Well if you say,you have no desire to dominate or control others, would you admit that there are Primitivist writers whose blogs you enjoy, who do?[/quote]
That’s a difficult question to answer definitively. But more to the point, it avoids the real issue, which is “Is it inherent in human nature to desire control and/or domination over others?”.
I should probably make it clearer that control isn’t specifically domination, at least not in my world-view. At some level everything that lives exercises some amount of control, otherwise life wouldn’t be possible. But what I assume you’re really talking about is good old-fashioned Domination: complete subjugation of an Other. I don’t believe that that is an inherent part of human nature, because I don’t have that desire anymore.
[quote=“Free_Range_Organic_Human, post:18, topic:298”]Would it be a safe bet to say that people with a desire to dominate and control others generally don’t get aong with each other
, but often are good at attracting, oh, let’s say “fans” “followers” “readers” that are more passive types?[/quote]
I would say it’s a pretty safe bet that people with a desire to dominate others generally don’t get along with others, period. You’re dangerously close to calling me a pacifist again.
No, actually, I don’t. What you’re really describing with the “sycophantic” relationship above is 2 people who both have a desire for the power of domination, one of which actually has it.
I think it’s important not to generalize too broadly about anthropological categories like “foragers”. ‘Foragers’ is really first and formost an economic short hand term that covers a wide range of groups existing in a spectrum of diverse social, political and economic behavior. Few socio-cultural charactersitics can be derived from this label as a logical entailment. Warfare is no exception.
Among the Pacific Northwest Coast hunter-gathering-fishing peoples, warfare was relatively common. There is solid evidence for this in archaeological sites up and down the coast, as well as in the oral histories and legends passed down to the decendents of many coastal clans such as the Haida, Coast Salish, and Musqueam. The Haida and Musqueam were constantly raiding each other’s territories, capturing the most fertile salmon bearing rivers and streams, and taking each other’s most able-bodied men as slaves. Huge, ornate war canoes were crafted to negotiate the waters of the Georgia Strait. There is practically no academic dispute about the existence of warfare in this region both before and after European contact.
The same can be said of the Yamomani in Brazil, the Maori of New Zeland and Australian Aboriginies of Arnhem Land to name but a few, with no less compelling evidence.
Hunting and gathering does not make a community immune from warfare, though it probably makes warfare less desirable as there is, in most cases, not much to gain from it. One can, therefore, make the case that warfare is less common in foraging communities, but not that it is rare or absent.
Among the Pacific Northwest Coast hunter-gathering-fishing peoples, warfare was relatively common.
Right. And why? Because in the relatively unique food super-abundance of the Pacific NW, the indigenous peoples experienced food surpluses only seen among horticultural peoples.
So it doesn’t really come down to lifestyle per se, but what amount of food your lifestyle (as a result of environment) creates.
I know Jason has written an essay on this ‘exception’ to the forager-conflict rule. I hope he posts it!
I think it's important not to generalize too broadly about anthropological categories like "foragers". 'Foragers' is really first and formost an economic short hand term that covers a wide range of groups existing in a spectrum of diverse social, political and economic behavior. Few socio-cultural charactersitics can be derived from this label as a logical entailment. Warfare is no exception.
“Forager” is exceptionally broad, meaning, “Everyone who isn’t like us.” So there are, of course, exceptions to the rule. Willem already found my article on the Kwakiutl, who actually formed a chiefdom and generally behaved like agrarians, because the salmon runs were so abundant that it created a situation with permanent settlement and food storage, which led to hierarchy and nascent civilization. The next in that series, Paleolithic Royalty, looks at archaeological evidence of a similar situation in Sungir. This is what usually happens when this “glitch” pops up: a geographically isolated chiefdom that rises and finally exhausts itself from the continual one-upmanship required to keep the hierarchy going.
As far as violence, it’s really the Inuit you want to look to who come closest to defying my statements about war, but even there what you have is blood feuds, which is still a long way from war, regardless of Keeley’s arguments otherwise. Foragers are by no means homogeneous, but the one thing they have in common is that none of them live like us, so the things that follow from living like us are systematically absent from all forager lifestyles.
