989, something a little bit similar has there reason again. We now have an American Globo-Cop. Once again, has not conquered the world. It’s tied the world together through trade, it’s wealth and its navy dominate the world. They police the open markets, the open sea lanes, and the United States can deliver violence on a level no one has ever been able to do before. But the whole system is predicated on nobody’s going to challenge the Americans, 'cause they can’t possibly deliver violence against everybody at once. And the trade networks have made the United States very, very rich, but they’ve enriched its partners even more. And here, similar graph to last time, orange line is, sort of darkish blue line at the top is United States, the orange line is China. And if we extend the graph out a little bit to catch it up to modern times, the Chinese line, depending on how you measured, has either caught up or overtaken the American line. And rather like historians will often say about the British global system, it’s been an economic triumph, but a strategic disaster and the people’s republic of China is increasingly looking like a potential rival.
Now, the beginning of the 21st century, pretty much nobody was willing to directly challenge the American order. When Saddam Hussein tried that, it turned out very, very badly for him. But if these present trends continue, 40 years from now, we may be back in a world like the 1910s where the US Globo-Cop can’t raise the cost of challenges high enough to deter absolutely everybody. Will we be back in a situation like that to the 1910s, where some powers are willing to challenge the American Globo-Cop. But now we have the worst of all possible worlds, one that is as unstable as a run up to World War I, but with weapons worse than anything that we had in D-Day, anything we had during the Cold War. And this is one of my favourite scary weapons, aircraft that can fly themselves. And this is a plane that already, 10 years ago, did the most difficult task we ever ask Navy flyers to do, which is land a plane by yourself on the deck of an aircraft carrier. The weapons now, I mean, these are just magic; the weapons we’ve got now. The next 30 years or so promise to be the most dangerous in the history of the world. And I think the lesson of history is that peace depends on leviathan, it depends on a Globo-Cop. If we want a richer, safer world, we should try to keep a Globo-Cop. And in the world would live in, that means the United States. The alternative means re-running what led up to the first World War, but with nuclear weapons.
Now the bad news, can we head that off forever? No, nothing has ever lasted forever. Like if you imagine, say, imagine somehow the world avoiding what happens in 1914, do you think that British are still going to bestride the world like a colossus in 2024? No, Globo-Cops are going to decay. Does that mean we are all doomed? Well, I’ve got some thoughts on that as well, but I see I am out of time. So if you want to know my thoughts on that, you’re going to have to read my book. So thank you for listening this evening or whatever it is, whatever time it is where you are. I will see if I can figure out how to get out of the sharing. I’m not sure that I can figure that out. So maybe you’ll have to come to my help on this.
[Host] I’ve un-shared it, so can you see the Q&A?
Oh, okay. Okay, I know.
[Host] Back to you, now.
Okay, that way. Okay, well thank you very much.
Q&A and Comments:
So I guess now if there are questions, I’ve got some down here, so I should be able to, okay, well the first question I’ve got here is just a compliment. So well, thank you for that. I won’t read that out. Even I am too modest to do that.
Q: Okay, so we’ve got one down here. “Hasn’t Hamas brought violence to a new level?”
A: Well, see, this is the thing about talking about a subject like this; about long-term rates of violent death. When I started writing my book, I would go out and have lunch with colleagues and talk to them about this and I would be talking about my book and their eyes would get bigger and bigger and bigger as I talk more about it. And they’d say, have you lost your mind? If you write a book like this, everybody is going to hate you and think you’ve become a monster. Because writing a book like this forces you to write about, think about the truly terrible things that are happening in the world, but put them in this long-term context and talk about them in this very dispassionate way. And the fact of the matter is that what Hamas did, while it was truly appalling, and I know a lot of people who lost friends and relatives in the October 7th attacks. On the world historical stage, it was tiny. It was absolutely tiny. Just like the attacks on the United States on September 11th, 2001, on the world historical stage this was absolutely tiny. And this will often come up, I’ll get into discussions with people about say something like the Cold War. I mean a lot of people die during the Cold War in these proxy wars between the great powers. So like, I’ll probably get the numbers wrong, you can look 'em up on your phones and check them. In the Vietnam War, I think the estimates are something like 2 million people die during the Vietnam War. Overwhelmingly, of course, these are Vietnamese civilians who die during the Vietnam War. This is a terrible, terrible thing. But if it’s true, and you know, this is course where the arguments would come in. If it’s true that the Vietnam War was part of a larger process by which the great powers avoided having an all-out nuclear war, then those 2 million people, that was globally, that was such a blessing for the rest of the world compared to the billions who would’ve died if it had gone nuclear. So, did Hamas bring violence to a new level? Well, I guess the answer to that is it depends what happens next. If what happens next is, Israel and Iran say get into a nuclear confrontation, start using nuclear weapons, that draws in the United States, that draws in Russia, that draws in China, and we actually get this nuclear global war, then yeah, Hamas has brought violence to a new level. If instead we get the kind of appalling stories we hear every single day about the casualties in the Gaza Strip from the Israeli attacks on Gaza, then depressingly, looking at this in a global context, the answer is no. Hamas did not bring violence to a new level. So I mean, hopefully you see from the way I was sort of struggling with that answer there, this is a very, very difficult thing to talk about. So let me move on quickly to a different question, before I get myself in trouble with that.
