Rousseau was wrong..
Mary Madigan
Okay, this is not really news, but hopefully this will put a dent in the armour of politically correct anthropological revisionism:
Nicholas Wade is a science writer for the New York Times, who used to be as Politically Correct as anyone in that mob on 42nd Street. No longer. Wade has discovered the new anthropology, now informed by a radically improved understanding of the human genome. The new evidence is clearly explained in his recent book, Before the Dawn: Recovering the lost history of our ancestors. It looks at the deep human past --- tens to hundreds of thousands of years --- combining written records, archeology, anthropology and the human genome. The result is spectacular. If this book is any indication, Politically Correct history is a goner. Rousseau's Noble Savage is French toast.Or, as LibHawk Epa said, "we must recognize that Cambodia, [Srebrenica] and Rwanda are the signposts of what cannot be changed in the human character. THIS war is alive today, and has never left us, and apparently NEVER will. We will never eliminate this force."Wade presents compelling evidence that humans appear to be genetically predisposed to warfare. Among ancient hunter-gatherers, "incessant warfare" was the norm, just as it is today among the Stone Age tribes of New Guinea and South America. Humans have a long history of cannibalism, so much that we carry genes to guard against the toxic consequences of eating human flesh (similar to Mad Cow prion disease). Modern humans are less aggressive than our ancestors were. The very fact that we can live in mass societies at reasonable peace with each other is an extraordinary advance...
...Anthropologists have become famous by writing that cannibalism was just a slanderous lie invented by the West. It all fit the neo-racist myth of the White Man's Guilt --- as at Duke University. Such people peddle the myths of the peaceful Hopis and Bushmen, the Gandhi-esque Hindus, Buddhists and Sufis, and all the morally superior non-White cultures. (They somehow forget that Gandhi's independence movement led straight to four million ethnic killings during the Partition of 1948)....
Acknowledging human violence is not the same as excusing it. Just the opposite --- precisely because we have the capacity to destroy, we must be taught to act morally. That is the basic view of Western Civilization going back to the Code of Hammurabi. Civilized armed forces like the United States insist on high levels of restraint in their warfighters, even in the face of direct personal danger. But the civilized world is constantly faced with aggressive enemies willing to kill and die for some bizarre cause, from the heavenly glory of the Emperor to some Mullah's weird obsession with hanging sixteen year old girls who fall in love. Not to mention yet another Marxist scam to create a perfectly egalitarian paradise on earth, as is underway in Venezuela today.
One of the oddities of the Left is its constant sabotage of defensive warfare, even when the facts are as plain as the assault on the Twin Towers on 9/11. Today Europe is going through yet another revisionist version of its own bloody history, trying to deny the undeniable facts of the 20th century. Big German media like Stern and Der Spiegel loudly equate the American overthrow of Saddam Hussein with the war against Hitler. That version of history involves not just one but two Big Lies — One, that Saddam was an innocent victim of American aggression; and Two, that Hitler was, too. It's too weird for words. Let's hope they get over it - because if they don't, they could be setting the stage for yet another imperial adventure...
The Barbarians are always at the gate..
This is one of the reasons I refuse to feel bad about Europeans taking the America's from the so-called "natives." As if they were all just co-existing peacefully until those white barbarians arrived. Please.
Killing and taking from the weak is part of our genetic code. That we develop moral codes to restrain ourselves is the abberation. But, as history shows us, our restraint typically doesn't hold long.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
We only have problems when things are taken to extremes - too much violence, too much pacifism.
Some extreme interpretations of faith condemn as 'evil' sex or violence. The followers who live according to these laws tend to go the way of the Shakers.
"genetically predisposed to warfare" (particularly in the way Wade finds) is not even remotely the same thing as "inevitably at war."
Amazingly, in the last century or so, we have discovered how to do away with it. It's called the Democratic Peace Theory, and it is without question the best-tested, best-supported theory in Political Science--the strongest that the entire field has ever come up with.
For perhaps the first time on this blog, I'm going to have to agree with Vic here. I think the term "genetically predisposed to warfare" is inappropriate. There's nothing genetic about it -- it's part and parcel of being hunter-gatherers, which humanity was for most of its existence.
Hunting-gathering means man consumed resources provided by nature that he *found*. In that environment, violent competition for pre-existing resources is almost inevitable (the alternatives are famine, plague, or infanticide). But first agriculture -- and then the industrial revolution -- changed everything, for then man consumed resources that he *created*. War, famine, plague, and infanticide were still possible, of course, but no longer were inevitable.
This has nothing to do with race, ethnicity, or genetics. It's just economics.
(But it's still a good idea to dispel the myth of the noble savage.)
Mike
It would explain a lot.
