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One of the more unsettling ideas in political history is that civilization may depend not only on teaching people virtue, but on steadily removing the people least capable of civilized life.
That is the thesis Peter Frost and Henry Harpending explore in Western Europe, State Formation, and Genetic Pacification. It cuts against the modern habit of explaining violent disorder almost entirely through environment, incentives, poverty, trauma, and weak institutions. Those things matter. But Frost and Harpending press a harder possibility: what if the long pacification of Western Europe was driven not only by stronger states and changing norms, but also by selection against the men most prone to chronic violence? (PubMed)
The historical pattern they point to is clear. In medieval Europe, homicide rates were vastly higher than in the modern West. Over time, as states consolidated their monopoly on violence and private vengeance receded, courts imposed the death penalty more systematically. Frost and Harpending argue that by the late Middle Ages, courts were condemning between 0.5 and 1.0 percent of all men of each generation to death, with perhaps as many more violent offenders dying at the scene of crimes or in prison while awaiting trial. Meanwhile, long-run homicide rates in Western Europe fell dramatically across the centuries. That broader decline is visible not only in their paper but in later summaries built from Manuel Eisner’s historical homicide datasets. (PubMed; Our World in Data)
That much already matters. Peace is not the natural resting state of a society. It is achieved. It is enforced. It is built through institutions capable of suppressing predation. The state does not merely administer order after the fact. It creates the conditions under which ordinary trust can exist. Without that floor, commerce, family stability, education, beauty, and freedom remain fragile.
But Frost and Harpending are interested in more than deterrence. Their stronger claim is that repeated removal of violent men from the breeding population may have altered the population itself over many generations. In plain language: if men most disposed to impulsive violence, predation, and chronic criminality are disproportionately executed, killed while offending, or otherwise prevented from reproducing, then over centuries one should expect some reduction in the prevalence of those tendencies. The state, in that account, does not just restrain violence from the outside. It may slowly reshape the human material with which the society reproduces itself. (PubMed)
That is the interesting part of the thesis, and the part that needs the cleanest handling. Frost and Harpending present it not as a settled master key to European history, but as a plausible co-factor alongside state formation, punishment, and cultural conditioning. Direct genomic confirmation remains absent. Other explanations place more weight on the state’s monopoly on violence, changing norms of self-control, declining honor culture, economic development, and improved policing. So the strongest honest claim is not that the paper has solved the history of European pacification. It is that it raises a serious possibility modern readers are strongly conditioned not to consider. (PubMed)
“Civilization is not sustained by kindness alone. It rests on a prior achievement: order strong enough to protect the peaceable from the predatory.”
Even with that caution in place, the paper still does useful work. It moves the discussion beyond the sterile split between “bad systems” and “bad individuals.” It suggests a layered civilizing process: institutions suppress violent conduct, norms change under the shelter of that order, and then, possibly, population traits shift over time as the most antisocial men are less likely to survive and reproduce. Culture and coercion do not sit in separate boxes here. They interact.
You do not have to buy every part of that model to see why it has force. A society does not begin from zero every generation. It inherits habits, expectations, institutions, and distributions of temperament formed over long stretches of time. If Western Europe became unusually low in interpersonal violence by world-historical standards, that happened through a civilizing process measured in centuries, not slogans. It was produced by a long narrowing of the space in which violent men could operate, flourish, and reproduce themselves socially.
That last phrase matters because reproduction here is not only biological. Violent men reproduce disorder culturally as well. They shape neighborhoods, train younger males, normalize intimidation, degrade family life, and turn predation into a viable strategy. Once that ecology is established, disorder becomes self-reinforcing. The reverse is also true. When a state reliably incapacitates the worst predators, peace can become self-reinforcing too.
That is part of why modern examples like El Salvador draw so much attention. The cases are not equivalent, and they do not prove Frost and Harpending’s genetic hypothesis. What they do show is older and simpler: when a state decisively removes a violent criminal stratum from daily circulation, social peace can return with surprising speed. The IMF reported in 2025 that El Salvador’s homicide rate fell from 54 per 100,000 in 2018 to 1.8 in 2024, and tied the improvement in security to stronger growth, tourism, remittances, and investor confidence. Human Rights Watch, from the opposite moral angle, also reports a significant decline in gang violence while warning that restricted data access and changes in homicide counting complicate full independent verification. (IMF; HRW; AP)
That is where a serious reader has to keep both truths in view at once. El Salvador does not demonstrate multi-generational selection. It demonstrates the older principle that predators must be removed from circulation if ordinary life is to recover. At the same time, Human Rights Watch documents arbitrary detention, torture, ill-treatment, and deaths in custody under the state of exception. The rights costs are real. The case does not prove that every harsh regime is wise. It proves that liberal societies often flatter themselves about how peace is maintained. (HRW)
This is not an argument for population engineering or collective guilt. It is an argument for recognizing that a small fraction of high-rate violent offenders can do outsized damage, and that civilization depends on their incapacitation. Modern liberal societies are comfortable discussing prevention, rehabilitation, and root causes. They are much less comfortable discussing the incorrigible. But any serious civilization needs a theory of that minority and the will to act on it long enough for the peaceable majority to live normally.
