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Piwin -> chimps? (Jun. 2 2023 2:20:35)
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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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