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A nation-state is a political unit where the state and nation are congruent. It is a more precise concept than "country", since a country does not need to have a predominant ethnic group.
Posts: 14801
Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC
RE: The pros and cons of the Nation ... (in reply to estebanana)
Well, since we are not permitted by the bully “state of This banana” to discuss the ethics of supposedly “ingenious violent war tactics that turn the tide!” In the other thread, I will take the bait over here to respond to the quote…so that the other place can remain a pristine beautiful discussion of great moments of WWII.
quote:
The "innate violence" crowd points to chimpanzees and says that since chimps are also war-like, our common ancestor must've been too, so we must have been like that at least for the last however long it has been since our lineages split (6 or 7 million years IIRC?). The argument falls apart of course as soon as you take the bonobo into account.
So in that kind of context, how do we figure out if war is indeed innate or if it's just a product of the kind of social structures we've set up? In the absence of a clear answer on that, personally I'd rather invest my efforts on social engineering rather than biological...
While we “aren’t chimps”, I did see the discussion about their violent behavior and there is an important element you missed there with the analogy. The chimps are NOT violent until they have reached a specific population discrepancy between communities. Specifically, they don’t do anything violent until they have reached the size of 8 to 1, and this is because they can’t be sure to “win” a “war” without these numbers. Why? Because they need 4 to hold the arms and legs of a single male, while the others do the killing part. Here is a description at 47:11
(If you watch that toward the end they mention brain size and aggression…correlations between domestic animals vs wild counter parts, bonobos and chimps, and even Human brains have decreased over time, and it correlates to less aggressive behavior). I think it is very safe to say, regarding humans, it is “innate”, and might even be related to this population thing, though, the human allowing for losses in war means they are orders of magnitude “less intelligent” than the chimps when it comes to war (estebanan example of “ingenious tactics” as a case in point ).
So with THAT, how can you possibly think advocating for “social engineering” vs biological would be a BETTER solution? What sort of social engineering has not yet been tried? Power corrupts, as even chimps show us, that is the bottom line. Only bio engineering could possibly eliminate this reality.
RE: The pros and cons of the Nation ... (in reply to estebanana)
Ricardo,
Bullying is when a person with a power advantage lords it over a weaker person that they have a power advantage. I did no such thing. I simply out smarted a person with my same amount of power and they reacted by saying the power dynamic is asymmetrical in my favor. In reality it’s not. Carry on.
RE: The pros and cons of the Nation ... (in reply to estebanana)
quote:
Bullying is when a person with a power advantage lords it over a weaker person that they have a power advantage. I did no such thing.
Sure you did; you think you are very clever with your definition, but even with such wording, your 'power advantage' comes from being willing to cross lines the other person is not willing to cross (not because they can't but because they won't). Not very many people want to deal with someone they perceive as a jerk when they have the option of not doing so.
RE: The pros and cons of the Nation ... (in reply to kitarist)
quote:
ORIGINAL: kitarist
quote:
Bullying is when a person with a power advantage lords it over a weaker person that they have a power advantage. I did no such thing.
Sure you did; you think you are very clever with your definition, but even with such wording, your 'power advantage' comes from being willing to cross lines the other person is not willing to cross (not because they can't but because they won't). Not very many people want to deal with someone they perceive as a jerk when they have the option of not doing so.
Touché
Feel free to trash me here as much as you like. It’s not bullying, I asked them to stop misconstruing my intentions, I asked nicely for them to stop talking about nation states and murderers. I requested in as reasonable manner for the subject I wanted to talk about to stay within a boundary. When my requests were ignored I played with the definition of nation states.
RE: The pros and cons of the Nation ... (in reply to estebanana)
But I don't want to 'trash' you (just sometimes your arguments if I think they are 'garbage'). And what I wrote was just my opinion. Perhaps I should not have opined, but there you go.