That, in the end, is the value of Frost and Harpending’s paper. Not that it offers a final key to history. Not that every part of its model has been settled beyond dispute. It matters because it reopens a forbidden question: how much of social peace depends not merely on teaching better values, but on the long-term suppression of the people least fit for peaceful life? Even readers who reject the paper’s stronger selection claim should still feel the pressure of that deeper point. Order is not self-generating. It has to be maintained against people who would dissolve it if allowed.
Modern states, at their best, answer that problem more humanely than medieval ones did. They use prisons rather than gallows. They rely on due process rather than spectacle. Good. They should. But the softer method does not abolish the harder principle. Social peace depends on removing certain people from the field, sometimes for a very long time.
That is the truth buried beneath the discomfort here. Civilization is not sustained by kindness alone. It rests on a prior achievement: order strong enough to protect the peaceable from the predatory. Everything higher comes after that.
References
Peter Frost and Henry C. Harpending, “Western Europe, State Formation, and Genetic Pacification,” Evolutionary Psychology 13, no. 1 (2015). PubMed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25748943/ ; journal page: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/147470491501300114
International Monetary Fund, El Salvador: Request for Extended Arrangement Under the Extended Fund Facility (2025). IMF page: https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/002/2025/058/article-A001-en.xml ; PDF: https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/cr/2025/english/1slvea2025001-print-pdf.pdf
Human Rights Watch, “World Report 2026: El Salvador.” https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2026/country-chapters/el-salvador
Our World in Data, historical homicide materials drawing on Manuel Eisner’s data: https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/homicide-rates-have-declined-dramatically-over-the-centuries and https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homicide-rates-across-western-europe
Associated Press, “El Salvador closes 2024 with a record low number of homicides.” https://apnews.com/article/69384a8705267eaddd18dcd28a53465b
The idea that spanking is somehow a valid parenting practice is disturbing enough. What is more troubling is that people who practice spanking are likely to justify it within their own moral framework and not change their views on the subject.
“To find answers, I looked at violence across cultures and history with my colleague Alan Fiske of the University of California, Los Angeles. We analyzed records of all kinds of violence, ranging from war to torture to genocide to homicide. While this was rather depressing work, it also led to some very interesting findings. We identified a pattern in that violence that was both predictive and explanatory.
The commonality was that the primary motivations were moral. This means that the perpetrators of violence felt like what they are doing was morally right. In fact, when they were committing the act, they perceived that not acting would be morally wrong. It wasn’t about a breakdown in moral sensibilities, but more that their sense of morality was different. They viewed violence as the fundamentally right thing to do even if no one else could see any possible justification for it.
With this lens, let’s go back to that spanking scenario. A child disobeys his mother, who spanks him because she believes it is her duty to protect him from himself and ensure that he becomes a responsible adult. She sees it as her obligation as a parent.
Similarly, drill sergeants and gang leaders often haze new recruits, as they believe it is their duty to create lifelong bonds and instill obedience, which are required in battle. We can even see this mentality with terrorists. ISIL members believe they are morally justified and obligated to commit acts of terror, while US soldiers accept some loss of civilian lives to achieve the deaths of those terrorists. In all of these scenarios, the violent act is perceived by the perpetrator as virtuous. As details emerge about the California shootings, we will begin to see more about the shooters; whether they felt their violence was something they had an obligation to do, and if so, why.
The general pattern we saw in the cases we studied was that violence was intended to regulate social relationships and sustain a moral order. The perpetrators are in control of their actions—they know they are hurting fellow human beings, and that is exactly what they intend to do.”
–Tage Rai Lecturer, MIT Sloan School of Management
“Rape/revenge is replete in tension and bloody cathartic release; there is terrifying violation, and then there is revenge you can feel good about. The films use women’s trauma to justify stereotypically male pleasures of hyperbolic violence. So Thelma and Louise get to pick up guns and shoot people like they’re in a Western, while Furiosa drag races across the desert and then gets to murder and take the place of the evil patriarch. Rape/revenge fits feminism into male genre narratives that Hollywood can embrace.