So yeah, we’ve got a question here about Carl von Clausewitz, who many of you will know I’m sure, Clausewitz is widely considered to have been the first really systematic, modern thinker about the nature of warfare; about what is war, how does it work, how do you win wars? What are they for? And one of his most famous lines is that “War is the continuation of politics with the admixture of other means,” which is a very confusing way to put it. I don’t know how many of you tried reading Clausewitz, but basically everything in Clausewitz is confusing. His book, it wasn’t a proper book, it was a collection of notes he’d made toward a book and then after he died, his widow put it together and published it. And the general feeling is, you know, if you have got the fortitude to sit there and fight your way through the whole of Clausewitz’s book, you’re going to learn so much from doing that. But it’s really, really hard work. It’s just all these scattered thoughts. But this is one of the most profound thoughts in the book. What Clausewitz sees, frankly, what all leaders and generals have always seen, but no one has sort of made it explicit and theorised what you do about it. He says violence is just a continuation of any other kind of political discussion. Like, so say you’ve got two leaders of states and I say, say I’m the president of the United States and I want to get China to buy more soybeans from me and this is a debate that we’ve had.
But I want China to buy more soybeans from me, so I can sit down with Chinese leaders or send my guys to sit down with Chinese leaders, and they say, okay, let’s cut a deal. I want to sell you more soybeans, there’s stuff that you want us to buy more from you, so let’s make a deal and we’ll just agree to buy more of this stuff. If you are not willing to do that, well, we can put the squeeze on you a little bit. We can say you’re not going to buy our soybeans, so what I’m going to do now is, I’m going to put a 10% tariff on your car tyres that you manufacture. If you agree to buy the soybeans, forget the tariff. If you don’t, I’m going to apply the tariff. You don’t, this goes on. Trade war develops. More and more and more tariffs go out there. If it gets worse still, I can start applying actual sanctions on you, now. Seize your financial assets overseas. I can keep escalating the pain that you suffer. And at a certain point, I’m going to say, okay, I’m going to start using violence against you. I’m maybe even going to go all-out nuclear attack on you. Because if we went to all-out nuclear war with China over soybean exports, that would be considered a bit strange. That’s highly unlikely to happen. But what Clausewitz saw is it’s a continuum. Any disputes that you get into, and now we’re talking about whether your two kids arguing in the school playground or you’re the heads of the global superpowers, Clausewitz would say, it’s all the same. It’s all about disputes and what kind of tools do you have at your disposal to resolve your disputes. And of course you also have the very, the sort of thing that was not available in Clausewitz’s day but is now, where you can take this to the World Trade Organisation, you can get an external third party arbitrator to resolve your disputes if you are both willing to agree to abide by that arbitrator. Which, of course, often great powers today are not willing to do that. But you can escalate the pain you cause to other people, other organisations, all the way up to total all-out homicidal, genocidal nuclear war, if you want to do that. And what Clausewitz saw, the art of politics and the art of war are totally intertwined. And a good political leader is one who understands war and what you can do with war. And again, utterly cynical, ruthless way of looking at it, but Clausewitz was, you know, almost certainly right about this; nasty as it might be to think about it. Clausewitz almost certainly right about this.
Q: Okay, moving on here. One from Shelly Shapiro who says, “Does religion play a role? Does it produce more or less violent death?”
