Reddit reviews War! What Is It Good For?: Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots

This is a legitimate area of study, and not for nothing. Conflict can ultimately result in a net positive to society as a whole even though it may be devastating to individual communities. It's an apt example for questioning one's support or denial of utilitarianism.

Edit: Apt is the more apt word in this case.

Edit 2: I'm in the middle of applying for jobs so I'm not going to get into the nitty gritty. It's just something that I studied while I was getting my anthro degree as we had several classes on war and disaster. Here is another source for anyone interested, which includes a link to the paper said researchers wrote. I'll leave it at that--back to it for me.

https://www.amazon.com/War-What-Good-Conflict-Civilization/dp/0374286000 is an interesting book (I hope I'm linking the right one).

It argues that every major disaster has been replaced by an era that is less violent than the era that preceded that disaster, with WW2 as the most recent example.

It is a bit short on explanations, but as always, all you can do is speculate since there is no way to test different hypothesis.

You might feel that way. I get how easy it is to emotionally not like the big bad evil empire. It is easy to hate Rome. But life under the empire was better than life out of it.

It is the same today. I don't care what you feel, the world is safer now and less violent. It might not feel like that, but it is.

http://www.amazon.com/War-What-Good-For-Civilization/dp/0374286000

That book changed my view on it.

So, clearly nobody commenting and blindly up-voting realizes this is just an except from this book by a Stanford classics professor. Here's a good summary instead of a picture with an incendiary headline, and here's an excerpt from that summary (just read the summary) so you can see that this is actually a non-fiction history book... It's frankly embarrassing that this is being up-voted.
>In the Stone Age, humans were a rough lot. When people 10,000 years ago disagreed, they usually solved their arguments without violence; but when they did decide to use force, they faced far fewer constraints than the citizens of functioning modern states. Violence was normally on a small scale, in homicides, vendettas, and raids, but because populations were also tiny, the steady drip of killing took an appalling toll. By many estimates, 10 to 20% of Stone Age humans died at other people's hands.If we fast-forward to the 20th century, we see a stunning contrast. The century suffered world wars, genocides, and nuclear attacks, not to mention civil strife, riots, and murders. Altogether, we killed a staggering 100-200 million of our own kind. But between 1900 and 2000, roughly 10 billion lives were lived -- meaning that just 1-2% of the world's population died violently.
So if you were lucky enough to be born in the 20th century, your risk of dying violently was just one-tenth of that in the Stone Age; and since 2000, the United Nations tells us, the risk of violent death has fallen even further, to 0.7%.
These are astonishing statistics, but the explanation is more astonishing still. In perhaps the greatest paradox in history, what made the world safer was war itself.
What happened, it seems, is that starting about 10,000 years ago, the winners of wars began incorporating the losers into larger societies. The victors then found that the only way to make these larger societies work was by developing stronger governments; and one of the first things these governments had to do, if they wanted to stay in power, was suppress violence among their subjects. he men who ran these governments cracked down on killing not because they were saints, but because well-behaved subjects were easier to govern and tax than angry, murderous ones. States that suppressed violence within their borders tended to grow; those that did not, tended to fail.
War is surely the worst possible way to create larger, more peaceful societies, but the depressing truth is that it seems to be pretty much the only way people have found.