Human intuition is indeed so constituted to find that line of argument persuasive, but reality differs. Genghis Khan killed more people than Hitler (even in absolute numbers, let alone as a fraction of people alive at the time). The Mongol sack of Baghdad killed more people than the bombings of Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki all put together. Synthetic diseases add nothing to the picture; nature throws incurable diseases at us all the time. The 1918 flu killed more people in one year than all man’s ingenuity had done in four. If SARS hadn’t been stopped by quarantine, it would have killed more people than any human agency in history.
And yet the meme that individual power is the danger we must fear, may yet prove deadlier than all of those combined. No weapon, no disease, has by itself the power to extinguish the future. A sufficiently appealing and plausible sounding meme just might.
Here is one of the more conservative estimates, putting 40 million on Genghis Khan’s account, which suffices to establish the original claim. (The total for World War II is somewhat higher, but includes all theaters of the war—and is of course much smaller as a fraction of people alive at the time.) Higher end estimates are necessarily less precise, but I’ve seen it suggested that the Mongol invasion of China alone may have caused up to 60 million deaths (out of a total population of 120 million) once the famines resulting from disruption of agriculture are fully accounted for.
Human intuition is indeed so constituted to find that line of argument persuasive, but reality differs. Genghis Khan killed more people than Hitler (even in absolute numbers, let alone as a fraction of people alive at the time). The Mongol sack of Baghdad killed more people than the bombings of Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki all put together. Synthetic diseases add nothing to the picture; nature throws incurable diseases at us all the time. The 1918 flu killed more people in one year than all man’s ingenuity had done in four. If SARS hadn’t been stopped by quarantine, it would have killed more people than any human agency in history.
And yet the meme that individual power is the danger we must fear, may yet prove deadlier than all of those combined. No weapon, no disease, has by itself the power to extinguish the future. A sufficiently appealing and plausible sounding meme just might.
[citiation needed]
Here is one of the more conservative estimates, putting 40 million on Genghis Khan’s account, which suffices to establish the original claim. (The total for World War II is somewhat higher, but includes all theaters of the war—and is of course much smaller as a fraction of people alive at the time.) Higher end estimates are necessarily less precise, but I’ve seen it suggested that the Mongol invasion of China alone may have caused up to 60 million deaths (out of a total population of 120 million) once the famines resulting from disruption of agriculture are fully accounted for.
Thank you.