A: Great question. And one time, after I published this book about war and all these people were telling me how wicked I am and I’m going around talking about this book. And somebody in Kansas City, the Kansas City public library, we’re giving a talk there and guy in the audience puts his hand up and says, “Yeah, clearly you you must have alienated a lot of your professional colleagues writing this book. Do you want to go the whole hog, to alienate any remaining people out there, by writing a about war and religion? Surely that would upset anybody who’s still left out there.” And I said, oh God, even I have more sense than to write a book like that. Never ever say things like that, because a few years later I get roped into, I didn’t write the book, but it got roped into editing a volume of conference papers on war and religion. So yeah, and it is sort of unavoidable. Thinking about this question, you start off down the path that I was looking at. And in my book, I said a bit about religion, or excuse me, this is one of the topics I sort of short changed in order to keep the book manageable. But my feeling on this, my feeling on a lot of cultural issues in addition to religion, is the answer is, “it depends.” That I think culture, or pretty much anything people choose to do, like I talked about cumulative cultural evolution, changing the ways we do things, these changes that we make in our behaviour, I think they can play out in all sorts of different ways. They can play out toward making you more likely to risk engaging in violent activity in pursuit of your goals, or they can play out toward making you less likely to do this. And I think religion is absolute like archetypal case here. Something that can go either way.
So a lot of the people who are most active in anti-war movements nowadays are profoundly religious people who interpret their holy text or their religious tradition are saying violence is bad regardless of the cause. There’s no cause in which it’s justified to kill other people, or almost no cause. And so, yeah, a lot of anti-war activists are very, very religious people. But on the other hand, you do even now get people who will say, we must kill these other people because of religious differences. And that’s something, we had a question about Hamas earlier. Obviously you do get certain number of people in the Islamic world saying, our grievances are sufficiently, our religious grievances are sufficiently extreme, that we are completely justified in using violence to try to solve these. And the European Christian Crusades in the Middle Ages, of course, the classic example of this. So I’d say yeah, religion absolutely plays a role and it can make people more or less likely to use violence in pursuit of their goals, depending on the details of the situation. And my own feeling, I haven’t studied this systematically, I think it would be a really interesting topic and maybe a really important one, too. My feeling is that if you are living in an age where your world is sliding toward more violent activity, then probably religion is going to be one of the factors involved in that, rather than one of the ones that’s slamming the brakes on it. If you’re living in a world where you’re moving toward less use of violence to resolve debates, probably religion is going to be a force that is helping to reduce the amounts of violence.
So I apologise for the wishy-washy answer on that, but I think this is a complicated and interesting sort of question to raise; and oh, actually there’s somebody, Bob posted a follow up to Shelley’s question, which raises an interesting thing too. He just says, “The Old Testament mentions violent death frequently.” Yes, it does. It is just, I teach a lot of stuff on the ancient theory, so we use the Hebrew Bible. Yeah, it is just dripping with gore. And this, I think, is really interesting thing. If you think about the periods when the Old Testament and the New Testament are composed, the Old Testament, a lot of controversy of the dates, but it’s basically, it’s the first millennium BC during the period when the kingdom of Israel gets formed and then breaks apart. It’s a period of small kingdoms, a lot of violence. Then you look at the New Testament, the beginning of the first millennium AD, CE, when the Jewish world is very much part of the Roman Empire. The New Testament has so much less violence in it, it’s so much more anti-violence than the Old Testament is. When is it written? During a time when Judea, the Roman province, is part of this large superpower empire that almost certainly is driving down rates of violent death. And I’m sure any of you with any historical inklings will have seen Monty Python’s “Life of Brian.” You cannot not see one of the great history movies of all time. Classic scene in that where John Cleese, Reg, leader of the people’s front of Judea, whatever the heck it’s called, he’s asking his followers, “What have the Romans ever done for us?” And so they come up with is, “peace.” They actually come up with a lot of answers, but peace is the one that Reg is unable to argue back against. And because the funny thing is, there is something to that. The Romans did bring the Jewish world peace and this is the point when the Jewish world creates the New Testament. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
Q: Okay, another question here from David. “Are your charts for death similar to charts for numbers of wounded?”
