May 25, 2024 3 min read

The first Memorial Day was commemorated on May 30, 1868, just a little more than three years after the end of the Civil War. The scars left by the war still ran deep – between the Union and the Confederate states, 620,000 combatants lost their lives. In the early 1860s, that was a full 2% of the entire population. To put that in perspective, if 2% of today’s U.S. population perished in war, that would be 6.5 million people.

Memorial Day is a distinctly American holiday, but other countries have their own versions of it. Ireland has a day to commemorate its war dead in July, Britain, Australia, Canada and other countries mark Remembrance Day on Nov. 11, the anniversary of the end of World War I, and the Netherlands had its own day of remembrance earlier this month. It seems to be in our nature, no matter the society in which we live, to remember lives lost in war.

There has been a debate raging in recent years about whether humanity is innately warlike and whether we are, in fact, becoming less warlike as our societies become more sophisticated and interconnected. Certainly when you compare our world to the first half of the 20th century, we are in a much, much better place. World War I and World War II claimed almost 522,000 American lives between the two of them and more than 100 million people around the world. The 20th century also had hosts of relatively smaller conflicts, ranging from the United States’ engagements in Korea and Vietnam to a whole menu of uprisings, revolutions and interventions affecting every continent on the planet.

So far, in the 21st century, estimates have it that about 4 million people around the world have died as a result of war. If that pace would hold steady until 2099, about 16 million people would perish in armed conflict, which is still a pretty grim number, but not anywhere close to the 20th century’s even grimmer tally of more than 180 million deaths worldwide.

Researchers believe that increased trade between nations, economic development, increased literacy and the spread of women’s rights and democracy have played a role in reducing wars. Steve Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard and the author of “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined,” had this to say in a 2011 interview with The Guardian: “The fact that violence is so pervasive in history, but nonetheless can be brought down, tells us that human nature includes both inclinations toward violence and inclinations toward peace – what (Abraham) Lincoln called ‘the better angels of our nature’ – and that historical changes have increasingly favored our better angels.”

Maybe Pinker is being optimistic, but let’s hope our “better angels” prevent more of the young people in our armed forces from having to be mourned on future Memorial Days.