Sorry in advance for how long this is. Kind of late and I haven't really organised my thoughts so just putting it out there on the spot (too tired to add them but just imagine I put a bunch of caveats in there like maybe, I think, possibly, etc. ^^):
Wrangham's observations are mostly based on the chimps in Jane Goodall's sanctuary. Goodall struggled with the data she gathered because there was a marked shift in the chimps' behavior. For years the chimps were largely peaceful, then in quick succession they became violent, and stayed violent. She noted that the change had occurred fairly shortly after she had started to feed them. Not only did the size of the group drastically increase, but many of the chimps started to spend a lot more time around the feeding area just bumming around with fùck-all to do. If anything, the facile interpretation of what happened there is just fodder for right-wingers and libertarians who take exception to providing any kind of assistance to the unemployed. ^^
I'm not entirely sure why Wrangham assumes the turn to violence is about costs and just being sure you have enough dudes to kill the other guy without incurring any losses. It's not a crazy idea, for sure, but it's just one among others. It's not clear to me at all that the size of the group was the causal factor there. The fact of the matter is that there was outside intervention that caused them to change their behavior.
Don't want this to come off as an ad hominem, but Wrangham has also been known to play a little bit fast-and-loose with the observations in order to bolster his case. For instance in the past he has counted as intra-species killings cases where they simply have no idea how the chimp died (in one case a very old chimp, far past their usual life expectancy, and nobody saw who or what, if anything, killed him, but he just assumes he was murdered by other chimps) and even cases of disappearances (and in one case the chimp popped up a few years later, very much alive... ^^). There are also significant discrepancies in his portrayal of certain attacks compared to the original observations made by Goodall, with his portrayal being markedly more violent.
Even if we accept his interpretation of the facts, it remains the case that what we're going off of, for both chimps and bonobos, is essentially just a half century of observations in a situation where their environment has been heavily influenced by human encroachment. To jump from that to "the common ancestor of humans and chimps must've been violent too, and it must be genetic" is quite a leap, one that I don't think is reasonable to make. The same is true of concluding that our common ancestor wasn't violent. Both are leaps of faith, at least in my book.
Note that there's a parallel within human groups as well. When Chagnon popularized the now infamous Yanomamo (Yamomano? Yamanamo? fck I can never remember that one lol), there were quite a few scholars defending the idea that their unusual level of violence was the product of state expansion and the pressure it created on them. It's equally difficult to draw any conclusions from the few non-violent cultures around today. Most of them live in some kind of symbiosis with larger, more violent cultures (think Amish or Pygmies).
So using modern-day examples, in a context that is largely influenced by a particular social system, I don't think it's warranted to use those examples as proof of what our ancestors were like.
What we do have is DNA evidence, which provides some interesting insights that you can then correlate with the archaeological record, but per se it doesn't really allow us to know what caused certain lineages to prevail over others, and then we have the historical and archaeological record, which points to a much wider diversity of social structures than what we have today. But the archaeological record is fragmentary, so even there it's hard to know how common X or Y types of societies really were and how violent they were.
Speaking of population size, Enlightenment thinkers introduced various models that essentially put agriculture as the necessary component for large groups to come together. In many ways that line of reasoning is still popular (prevailing even?) today. You have your hunter-gatherers in small groups, then farmers in larger groups. Farmers started to produce surplus, and that surplus then gave rise to sedentarism, private property, trade and the whole shebang. Something like that anyway. And of course they were to be seen as a hierarchical chain, with farmers superior to hunter-gathers, etc. and the implication was that hunter-gatherers were not farmers simply because they did not have the know-how. "They would've if they could've". You have to wait a long time (up until Levi-Strauss?) for people to start thinking "maybe they could've but chose not to". A bunch of Neolithic Ian Malcoms telling us we were so preoccupied with whether we could, we didn't stop to think if we should. ^^
The historical and archaeological records we have now paint a more complicated picture. Some groups of "hunter-gatherers" are thought to have united to farm during one season with a kind of least-effort let-nature-do-most-of-the-work approach, then buggered off to forage or hunt on their own for the rest of the year. As late as the beginning of European exploration/colonization, there were indigenous groups in North America that did the same with hunting, and their social structure changed accordingly: united and hierarchical during the hunt, then everyone buggers off on their own and does their own thing for the rest of the year. Some had no law enforcement. Some had slaves. Some had private property but only for religious artifacts, while others would hoard anything and everything to increase their social status. In fact there's one line of reasoning according to which the moment violence really started to take off was with the introduction of private property. In short: one hot mess of diversity. But the interesting part is that the picture that is emerging in many areas of the world is not of isolated tribes disconnected from or at war with one another, but rather of vast networks sometimes spanning half a continent, of sometimes loosely, sometimes tightly, connected groups. What they had that we don't IMHO is flexibility. Population size? When? In January or in June? We're so used to having permanent social structures that we wouldn't even know how to begin to parse that.
