This question surfaces anew every several years. Certainly, the advent – now there’s a perversion of the word – of nuclear weapons, despite all their challenges, seems to have placed great-power wars on hold. But Joshua S. Goldstein and Steven Pinker assert in Sunday’s New York Times that even smaller-bore wars are going the way of flamethrowers:
Perhaps the deepest cause of the waning of war is a growing repugnance toward institutionalized violence. Brutal customs that were commonplace for millennia have been largely abolished: cannibalism, human sacrifice, heretic-burning, chattel slavery, punitive mutilation, sadistic executions. Could war really be going the way of slave auctions? Nothing in our nature rules it out.
In any event, it’s something worth bringing up at the holiday dinner table if conversation lags.