For the last few hundred years, we have become increasingly less violent. Check out Steve Pinker’s book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, which includes numerous graphs showing the decline. If you have doubts, just think about what society was like in the Middle Ages. Slavery was accepted, people regularly engaged in duels, there were dozens of capital offenses, capital punishment included such practices as drawing and quartering, people were burnt as witches and you could be sent to debtor’s prison.

What processes have been taking place to cause violence to decline? There are several explanations that have been offered. Some have said that the rise of the state, with its police and courts, is a factor. Others point to the small world effect. Our increased transportation and communication abilities has enlarged our tribes. It has also been suggested that our increased learning and use of abstract reasoning is a factor. How else to account for laws protecting animals?

What you say is true, but the article was specifically aimed at sudden violent outbursts, not current social trends.
It seems reasonable to think we may be wired to protect our tribe. This could mean family, neighborhood, financial peers, home-school, etc., whatever we perceive to be our tribe.
I wonder if there could be a way to mentally/emotionally link tribes together, so humanity could feel protective of the human race against other threats, like pollution, disease, and hunger.
I agree that socially we have become less violent. Now though, can we become socially more tolerant, and friendly? If we could sudden outbursts would become evolved out of us, and end mass shootings, and most wars. Then we could turn our defenses against mental illness violence like rape and serial killings.

Tribalism is a very deeply ingrained feature of human psychology. I remember reading about several studies exploring tribalism in which subjects were divided randomly into groups and then put in situations that tested their partiality to members of their own group or those of the other group. Even though the only thing the subjects had in common with others in their group was that they had been assigned to that group, that fact alone was enough to create a tribal preference among its members. Imagine how much stronger that tribal impulse is when the basis for affiliation is more tangible.

Under low-stress conditions, tribal fault lines aren’t necessarily divisive. That’s why, for instance, we hear how members of different ethnic groups or religions peacefully coexisted as neighbors prior to some upheaval. But when placed under pressure these tribal fault lines fracture and people rally around the flag of their tribe.

This stuff is hard-wired into our brains and operates at a visceral level. We will always have it. The only recourse is to develop the higher level functions that we also have which can be aware of these tendencies, recognize what triggers them, and choose to act differently.

We would need to perceive a large enough threat to encompass the entire human species as a single “tribe”; thus the popularity of such movies as Independence Day

A pandemic or even climate change could fill the roll but they are faceless, soulless entities that are hard for most to view as an enemy.

It seems to me, that those tribal lines could be rearranged on a more meaningful, and more permanent level. I don’t imagine anything so extreme as pandemic or mass hypnosis would be necessary, but also, it could not be immediate.
@thorninmud , couldn’t those tribal lines be made more tangible? Suppose those same random groups were larger. Suppose they were given various criteria; how many have had or have cancer, how many have been involved in an auto accident, and how many have had to skip a meal when they were hungry and really want to eat? In a matter of five questions, I bet we could link 100% of a random group of a quarter million people. With questions of hard, personal significance, people could begin to perceive those lines differently.
I find this subject tantalizing, and I am pleased to know people have at least fiddled with understanding it better.

@Here2_4 We have mental functions that are concerned with differences and we have mental functions that are concerned with unity. We need both of those. Recognizing difference allows us to appreciate and put to use the variety of things and beings. Recognizing unity counterbalances the divisive potential of difference and awakens compassion and love.

Tribalism is what happens when difference has the ascendancy. That faculty of discrimination gets busy drawing dividing lines. It’s what we do when we feel threatened. Inside the line are those similar enough to us to not feel dangerous. But even once that tribe has been defined, the faculty of discrimination will continue to subdivide the tribe by yet other criteria. The culmination of that process is that we eventually become a tribe of one.

The faculty that recognizes unity is easily overpowered. It takes constant work to make it a vibrant influence in your life. It’s also not compatible with a self-serving point of view, because it blurs the distinction between self and other. This work and self-abnegation are not an easy sell. Some people do it. But it’s much easier to appeal to tribalism.