On a per capita basis, we're much, much less violent than societies of the past.You can put your own constraints on this argument. 2 BC, 200 BC, 100 AD... What are your thoughts? Were ancient people less or more violent than humans today? Was a larger percentage of the total population being killed and raped then or today?
Is civilization getting more violent or less violent?
I'd have to dig to find it again, but there's a Stephen Pinker lecture from a few years ago (from when "the past century" still included WWI) where summarized some of his book Better Angels of our Nature and made the case that in the past century, on average, people were less likely to die by violence than in any previous century... all despite WWI, WWII, many smaller wars, the Holocaust, the Rwandan Genocide, the Armenian Genocide, etc.