"How Natural is War to Human Beings?" Topic

"If you look at the world today, and if you survey the human race's recorded history, it's easy to see our species as innately bloodthirsty and aggressive species. It seems as if warfare and brutality have been omnipresent, and are natural to human beings. And indeed, this is the conclusion that many scholars and scientists have reached. One of the founders of evolutionary psychology, E.O. Wilson, referred to warfare as "humanity's hereditary curse," whereas another evolutionary psychologist, Steven Pinker, has suggested that "chronic raiding and feuding characterize life in a state of nature."…."
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Amicalement
Armand

It's not a curse.

It's part of our DNA, helping us to overcome adversity, the elements, dangerous creatures, and various other issues. I imagine it is part of what makes us the top animal on the planet (though the jury is still out on that opinion in many aspects).

I suspect if we lose that, we'll be like those in the movie Serenity, who succumbed to their own apathy.

I think the data on pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers is not so benign; as I recall death by violence was thought to be pretty common among our distant ancestors before they settled down to be farmers

Check out Keeley's Warfare Before Civilization: link

I think calling us the "top" animal is somewhat too positive a spin. Ants fight wars too. Warfare against other members of our species doesn't put us on "top" of any hierarchy at all that includes the other species. The idea of their being a dominant species or top species in a hierarchy of all species not a good idea. It is to conflate the "glory of dominance" within our species to that of the world as a whole. It is a foolish outdated humanocentric view with probably as much problems to our real security as a species as does the mindset of being the "top" of the hierarchy within our species does in the long term.

Co-equals with empathy and cooperation will almost always defeat alpha groups in the long run. Glory cannot be shared, but one cannot eat it either.

I still say absent civilization, we'd have to make do with blood feuds, robbery with violence, murders and the odd massacre of strange people on territory we claim. Proper warfare is, as Clausewitz points out, political. It needs a chain of command.

I think fighting is in the DNA, and tool-using turns the fight into homicide at a rate species not blessed with clubs, knives and repeating firearms can't match. If you were beating on a guy, most of us would stop when he stopped fighting back. But if you shoot or stab him, it's a little late for that. And it takes civilization to kill people you've never met.

I agree with Thresher: we tread a narrow path between too much aggressiveness, which would result in species extinction, and too little aggressiveness, which would result with us standing around with us standing around with our thumbs in our navels all day and going nowhere.

Grelber

This discussion is way too deep for me, I left my shovel back in Minnesota.

(smile)

Amicalement
Armand