To briefly comment again on the changing nature of human violent relations, I want to complicate that question by introducing a few additional interacting inflection points that might have some bearing on this evolution.
As earth shattering as the World Wars were, and as much as they profoundly changed the cultures, technologies, politics, and economics of the societies pulled into them, those wars necessarily took place upon a sprawling landscape of human history that extended centuries and then millennia into the past, depending on how high of a resolution and depth of a history you want to analyze.
And as we've explored before, behind a great transformation is a set of conditions making that transformation possible, and behind those conditions are multitudes of transformations in themselves. We're tempted to fixate on great transformations as distinct driving causes, but as one picks at all the other connecting causes, it becomes apparent that there is much more to the story. Indeed, the distinguishing of background and foreground requires perspective. But alas, as a large part of the nature of analysis is to focus, here we are, choosing yet again something to foreground.
One inflection point I wanted to touch on is particularly fascinating because of what it revealed about the shifting sensibilities and class relations at the time, in addition to what it revealed about the changing nature of human violence in a longer arc.
As Dan Carlin surveyed in his Hardcore History series, and as other historians have pointed out, there was a revolution in sensibilities in the 17th and 18th centuries which came with the emerging Enlightenment era and the ushering in of modernity, the implications of which were particularly pointed in the purpose, functions, and carrying out of capital punishment.
The class dimension and the uneven development of this revolution is especially interesting. We can take a quick jog back in history a bit to get a glimpse. Though the incredibly brutal and horrific torture executions of the Middle Ages were meant to deter would-be criminals, heretics, and dissidents, the executions also had a dramatic flair and narrative which was religiously coded to show that the victims were being publicly "saved" in the eyes of observers, communicating a sort of justice as part of the overarching religious life of the society.
The form of torture and execution would mirror the nature of the crime (eye for an eye, that sort of thing) and the terrible ordeal of the victim would absolve the sinner in the eyes of the judging crowd. These were profound spectacles that would completely engross the crowd, and it became apparent that the crowd would often bond with these victims and take part in a sort of spiritual - albeit terrible - shared experience.
Somewhere along the way however, this greater phenomenon would decay along with the strength and legitimacy of the prevailing regime. Authorities decoupling from those spiritual and religious codings would begin to question the utility of these collective experiences, and then fear them and the ruled peoples they were increasingly becoming alienated from, gutting the theatrical flourishes of the executions in favor of teasing out their deterring effects, taking on an increasingly utilitarian function and purpose.
The course of change was uneven. Authorities and intellectuals were becoming ever more irreligious and ideas of human nature were proliferating from an Enlightenment vision negating the religious ideal of the wicked and fallen "sinner," favoring a benevolent and good humanity, so that the witnessing mob - which itself was coarsening as the gutted executions became a more lurid and carnivalesque affair, and evermore unstable with an uneven mix of genuinely hated criminals and unjustly persecuted political martyrs - was cast in a fearful light: people shouldn't be enjoying this.
There was even a decay of the executioner class itself, with a dwindling supply of talented and competent executioners, leading to botched executions, which only fed the growing instability of the whole institution and the corresponding legitimacy of its masters. And as ruling class legitimacy waned, there grew a fear and distrust of the gathering mob.
Fascinatingly, authorities - doubting the value and purpose of worldly suffering - began to secretly mercy kill the torture execution victims before the execution was finished (subtle strangulations and pouches of gunpowder around the neck during burnings, for example), yet continuing to go through the motions of the execution to satisfy the diverging interests of the observing audience, many of which still enjoyed the spectacle, a sensibility considered coarse and lower class by the evolving intellectuals and upper crust at the time. Finally, these diminishing spectacles would begin to vanish altogether in the middle to late 1800's.
And as we noted, this change could be attributed to a multitude of political, technological, economic, and cultural changes going on in the background, all of which themselves could be endlessly analyzed, picked apart, and their interacting threads followed far into history.
Excess and decaying ruling class legitimacy (among many other forces) would feed into yet another important inflection point: the emerging modern world's distaste for slavery, itself a large and complex question worth books upon books of analysis. And the post grows long.
The horrors culminating in the Atlantic slave trade would bear all of the hallmarks of the process of industrialization that would ultimately unseat it as a mode of production: the labor shortages brought about in the New World due to the genocide of the indigenous populations, which were initially slated to labor over the raw material flows being fed into the rapidly industrializing West, would need to be supplanted with a substitute forced labor force, now a commodity, to be harvested from the African continent.
The circle of that emergent ideal of universal human worth and rights would need to be squared with this peculiar institutional arrangement, and ultimately it wasn't going to happen. A ragged and unfinished collapse would take place, and along the way the contradictions would erupt in the Haitian slave revolt, culminating in the 1861 to 1865 American civil war. There's much more to say on this subject, but I'll have to set it aside for the moment.
Would the toxic legacies of such atrocities eventually be completely reversed? Here in the quiet of sustained reflection, we certainly know better. Though the course of human history would be dramatically altered, continuing to do so today, and the consequences of our species' long record of violent domination would shape the form that course takes.
At least the evil doesn't have a shelf life any longer than that of the good, change being the only constant. And these many transformations would form the landscape that the experiences of the great wars would take part on. Violence and subjugation - though an integral part of the human experience - would be seen radically differently by the postwar world.