Focusing on seasonality just because that's what I brought up in the other thread, but I think there's really something to that. My suggestion to rotate veto rights at the UNSC would probably be seen as unrealistic, if not outright mad, by most diplomats and officials. Why? Outside of the state model we see plenty of groups that do just that. It's smart. There's no particular reason to believe it's not scalable to larger societies. The principle is the same: everyone has an agenda, and by ensuring that everyone gets to rule at some point, that incentivizes you to not abuse your position of power when you're the one ruling, for fear that they'll do the same come their turn. You say power corrupts. That might be true. Hence why we should look at all the different ways we can keep that power from ossifying into the same hands. What sort of social engineering has not yet been tried? I don't know. What I do know is that most of the forms that have been tried don't exist anymore and we just don't know how successful they were in promoting peace. Maybe the fact that we're the only game in town now means that our models are better. Or maybe it just means that we took a wrong turn somewhere and screwed everything up.
The point of contention here is whether violence is innate or not. You think it's safe to assume that it is. I don't. I have no idea whether it's innate or not. My hunch would be that it's not, but I have no idea. If it's not innate, then no matter what kind of biological engineering you do, you should still expect war to arise if the social structure of the time is conducive to it. The reasons for war may be different from what they are today, but there would be war nonetheless. And if it is innate, first we'd have to figure out what exactly that means, and second, assuming it's even theoretically possible, the kind of biological engineering you have in mind is a long ways off so it would still be beneficial to investigate and maybe try new or lost social solutions, even if only partial and temporary.
Last point just coz Peterson is the interviewer so it's a good occasion to lay out this question: are these theories of innate violence so popular because they are firmly backed by the evidence, or is it because they fit nicely with (and reinforce) certain traditional cultural narratives (like Christianity's Fall of Man myth, etc.)? It's at least something to be cautious of...
@estebanana Funny thing is, while you thought there was some kind of thrilling battle of wits going on in your thread, at the end of which you "outsmarted" me (congratulations I guess? I mean, you were playing on your own, but still, well done, well done), really I just hadn't noticed you really didn't want me to talk about those ethical issues in that thread. You were far less explicit than you think you were. I see now that you have a post saying your point had been glossed over. In other circumstances I'd apologize, but here no, not gonna happen. You know why I didn't pick up on it? Because it has happened so often to me with the inevitable drift to US-centric political issues that I've internalized it as normal and don't even notice when it happens anymore. Being ignored in your own thread? Yeah, totally normal to me now. But back when I voiced those concerns and suggested as a possible solution to just open a separate thread for US politics to avoid being glossed over all the time (essentially the exact same solution you came up with here), you blew a gasket, called me anti-American (lol) and said it was perfectly normal for you to disrupt threads to discuss US politics because you're in the majority on this forum (no asymmetry my a--). Then you got even more gratuitously vindictive (against what exactly? beats me. I had literally proposed the exact same thing you did here) by labelling all of your posts with an "anglo warning" label for weeks if not months. I suspect the LoTR one was particularly vindictive, but I'm willing to play the fool and act like it was just an unfortunate alignment of the stars. As far as bullying goes, this is what I said:
quote:
The "humor" is just meant to conceal the fact that you routinely do the same thing you're complaining about me doing here. Just the usual bullying tactics that far-right trolls have been using on the internet for decades in order to divert attention from legitimate criticism.
and I stand by it. The "but you have no sense of humor" schtick is a typical tactic of far-right trolls on the internet to disrupt and bully into silence and pass it off as "humor". If you took that to refer to more than just the particular use of "humor" you made in your post, that's your call. I'm not opining either way. But anyway, I don't care to discuss this any further, nor will I. Since you suddenly care about not disrupting threads from their original topic, how about we leave this one for the topic it was intended for?
