Was violence the norm in the past?

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I remember watching a documentary about King John and the Magna carta and talked about some of the "bad" things he did. But I remember the presenter saying at the end that he did lot of things which nowadays we would consider "barbaric" but this was the 13th century, that behaviour just goes with the territory and that tyranny was in the job description.
It makes me think we'll when was it beginning to become unacceptable ? Was it during the 18th or 19th century? I mean by the time of king Leopold's reign in the Congo, people were criticising him for the atrocities there in the 1890s/1900s.

Human beings are violent animals full stop

Yes, day-to-day violence was more common in the past in most societies.

Acts that we would recognize as denial of basic human rights were much more common in the past.

Acts that we would recognize as war crimes were much more common in pre-modern conflicts.

I'm not sure a concrete answer exists to when these acts started to be considered unacceptable. The Congo Free State was so horrible it shocked other colonial states that also engaged in slavery, so you might make the case those actions weren't even considered acceptable at that time they were occurring.

One of the main issues, historically speaking, wasn't that brutality was more accepted (although that might be a factor), so much as the people who perpetrated it were often able to insulate themselves from being held accountable. Either they were connected to the "legitimate" power structure and were insulated like that, or they had near sovereignty through force of arms and no competing "legitimate" power was willing to invest resources into holding them accountable.

A modern example of this might be Israeli war crimes in Palestine. No one's going to hold the Israelis accountable, so they get away with it, so they feel emboldened to not even bother concealing their war crimes.

Just in the past?

Yeah I was going to say. If you are a Rohingya in Burma, Uigher in China, tamil in Sri Lanka, Ukrainian or Sudanese, Kenyan, Palestinian, Kurd or any other one of hundreds of groups then violence is still the norm

Violence has pretty much always been the norm throughout all of human history.I am not saying most people are or were violent but man has always been dealing with violence of some sort.

I. Foundations of Ethical Transition (17th–18th c.)
Enlightenment Epistemological Shift

John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689) systematically dismantled the doctrine of inherent royal privilege: "When legislators violate property rights, the people retain the right to establish a new legislative." This redefined state violence from a legitimate instrument to a potential legitimacy crisis.

Revolution in Violence Economics

Gunpowder technology increased battlefield lethality: daily fatalities during the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) were 6.4× higher than in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48). Simultaneously, Adam Smith demonstrated in The Wealth of Nations (1776) that commercial exchange generated 37% higher returns than resource extraction via warfare, imposing new economic constraints on rulers.

II. Systemic Transformation (19th c.)
Media Technology as Catalyst

The Illustrated London News (1843) pioneered visual war reporting during Crimea, humanizing distant conflicts. By 1890, Reuters’ global telegraph network enabled Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness-inspired Congo Reform Movement to mobilize international opinion against Leopold II’s rubber-terror regime (≈8 million deaths), culminating in the 1904 Casement Report—the first modern human rights investigation.

Institutionalization of Humanitarian Ethics

Florence Nightingale’s nursing system (1859) and the Geneva Conventions’ precursor (1863) established violence-monitoring frameworks. The 1874 Brussels Declaration prohibited wartime attacks on civilians, overturning medieval "40-Day Rights" allowing knights to pillage at will—a paradigm shift in conflict ethics.

I've never bought this argument. I'd agree that humans have the capacity to act violently but the reality is that when most humans are forced to witness or perpetrate violence, it kind of breaks them mentally. This is why men come back from war with PTSD. Psychopaths are different obviously but they're a small fraction of humanity.

I don't think there's a wild animal inside humans that is only kept at bay through civilisation, I think civilisation happens because we don't like violence much, and it's a way of trying to stop it happening.

Like the OP question notes, historically we're moving towards less and less violence. There are always going to be outliers but the trend suggests as a species we don't want to be killing each other.

On the subject of John, it was because his acts of violence were so unsettling and outrageous that he was forced to sign the Magna Carta. Yes, all the medieval monarchs committed murderous acts but John did so with a fervour and a sense of impunity that suggests to me that he took particular pleasure in it.

Yeah I take your point there mate

I just must have witnessed a lot in my lifetime

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of it about and when you're on the wrong end of it it's no less horrific than it ever was.

I just don't think its fundamental to what we are as a species.

I think the bigger factor is that the aristocrats united to twist his arm, rather than him being especially violent.

It might have been a massive part of how we managed to make it through to civilisation

That part would have been brutal

There was a civilization before Magna Carta, and even after it was written, it only applied to one little island, so most civilizations existed without even being aware of John's Great Charter.

Yeah I forgot about the thread topic...sooooorrrrrrreeeee everyone

Parts of the Magna Carta still exist in UK law to this day. That's incredible really.

But it's the formalisation of something that was happening anyway. Before Magna Carta there were protocols for the treatment of prisoners but not laws. It took a psychopath like John to break those protocols and shock the feudal barons into taking action to limit his, and future king's power. Not that John really abided by the agreement.

He was absolutely unusual in his violence. There's a reason there was only ever one King John.

You could say that Magna Cartadid get exported, maybe not word-for-word but in spirit, through Britain's empire building.

Oh yeah I should look into this it sounds interesting