A: So yeah, this is getting now a little bit into the methodological side of it here, where I did comment that producing these numerical charts, this is just a very messy process. There’s tremendous amount of room to argue over the data because the data are just so messy. There’s also a lot of room to argue over what exactly should we be measuring here. And I was talking about rates of violent death. I was actually being very specific in singling that out as what I’m talking about. And the reason I was doing that is a lot of arguments for why just the number of people who are directly killed in the wars, is not the right metric to be using. And David talks about the wounded as well. What about all the people who die from disease, and basically every major war up till the end of the first World War, more people are dying from disease and starvation than from direct acts of violence. So you could argue that the metric I’ve used is not the right one. The reason I use that index to look at it, is that’s the one that we can operationalize; at least potentially put into practise and actually measure. 'Cause through the long ages of prehistory, obviously there are no government statistics on casualties in war. So you are overwhelmingly relying on proxy data, things like lethal trauma to skeletons, of which we have an enormous global database now. Tens of thousands of examples, maybe hundreds of thousands by now. And it’s constantly growing. And so, that is something you can be very precise in what am I looking at here? I am looking at wounds on these skeletons that were likely to have led to death. And there’s still going to be room to argue over this. 'Cause you know, sometimes you get a skeleton like say Richard III, the English king, who his body, there is no way anybody could possibly survive what was done to him.
Others, you got much more ambiguous wounds to the head, say, that might not have killed people. But so I singled it down to death, lethal violence against people because that was the thing I thought there’s at least the potential to measure here. And it would be interesting if somebody could find some way to do it, to see how that compares to the other sorts of charts. It might be complicated, 'cause one of the big changes in modern warfare, is you look at pre-modern wars up to beginning of the 20th century, you’ve got this sort of rule of thumb that generally for every person who dies violently on the battlefield, two will be wounded because a lot more get wounded, but most of them will die of their wounds of infection. You look at modern wars, Iraq, Afghanistan, and some of these other places, the ratio of wounded to dead is like 10:1, 20:1 because now helicopters swoop down, take you off to Rammstein airbase and you get modern medical attention right away. So this is a complicated sort of thing. Fascinating, but complicated kind of thing. Ah, okay. What do we got here? Question from I see I have, oh, we’re dead on noon. What is the rule here? Am I allowed to carry on a little bit, or do I have to let everybody go do something more interesting, or?
[Host] Yeah, no, you can finish your questions. No worries, we’ve got 10 minutes.
Okay, yeah, so I won’t natter on and obviously, if you are bored, you all all already have left. But if you’re getting bored or got something more important, please feel free just to head off.
Oh yeah, this one from Leonard. This is sort of interesting, 'cause this is something I sort of skimmed over, just touched on very quickly talking about one of the graphs. He says, “Arguments seem to apply to humanity at a global scale.” Yeah, that is absolutely right. My arguments do. “Violent death rates viewed locally, murder rates in South Africa, localised wars in Ukraine, Gaza, drug wars in Latin America, risk and rates of violent death are much higher than globally.” Yeah, absolutely.
Q: “How to explain this discrepancy? Still scope for authoritarian, nasty governments with matching leaders.”
A: Yeah, and this is something, again, so two things worked on me in deciding I was going to work at the global level when looking at this. One was just, that’s what I’m interested in. And I think that’s what the Hobbes and Rousseau questions are all about. Even if Hobbes very much framed what he was doing in terms of the English context, having just lived through the English Civil War, Rousseau very much framing his in terms of the Western European context. But the global side, I think this is the big question. What can we do to make humanity as a whole safer? And I think, increasingly, it’s just become global by the way the power of the great stakes to affect the entire planet has gone up so much. So I was looking at the global because that’s what I think is most important here. But yes, rumbling along through the whole story is the fact that the rates vary so much regionally. And so I mentioned this in connection with my spaghetti graph. 'Cause if I did a graph of breaking the world down to smaller parts, every single graph I produce would be a spaghetti graph. And one of the big things that’s going on, is you can identify, I think particularly since about the year 1500 AD, one region, initially Western Europe, basically imposing its rates on more and more of the rest of the world. And of course, European colonialism is a very brutal, extremely unpleasant process, but it does have this one side effect of setting up these governments that often do horrific things and drive rates of violent death up really, really high, but often slowly, more quietly are driving them down in the background. And so you get this really complicated, messy global story.
And then you periodically get complete breakdowns and collapses of this. And this is something I emphasise a lot in the book, less so in a brief 45 minute talk about it like today, that there is no inevitability about this story. And that, I think, is what looking at the mediaeval period when the rates spike up, that’s one of the things it reminds you of. No inevitability whatsoever. We’ve been living through this period for hundreds of years now, where particularly in the wealthy world, rates of violent death have gone down and down but there’s nothing to suggest it can’t be reversed. And of course, on the short term, it has been reversed. World Wars I and II very much reversed this. We’re seeing it reversed in places like Ukraine at the moment, very much reversed the last few years. So yeah, this is just, this is how the pattern works. This is the Harry Truman 51% kind of rule that the big pattern over long periods can be down and down. Your own experience of it, though, can be the exact opposite of this if you are unlucky enough to live in one of these places where serious violence, serious fighting does break out. So yeah, it is a complicated, messy sort of story to look at.