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"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
The point of contention here is whether violence is innate or not
if you assume that ultimately the point of life is to survive, wouldn't "violence" just be another means of survival? eg if it's down to just you and me and there's only one piece of chicken left -- you ain't gonna get that chicken
RE: The pros and cons of the Nation ... (in reply to estebanana)
This is really tedious-
Here is my point-
When talking about the history or storylines from war, most reasonable people take the tragedy, destruction and the loss of life as ‘a priori’ - it’s a given in the subject matter. What I found tedious is that I had to do two pages of explaining my positions on this issue that most people think, ok this guy isn’t trying to hate anyone or has the emotional intelligence to see war is hell, let’s get on with the story. Instead I was challenged from several directions by different participants ( called some wicked names) and eventually after patiently explaining that I get the idea ‘war is bad’ I got tired of explaining.
So debating and discussing the validity and problems with the international system of nation states is quite a far off topic from the technical aspects of ‘skip’ bombing a dam. A reasonable person would see these topics as very distinct and far from each other in content and context.
Thanks for bringing your conversation to a separate thread, which is a common moderator tactic, to begin a new thread for an ever expanding topic. One person starts a topic, it begins to mushroom into a variant of the topic that sufficiently diverges from the original topic, that deserves a new thread format. This is a common tool moderators use to keep topics from going ridiculously meta.
Now this is great because I now have my own ‘Banana Republic’ thread and all the monkey talk is here. It’s perfect in my view. And you know what, the real moderator here didn’t call a foul on my tactics, so it’s legal. Whether you like my tactics or not, I have no opinion either way. It is what it is.
Next time a topic gets off topic to the point it’s making someone disgruntled, try starting a new separate topic instead of forcing your will on a topic that doesn’t need the impact. That’s what I’ve done after complaints that I forced my views on past threads. There’s a reasonable limit to how far off topic a thread can be bent before it gets refocused. If the topic is trash or something then why not take it to an interesting place? But my topic wasn’t trash, it was well proposed and supported by my tries at taking the off topic parts with a modicum of thought.
Start more topics if you have things to say. It’d be much better than lumping your whole ennui into one gargantuan topic.
Carry on, and I’m not going to respond to anything further.
You say power corrupts. That might be true. Hence why we should look at all the different ways we can keep that power from ossifying into the same hands. What sort of social engineering has not yet been tried? I don't know. What I do know is that most of the forms that have been tried don't exist anymore and we just don't know how successful they were in promoting peace. Maybe the fact that we're the only game in town now means that our models are better. Or maybe it just means that we took a wrong turn somewhere and screwed everything up.
The point of contention here is whether violence is innate or not. You think it's safe to assume that it is. I don't. I have no idea whether it's innate or not.
So you brought up the chimp thing, so I was going based on that guy and his discussion about it. He seemed credible at the time and his language implies there is a field of chimp research and study ie, a chimp research community, so I had no reason to doubt the conclusions (that he presents as fairly wide spread, not personal). So if you say there is other literature that claims this guy is making erroneous interpretations, I would be interested in checking out at least one of those sources. Otherwise I have to take your word for it. I admit the interviewer has a clear political agenda, but that is beside the point of interpreting the observations of “warlike” activity of those animals. There was also the brain size thing. Any info is welcome.
Beyond that, the rest of your point is basically a big “we don’t know anything at all, not a clue”….which I think can’t be right. If everything is a “maybe”, then there is no basis for even trying xyz social engineering anything. The aggression thing is not universal anyway, the issue is there will always be that minority that gains power and wants to act with aggression once they can, regardless if that motivation was conditioned via abuse, or genetic disposition. And the genetic intervention I pointed to is only on the back burner for ethical reasons now. There is a lot we COULD do for humanity if it were universally acknowledged as beneficial….but we are still stuck on the “beauty” of our faults presently.
if it's down to just you and me and there's only one piece of chicken left -- you ain't gonna get that chicken
Then there is the self sacrifice where you let the other person (especially a loved one) have the one piece so that they may survive. Which one is the “innate” characteristic? “Women and children first”. When is society going to treat woman and children as equals to men?