…rape/revenge films are designed, often quite consciously, to let everyone in the audience experiment with, and experience, different gender roles, whether as trauma, empowerment, or both. That instability leads to a wide range of responses—and perhaps explains why rape/revenge is responsible for both some of the most critically lauded and most viscerally derided films of the last 40 years. For better and worse, the rape/revenge trope reveals how violence squats upon our understanding of gender—and how rarely, and timidly, that is confronted in popular culture.”
-Excerpts from the article by Noah Berlatsky found on The Establishment.
No one should have to live in fear. Death by airstrike, death by rocket. Same result. I cannot even imagine having to deal with every day life in Gaza, especially if I had children.
“I am used to the bombings, but my children are worried. So I have to keep reassuring them.” Explaining what is happening in the skies to children sometimes proves difficult for some Palestinian parents. “When my child becomes scared I try to pacify her,” said Yasir Fatih. “I tell her the noise is far away and it’s not dangerous. Or sometimes I tell her it’s not real, it’s a game.”
One hell of a bogeyman no?
Of course the situation is complex, of course there is aggression from both parties. The violence being perpetrated though, should not be thought as a war between equals. If there ever was a case of David vs Goliath it would be the situation of Hamas versus the IDF.
We have different labels for similar situations…this comment from DierYassin summarized nicely how varied the world stage is.
“Facing international opprobrium over apartheid, Pretoria angrily asked why the world was focusing on them when far more serious atrocities abounded elsewhere.
They boasted of the better living conditions of blacks under white rule. And of how they were a “beacon of civilization” in a backward continent surrounded by countries wanting their “destruction”. They labelled armed resistance as terrorism and gave blacks truncated enclaves ruled by powerless chieftains and called it self-determination.Sound familiar?
Ah, but we in North America are ardent supporters of Israel so obviously, this cannot be the case…
[Source]
I saw this quote on the Anti-Porn Feminists blog. Too good not to share.
I have seen a sixteen-year-old boy weeping in distress after getting a girl’s pube stuck in his teeth, I hear he was unshaven. I have seen boys showing each other porn on their iPhones on the train home from school, in bars and whilst strolling along the Champs-Elyséés. I have had a boy ask me to text him screenshots of porn films because he was on a wifi-free family holiday. One boy turned to kiss his date in the cinema but not before romantically whispering ‘don’t struggle’. One friend drunkenly walked off into a park in the early hours of the morning and when a male friend brought her back without ‘trying anything’, he was heralded as being ‘soo nice!’ rather than ‘soo normal!’. I have friends whose boyfriends have posted naked pictures of them all over the Internet. I have heard consent described as ‘de-romanticizing’. I have had a shockingly sober boy say to me ‘Why can’t I just slap my dick on your arse? Doesn’t cost you anything!’. This just scratches the surface of my store of depressing anecdotes; the most violent of which I won’t go into out of respect for the girls involved.
2014 is not a good year to be a teenage girl. The last of the 90’s kids are growing up and we are starting to see the effects of being raised with the Internet. For generations before us, hormonal teenage boys looking for sexy images of women had limited options; they could brave the embarrassment of going to the counter and buying Playboy, they could look through their sister’s Cosmo or they could use their imagination. Porn today has rid itself of the embarrassment-factor by embracing the anonymity of the World Wide Web; Playboy isn’t really considered to be porn anymore, the real stuff lives in your phone, on your laptop, your tablet; it is available anywhere, anytime at the touch of a button.
Violence, Teenagers, and Gonzo Porn, Clara Bennathan
“When I was about 20 years old, I met an old pastor’s wife who told me that when she was young and had her first child, she didn’t believe in striking children, although spanking kids with a switch pulled from a tree was standard punishment at the time. But one day, when her son was four or five, he did something that she felt warranted a spanking–the first in his life. She told him that he would have to go outside himself and find a switch for her to hit him with.
The boy was gone a long time. And when he came back in, he was crying. He said to her, “Mama, I couldn’t find a switch, but here’s a rock that you can throw at me.”
All of a sudden the mother understood how the situation felt from the child’s point of view: that if my mother wants to hurt me, then it makes no difference what she does it with; she might as well do it with a stone.
And the mother took the boy into her lap and they both cried. Then she laid the rock on a shelf in the kitchen to remind herself forever: never violence. And that is something I think everyone should keep in mind. Because if violence begins in the nursery one can raise children into violence”
— Astrid Lindgren, author of Pippi Longstocking, 1978 Peace Prize Acceptance Speech
Violence and child rearing should never intermingle. With the understanding we have of the correlations of violence at an early age with future behaviour, there are no excuses for beating your child. Not one.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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