What is this, now I’m about to do something I always tell students not to do here; read out a question I haven’t read what this question says. Read it out without finding out what it says first. I’m going to do it anyway. This is a question from Barry Epstein.
Q: He says, “You don’t mention India. In 1973, my wife and I lived on the kibbutz in Israel. You were looked after from the crib to the grave. It seemed to be the perfect way of life. Now the kibbutz has almost disappeared. What happened? Fascinating lecture, thank you.”
A: Well, thank you too, Barry. Yeah, I mentioned India in the book. It sort of get, yeah, it gets squeezed out trying to talk about the entire world here. Lots of important places get squeezed out. India, I think, we do see some of the same sorts of trends as we do in other places. It has its own fascinating story. Yeah, the kibbutzim in Israel, I know quite a few people who lived on kibbutzim at various points. Some of them really hated it, that it just kind of wasn’t their thing, the communal style of life. Most of them overwhelmingly enjoyed this and wish it could be done again. And yeah, most of the people I know who have experienced kibbutzim are just really, really saddened about the way that they disappeared. And yeah, in one of the questions, one of the reasons why you never read out questions and before reading into yourself first, I really, I don’t have an answer here. I think, I mean I can see ways in which it disappear into the kibbutzim, you can say this is linked to much bigger things going on over the last say, 40, years or so in Europe, in North America, in the developed democratic world, how all kinds of institutions and organisations that seemed to be designed to further equality of various kinds, so many of them sort of been squeezed out. We’ve seen rates of wealth inequality starting to go back up again, after so many decades of going down. Maybe the kibbutzim is sort of part of this. I know there are, number one, I don’t know much about the topic myself. I do know some historians of Israel who say it’s actually peculiarities of Israel are what’s the blame here. So yeah, I think a terrible question for me to read out because I don’t have anything to say on it. Okay. I move on to one where I think I maybe have something to say.
Q: “Comment on rates of suicide.”
A: From Gerald Weintraub. Yeah, great question. I mean, isn’t this peculiar in some ways. Like one of the countries among the highest rates of suicide in the world are Scandinavian countries. And the Scandinavian authors, of course, like if you watch much detective fiction on TV as I have been known to be done, a lot of it is based on Scandinavian authors. They’re the ones who invented this sort of “Nordic Noir” they call it; these murder and all kinds of other ones. Great murder shows. They have very, they have the lowest rates of violent death on the planet. And I can’t remember the numbers now, but I think Denmark is the lowest one. If you look it up on your phone, each are point zero, zero, zero something percent die violently if you live on Denmark. And yet, so many of them killed themselves. When I was younger, back in my twenties, I worked on archaeological projects with a lot of Scandinavian people and they were the nicest, most fun people in the world. And I would go, visited Sweden a number of times, had such a good time, yet they were so dark; they could turn so dark so quickly. And one of the theories that’s been floated out there, not just to talk about things like suicide rates, a bunch of other phenomena too like say the way people’s perceptions of the violence in the world have really gone up, even though the actual rates of violent death are coming down, perceptions of violence have gone up.
Is that some sociologists think that what’s happened is that we have sort of adjusted ourselves and things that in the past, you would’ve just sort of blown off, say, this is just part of life’s tapestry here. I don’t like what’s happening to me, but I just got to learn to live with it. Now, increasingly, people are perceiving this as these horrible, horrible traumas that can maybe even drive you to suicide in certain cases. This is something that, again, I know a few other people involved in this, sociologists in the United States have been very interested in of asking people what counts as violence. And generally speaking, over the last 50 years, it’s sort of come down. Initially it was very much rape, actual physical violence is what it is. Now, more and more things, people will count them as violence. Particularly speech acts are being counted as violence. So yeah, we live in really complicated times. Again, I don’t really have an answer to that, but I think all these things are sort of bound up together.
So I see, well, it’s a 12:09 now so I should probably let people get going and I have to get outside, 'cause we’ve got somebody coming at some point in the next hour or so to look at the hot tub, very Californian here, and get my hot tub working again. So let me just say thank you so much for inviting me back to Lockdown University. Hope you found this interesting, even if you didn’t necessarily agree with what I’m saying. Hope you found this interesting and I hope you have me back at some point in the future.