You can have the chicken. But if I later on I get so hungry that I start thinking you kind of look like a chicken and I wonder what you would taste like, whatever happens next is on you.
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"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
Sure. I'm mostly going from memory but I'll rummage around to see what sources I can find. Not dismissing Wrangham or anything. It's just a controversial topic and not everyone agrees with him.
Not saying we don't know anything at all. But we know very little. Even with the chimp thing, I think you'd be surprised to see just how few cases they're talking about. And it's worse with the archaeological record. I don't think archaeologists would disagree with me on this. That's why stuff like Pinker's book was widely criticized by them. They're fully aware of just how fragmentary the record is and therefore cautious about making generalizations or assuming what they find is necessarily representative of broader groups. The basis for trying stuff? Well, are you under the impression that what we have now is working? ^^ In any other area of research you can have "incubators" or experimental groups to try stuff out. Politics? Not gonna happen. Every attempt at something new is skewed from the outset because the powers at be will oppose it. It's conservative to the extreme. Orthodox really. That degree of inertia doesn't bode well, especially when we're facing potentially existential threats like we are now.
I don't doubt that we could tweak genetics to favor certain traits over others. I just question whether that would actually get you the outcome you think it would. If war is primarily cultural, then you may very well just end up running around in circles, creating new kinds of humans who will wage war for reasons you haven't imagined yet, and then you tweak them to get yet another kind of new humans, and they start waging wars for yet other reasons. It's all based on the premise that war is entirely reducible to genetics, and I don't think there's any reason to believe that's the case.
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"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
they mention brain size and aggression…correlations between domestic animals vs wild counter parts, bonobos and chimps, and even Human brains have decreased over time, and it correlates to less aggressive behavior
Puzzling that they would talk about just brain size when this is now understood to be, by itself, a poorer indicator of behaviour or intelligence changes. Better proxies/indicators are density and type of connectivity, functional hemispheric asymmetry.
As to body-brain size (i.e mass) comparisons, a recent very comprehensive study in 2019 showed that in all mammals brain_mass ~ body_mass^(3/4), i.e. brain size always scales as the 3/4 power of body size.
The point of contention here is whether violence is innate or not.
From a personal perspective I find this to be a false dichotomy. My propensity for violence has altered significantly over a long lifetime.
From my youth to early 30s I was strongly inclined toward violence. I acted upon it in both a state-sanctioned role, and subsequently for a few years as an outlaw. My disaffection was prompted by a feeling I had been duped into fighting in a dirty little war in Central America, and by a personal misfortune which I attributed to cultural mores.
After I went straight I got a job in the defense business. Within ten or twelve years I was a member not of the inner circle, but perhaps of the second circle of the Cold War. My clients were people with job titles like Under Secretary, vice presidents of large corporations and people at the same levels in allied countries. We and our Soviet adversaries brandished weapons of mass destruction. On both sides we reassured ourselves that they would never be put into action: it would have been the death of civilization. Still, we brandished them.
Three years ago one of my grand-nephews asked me about the Cold War. I replied, ¨Forty years of nearly insane paranoia.”
“How did you escape it?” he asked
“I didn’t. I was an enthusiastic participant.”
Even in my 60s I admired the performance of the U.S. military in Iraq. I took pride in my old outfit, the 4th Infantry Division, finding Saddam in his spider hole.
But as the Iraqi and Afghan wars devolved into their inevitable debacles, my attitude toward war began to align with an increasing disinclination toward violence of any kind.
Now, at age 85, if I had held the same attitudes I do now when I was drafted, I would have fled to Canada, on both moral and practical grounds.
Although personal experience shows me that violence can be innate or not, at different times of life, I believe the propensity for war is innate in Westen culture. Of course, when attacked, the right to self defense is undeniable.
