Historical Psychology

Data about the victims of social violence in different cultures and historical epochs are provided by wars, political repressions, and everyday violence. Rough calculations demonstrate that while demographic densities and the technical capacity for mutual destruction have increased throughout the millennia, the violent death rate - the quantity of deliberate killings per capita per time unit - has been decreasing. The resulting downward trend appears highly non-linear, dramatic, and mediated by man-made catastrophes, but still, in the long term, progressive. Obviously, some perfecting mechanism of cultural aggression-retention has compensated for technological developments; among those mechanisms was economic development. This issue is explored using the pattern of techno-humanitarian balance.