Violence is not a human invention, but the dream of ending it is. Social schemes whose inventors were certain they'd end violence have all been failures. Anarchists of the 19th century felt man was essentially good, but the oppressive power of monarchies, corporations, and states had twisted him toward greed, exploitation and murder. Eradicate the kings, presidents and parliaments, and human evil would melt away. Men would embrace each other in the clear new day of a sunny utopia. But the anarchist dream resulted in the thing it was designed to eradicate: violence.

Anarchist assassins killed a czar, and a Romanian queen. The czar was a ruler of a liberal bent who had actually freed Russia's serfs. The queen was a harmless romantic lost in a fantasy world of novels.

A rival group for control of the dream of peace was the Marxists. They, too, knew how violence could be ended. War and killing were products of capitalism. Wipe away the capitalist structure and battles between men would disappear.

In 1917, when WWI was chewing up the bodies of Russians, Germans, Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Americans Russian Marxists knew the one sure way to end the war: topple the capitalists structure in their homeland. The workers of Germany, England and France, seeing the Russian example, would also throw off the capitalist yoke. A world ruled by workers would have no need for war.

But the Marxist triumph in St. Petersburg and Moscow did not end the war. And the state that destroyed capitalism did not become a beacon for peace. It became a new model for militarism. It would cultivate the largest standing army in the world, and encourage violence in one country after another, fostering an altogether unaccustomed degree of military absorption. Marxist states from East Germany to Cuba and Nicaragua would sport the highest percentages of citizens in arms and the highest proportion of spending on military hardware in the world. The philosophy that would banish violence from the earth was reduced to teaching its children to count with pictures of soldiers holding submachine guns.

But despite the new forms of violence in the 21st Century--suicide bombings, wireless-and-world-wide-webbed armies of urban terrorists, invasions, and mass murder over diamonds-- there are hints that peace is evolving among us. If we are lucky, we can already see its faint outlines. Long before the dawn of the Third Millennium, Margaret Mead observed that in the past men felt killing was taboo in a small group of 50, but legitimate everywhere else. By the 1970s, she pointed out, the taboo extended to tribes as large as 235 million. Unfortunately, most of those modern hyper-extended tribes--nations and movements--had been created in blood.

Violence was the basic tool of life's old learning device. It was based on the utter disposability of the world's creatures. The new learning mechanism, intelligence, the meme, puts a premium on life. Knowledge only belongs to those who can survive for decades and beyond. Death in a knowledge society kills off invaluable wisdom. The further we move toward bigness, knowledge, and the meme, the farther we will hopefully move away from nature's ancient violent course.

But we must move carefully. The first attempts to build intellect-driven states have been a failure, showing how our current knowledge is filled with ignorance. The Marxist states of the 20th Century assumed that a few well-trained minds could make all the decisions. In Russia, this approach numbed its citizens' creativity, produced extraordinary rates of alcoholism, shortened life spans, drove up rates of infant mortality and suppressed the complex dynamical system--the battle of ideas that makes human society a learning machine. The ultimate knowledge society will hopefully not be a society where all the understanding resides in a few brains at the top, dictating to a politically lobotomized mass. It will hopefully be a society where the maximum knowledge is in the minds of the largest number of constituent brains. And a society whose knowledge goes further than the thin depth of intellect.

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