But there are a sufficient number of young people inclined toward violence, viz our “volunteer” armed forces. And there are a sufficient number of older leaders who would justify wars like those in Iraq or Afghanistan, to which I would object on moral grounds, and on their nearly certain outcomes.
i should've said something like "only one of us will be standing when that chicken is eaten" but ricardo already quoted me and this will go down in history as one of the biggest "misspoke"-ings.
yes you can choose to give the chicken to a "loved one" to help their survival. but who is this "loved one"? i can only imagine a starving person giving the food to their child, who is related on a genetic level and thus still "in line" with my "life is about survival" hypothesis/axiom.
richard, your story is one of character development or learning from experience but i fail to see how it disproves the "innateness" of violence within living beings? as far as i can see, violence is simply a tool for getting what you want. war, or large scale organized violence is a different matter.
ORIGINAL: chester richard, your story is one of character development or learning from experience but i fail to see how it disproves the "innateness" of violence within living beings? as far as i can see, violence is simply a tool for getting what you want. war, or large scale organized violence is a different matter.
I tend to attribute my decreasing tendency toward violence to two more factors in addition to the ones you cite.
One is hormonal balance changing with age. Until I was in my mid-40s I had a bad temper. I recognized it as a character flaw, at least as damaging to myself as it was to others. Once I realized that others were controlling my mood by triggering my temper, it was easy enough to deny them the opportunity.
The second is that I have been financially independent for more than 20 years. At a time when the lottery payoff had reached astronomical proportions, a San Francisco TV anchorman asked the weatherman whether he would keep his job if he won the prize.
“I think I would,” the weatherman replied, “but my attitude might change.”
I had to give up working at the end of 2009. It was taking up too much of my time.
richard, your story is one of character development or learning from experience but i fail to see how it disproves the "innateness" of violence within living beings? as far as i can see, violence is simply a tool for getting what you want. war, or large scale organized violence is a different matter.
How is war or large-scale organized violence any different than the violence an individual employs "for getting what you want."? I would suggest that war is initiated by a collective of individuals (the "state") in order to get what that collective wants--more land, natural resources, imperial ambitions, etc. That said, the collective of individuals ("state") that has been attacked has every right to defend itself employing violence without being accused of necessarily being innately violent in doing so at the time it is attacked.
Bill
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And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, With the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East."
How interesting- it’s the opposite for me. I was a dedicated rock guitar player in my twenties. Music, party, and women were my main interests. No desire to beat up or shoot anyone. I have much less regard for people in general today. I’d like to freakin pummel my next door neighbor these days but instead put a cante cd on repeat at full volume today in the backyard. Tomorrow I might put some Bernarda on. Her sense of pitch just might drive him insane.
quote:
ORIGINAL: Richard Jernigan
quote:
The point of contention here is whether violence is innate or not.
From a personal perspective I find this to be a false dichotomy. My propensity for violence has altered significantly over a long liifetime.
From my youth to early 30s I was strongly inclined toward violence. I acted upon it in both a state-sanctioned role, and subsequently for a few years as an outlaw. My disaffection was prompted by a feeling I had been duped into fighting in a dirty little war in Central America, and by a personal misfortune which I attributed to cultural mores.
After I went straight I got a job in the defense business. Within ten or twelve years I was a member not of the inner circle, but perhaps of the second circle of the Cold War. My clients were people with job titles like Under Secretary, vice presidents of large corporations and people at the same levels in allied countries. We and our Soviet adversaries brandished weapons of mass destruction. On both sides we reassured ourselves that they would never be put into action: it would have been the death of civilization. Still, we brandished them.
Three years ago one of my grand-nephews asked me about the Cold War. I replied, ¨Forty years of nearly insane paranoia.”
“How did you escape it?” he asked
“I didn’t. I was an enthusiastic participant.”
Even in my 60s I admired the performance of the U.S. military in Iraq. I took pride in my old outfit, the 4th Infantry Division, finding Saddam in his spider hole.
But as the Iraqi and Afghan wars devolved into their inevitable debacles, my attitude toward war began to align with an increasing disinclination toward violence of any kind.
Now, at age 85, if I had held the same attitudes I do now when I was drafted, I would have fled to Canada, on both moral and practical grounds.
Although personal experience shows me that violence can be innate or not, at different times of life, I believe the propensity for war is innate in Westen culture. Of course, when attacked, the right to self defense is undeniable.