Nonsense. Show me the evidence (because Wade's research does not, in fact, establish this). War is certainly something we find with regularity between human societies. But saying that it is the "natural state" of human beings is basically to say that peace is abnormal. This strikes me as being as silly as the idea that murder is the natural state of humanity: despite the fact that 90% of folks never murder anyone.
Being civil is hard work, it is not natural at all.
You're forgetting the balance. Aggression is a natural part of the human condition. But so is protection of the pack. We're PACK animals.
But even pack animals will turn on each other during times of extreme scarcity.
Human beings have the ability to control their base instincts. That is what separates us from beasts (and makes us something besides a savage). But that doesn't mean that everyone has the control to the same degree—some better, some worse, or that it is desirous to control the urge to protect your life and the life of your family/pack when it is threatened.
Rousseau [spit!]. Everything he wrote was crap and every philosophy that uses Rousseau as a base is also crap.
There is nothing noble about a savage. That's why we call it "savage."
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
The ideas known as Tabula rasa, Noble Savage, and the Innocent Child can all be safely classified under, "Pernicious Nonsense."
Add to that list the idea, currently in vogue, that "natural" equals "good." God, what crap.
We are savage by nature. Everything good and comfortable and safe about our existence today owes to our success at subverting nature, without (shelter, clothing, tools, etc) and within (rule of law, division of labor, freedom of trade, etc.). To pretend otherwise is foolish.
Name any ten year period in American history in which we did not have troops at war somewhere.
Prior to the blossoming of democracy all over Europe--democracies never go to war with each other, as we know now--name me any such period in European history.
Or African history.
Or Asian history.
I predict that you can't.
You want an end to war? There's only two methods I can think of that have ever worked reliably. "Non-violence" movements have failed far more often than they've succeeded, so that isn't one of the two.
A. Democracy. The Democratic Peace Theory is not an absolute "law" in the mechanical sense, but has built up such an impressive track record that it's hard to still claim coincidence.
B. Absolute, total genocide of one side of the combat, so they're not around to wage war any more.
If those are the choices, I'll choose A.
In my more metaphysical moments, I often get the feeling like the laws of the universe are set up in such a way that traditional values like a strong work ethic and the golden rule and charity toward the less fortunate seem to almost mathematically line up with the way the universe is structured. Now you may argue which is cause and which is effect: whether the wisdom of generations zeroed in on those values which happen to fit the nature of the universe, or whether the laws of the universe were created a certain way in hopes that we would behave in a certain way. I'm not the one who'se going to settle that question.
But this discussion thread and the recent Moore's Law thread inspire me to more of that sort of thinking. Looking at the historical track record, you could almost conclude that the world provides plenty for all, if we work together, but not enough for anybody if we fight over it; and that we as a species have spent the past couple of millenia slowly working out how to reach that plenty for all stage. It fits with the ideas of compound interest and positive feedback: if we invest in preserving and conserving, we build more infrastructure that can produce more, and we also support more human beings who can then solve more problems; but if instead we hoard and destroy, we both waste resources and lose people who might otherwise have contributed to our lives. The Democratic Peace Theory seems to say that
It's almost as if we're expected to try to figure that all out.
The Democratic Peace Theory seems to say that mature, modern democracies have reached a point where they recognize that collaborative competition gains both sides more than aggressive competition will.
This time, the bear will be replaced by a bearded, apologetic anthropologist saying, "And, yes, I'm afraid the Paleo-Indians wiped out the American aborigines."
Collaborative competion (or just plain cooperation) is a more effective survival tool than aggression.
Research shows that predators are better than prey at controlling their aggressive impulses towards each other. They have to deal with aggessive, violent impulses all the time, so they have to know how to deal with it. The more 'peaceful' herd animals don't have that skill.
I chose the phrase "collaborative competition" very carefully. I think it may be as important as cooperation, maybe moreso. We have a much greater caability than any other species to learn from the other guy's successes, and also to document our lessons learned for future generations. So I think that as long as the competition is nonaggressive, we gain a lot from it.
l0l0l0lll!!
sentient demcracies? the singuarity is aways with us. glad to see u r getting an inkling, mare.
that is why im an evocon.
better yet, read Pinker, not why is there war, but why is there ever peace?
I've always thought that violence and self-defense are an essential part of nature. That's the way it is and that's the way it should be.
But I don't have to tell you that - you're a Serenity fan too..
What's amusing is that anyone thinks that America has an absolute ruthless military domination. ;-)
Anyway, any look at history will show you that other approaches work so rarely that you can only think of a very few of them that ever worked.
As for the Democratic Peace Theory: why the theory works is still entirely open to analysis and dabate. That it works is, however, increasingly about as questionable as the theory of Natural Selection--i.e. not very questionable at all, and might as well be treated like a fact for all practical purposes. Which utterly infuriates some people, but that's the way the cookie crumbles.
Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.