But there are a sufficient number of young people inclined toward violence, viz our “volunteer” armed forces. And there are a sufficient number of older leaders who would justify wars like those in Iraq or Afghanistan, to which I would object on moral grounds, and on their nearly certain outcomes.
I can only imagine a starving person giving the food to their child, who is related on a genetic level and thus still "in line" with my "life is about survival" hypothesis/axiom.
If it's a child I'd let him have the chicken whether he's related to me or not. Well, that's my moral intuition anyway. Whether that moral intuition would hold up if that situation actually arose (knock on wood that it never does...), I can only hope.
To some degree I agree with Richard that it's a false dichotomy. Or at least, I'm sometimes confused as to where the line should be drawn. That's why in my previous post I was saying we'd have to figure out what exactly it means for violence to be innate. Since some are describing it as a tool, a means to an end, take scissors as an analogy (perhaps a dumb analogy, but it's sunday, cut me some slack ^^). In my mind, that's a product of culture. Of course culture accommodates our biology so scissors have the shape they have because our hands are shaped the way they are. But our hands didn't evolve to hold scissors. Not scissors specifically anyway. It's just something we invented that piggybacks on biological evolution.
To me, saying violence (and war) is innate is tantamount to saying that our hands evolved to hold scissors, as opposed to saying that it's just something cultural piggybacking on something biological. And it's also to say that scissors are inevitable. That there's no conceivable world, either in the future or in some alternate timeline, where mankind doesn't use scissors, but rather some other tool, and that the only way to even conceive of such a world is to tweak our genetics so that we change the shape of our hands and then, and only then, can we finally have the world without scissors that we've all been pining for.
Of the three factors Richard described, which I'd broadly characterize as experiential, hormonal and financial, at least two can be more easily addressed through a social lens rather than biological, and perhaps even all three*. I'd even suggest that the third one, if we can extrapolate it to humans overall (which admittedly is a big if, granted), would support the idea of our "hunter-gathering" ancestors as having been less prone to intra-species violence thqn we are. That we are wealthier than they were is clear. But it's equally clear that it was much easier for them to have all their needs met - to be "financially" independent as it were - than it is for us where for most of us we are essentially born into a life of semi-servitude, where there is no freedom in any real sense until you've sold enough of yourself to others to earn it ("freedom" indeed). In fact in the backlash against the idea of a universal income some are quite explicit about it: they oppose the idea on the grounds that if you had that kind of freedom, then you probably wouldn't go do the job that nobody wants to do but that they need you to do for their own profit. Then they just need to jump through a few hoops to explain why their profit is actually also your profit (ha!) and the trick is done.
In the context of the post-Enlightenment discourse on politics, geopolitics and warfare, it was just assumed that the drive to always want more, at any cost, is innate, rather than being just a reflection of cultural values. And that drive to want more is what causes war. It was in part a defence against the indigenous critique of European society. How do you cope when people who are so much poorer than you look at your society and reject it? You say that they're ignorant, that this can't possibly be the result of an informed decision, that it can't possibly be that they just value different things than you, want less "stuff" than you do, and therefore since that can't be it, they must be much less happy than you are, because after all, they have a lot less stuff than you have and you've posited that they want as much stuff as you. It's circular, but the only way they found to defend against that indigenous critique. Not that that's all there was to it, nor even that the indigenous critique was necessarily central, but that it was part of the discussions that led Enlightenment thinkers to come up with the arguments we still use today in defence of the state, that much is undeniable.
And to some extent we still struggle with that today, with sciences like psychology being rather quick to extrapolate findings in one culture as necessarily applicable to others. There's growing awareness about that problem, but IMHO they're still a long ways off from really solving it. Since I mentioned Pinker before, in his linguistic work he's a careful thinker. For instance, in a study related to the critical period hypothesis (which was notable because of the insanely large sample size: over half a million participants), he found a statistical drop-off point for the acquisition of syntactical processing around 17/18 years of age. I.e., after that age it seems that it's significantly harder for people to acquire the syntax of a foreign language than before that age. In the discussion section, he covers all of his bases: he says maybe this is the result of maturational effects (i.e. biological), or this is the result of changes in social expectations (i.e. culture), since that's about the age where you enter the work force or professional education, or maybe the fact that we chose that age for the transition to the workforce/professional education is because as a society we noticed that people aren't as good at learning anymore once they've reached that age (i.e. ultimately biological, but through the intermediary of culture). All bases covered. But in the context of the discussions about police in the wake of the Floyd protests in the US, he fails to uphold that intellectual rigour: he recounts a police strike that occurred during his childhood, during which time there was looting and rioting. He describes it as an example of the scientific process put to the test: as a young person with left-wing ideals, he had hypothesised that humans don't need police to have a peaceful society, then there was a situation where for a brief while there was no police in his city and all hell broke loose. That disproved his hypothesis, and he concluded that humans need police to maintain a peaceful society. It supports his broader narrative of a Hobbesian state necessary to suppress the innate (i.e. biological) violent tendencies of its citizens. It never occurs to him to step outside the bounds of his own culture and ask whether the fact that people looted is because they are the product of that particular society, that the society that produces a police force is the same kind of society that produces looters. Whereas in his linguistic work he's careful to consider other options than biological, in his political punditry he goes straight for the biological. Perhaps it'll turn out that he's right. But right now he's jumping the gun. As are IMHO all of those who claim that violence and war are inevitable because supposedly innate.
@Ricardo Here is a paper by anthropologist Robert Sussman (similar background as Wrangham, anthropologists that focused on primates, in Sussman's case lemurs) that seems to cover some of the issues I was. In fact it's so similar that I wonder if this wasn't the one that got me to start thinking about this back when I did, but I can't remember.
*specifically the hormonal balance. Because, while biological in nature, why certain kinds of hormonal features are selected for rather than others can also be viewed as the result of cultural choices. It would likely take longer than Ricardo's preferred choice, but ultimately we do have the option of setting the cultural parameters that would select for less aggressiveness rather than more, such that, through culture, some generations down the line you end up with a population less prone to violent behavior, and perhaps even with a more balanced distribution of hormonal levels across the individual's life time.
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"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
Meerkats: nature's miniature version of Game of Thrones
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"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
Interesting stuff! But like the Chimp wars, Piwin says the guy making the claim is responsible and likely outside of the mainstream scientific thought, and who’s to say the exotic Meerkat observations are not the same type of thing? I guess we need to discover the peer review/field of study to be sure….it could be just sensational reporting.
Not sure whether Wrangham is outside the mainstream or not. My understanding is just that it's a controversial issue with no clear consensus yet. But I could be wrong. Re: meerkats, I think it fits in the mainstream. If you count killing children, there are species that are a lot worse than us. It's when you only count killing between adults that we stand out.
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"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
RE: The pros and cons of the Nation ... (in reply to estebanana)
I’m going to break my promise once-
As an amateur anthologist, with a modicum of training, I’d like to point out that the reason we as humans developed into a sentient species with technology and philosophy is because the fossil record and the buried remains of our ancestors show that humans sustained otherwise mortal injuries because we have had teamwork and empathy as we developed. Just like animals. You can look at study after study by scientists, and that’s cool, but all you really have to do is look at a dog.
The answer is share the damned chicken and then work as a team to catch another one. It’s not that violent behaviors are baked into us, everything is baked into us, good and bad. Pick the good, share the chicken, stupid.
Our ancestors broke their skulls and legs so badly they’d have died unless someone else in their band shared the chicken. This is the truth and it’s so freaking easy to understand. Only lonely dummies take all the chicken.
It’s not that difficult really. Now to my dark evil tower.
ORIGINAL: BarkellWH How is war or large-scale organized violence any different than the violence an individual employs "for getting what you want."? I would suggest that war is initiated by a collective of individuals (the "state") in order to get what that collective wants--more land, natural resources, imperial ambitions, etc.
killing someone in order to survive is very different than convincing/brainwashing a bunch of yokels to go kill people they never met because of "reasons"
Share the chicken 🐔 chicken 🍗 chicken 🐓 it won’t kill you to share the chicken- then when you break your legs hunting the person you shared the chicken with will still be alive and will bring food to your selfish ass.
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