But examples like the Kwakiutl and Sungir show that it isn’t the nobility of the forager lifestyle that gives you peace, but the way the system works. When the system breaks down, like it did in Sungir or the Pacific Northwest, you get foragers that live like us, and they suffer the same problems we do. But these are, as I indicated by the series’ title, exceptions that prove the rule.
The same can be said of the Yamomani in Brazil, the Maori of New Zeland and Australian Aboriginies of Arnhem Land to name but a few, with no less compelling evidence.
It’s worth noting that your first two examples are horticulturalists, and thus products of the Agricultural Revolution just like agriculturalists. You’ll recall I said that war is associated with food production, not just agriculture specificially. This is one effect that really does apply to horticulture and agriculture. I don’t know as much about the evidence for war or subsistence patterns among the Aborigines from Arnhem Land, but since Arnhem Land is somewhat tropical, I’d suspect that the Aborigines there were further along the horticultural end of the spectrum, no?
Hunting and gathering does not make a community immune from warfare, though it probably makes warfare less desirable as there is, in most cases, not much to gain from it.
Hunting and gathering generally makes warfare difficult to wage, and eliminates what can be gotten from it. There are forager groups that have waged war, but there’s always been something awry with them: the chiefdoms of the Pacific Northwest, for instance, or living in the world’s harshet environment, like the Inuit.
One can, therefore, make the case that warfare is less common in foraging communities, but not that it is rare or absent.
Yes you can. Warfare among foragers is an anomoly. It only happens when something quite exceptional is going on.
I personally think that strength and courage is the highest manifestation of man with nature only respecting those strong enough in their convictions of survival.
I see civilization being a compilation of convenience,comfort and luxory the ultimate vanity or weakness of human beings.
The civilized man is a waste of life for he offers no real appreciation of living because everything he is comes to be what is handed down to him.
Modern man is a consumer not a survivalist. Consumption no where equals survival.
“Strength” is a domination term, it means the power to make things as you will it. Nature doesn’t respect strength. It laughs at anything we might call strength, because it is so much stronger. Far more important is flexibility, adaptiveness, the ability to adjust to circumstances. Things are beyond our control, and no matter how much power (personal or collective) we aquire, it will always be so.
It’s like the parable of the oak tree and the reed. When the storm came, the mighty oak tree did it’s best to stand against the wind, and was blown over. The reed bent with the wind, and remained standing.
Most oral traditions love the story of the Strong Person who’s brought to ruin by the Trickster. If there’s a basic archetype of the indigenous, native story, I’d say that comes close.
[quote=“Free_Range_Organic_Human, post:1, topic:298”]I am adressing this mostly to the Guys that post here. I really get nothing out of internet pissing contests, but I am contrarian by nature. That mean that whenever I see a point of view being expressed I tend to automatically take the opposite view. Among Democrats, I am Republican, among vegans a carnivore; when in the company of Hawks, I take the pacifist perspective.
So think of this as a challenge to your thinking, nothing more.
In my personal journey of rewilding, I eventually came to wrestle with questions of the proper use of power. I feel like that is a topic not only related to the question of what it means to be human, but also more specifically, what it means to be a man.
In my opinion, most people seem to come into primitivism from the far left, as if primitivism is the logical conclusion of left wing thinking.
Its almost as if primitive tribal people are held up as the exemplars of the human race because they seem to embody things liberals hold up as ideals. Equality, egalitarianism, freedom, ecology, even eating organic!
Could this be a case of bias? Could you be seeing what you want to see among primitive people? Like as Robert Anton Wilson said “What the thinker thinks, the prover proves!”
Could it be possible that primitive people also embody what is seen as the dark side of human nature? Like violence and greed?
Jason Godesky has written about pirates, painting them as primitivists. It would be really hard to argue that pirates weren’t violent and greedy.
I guess in a way it can be excued, since pirates are “on our side” for being rebels against the establishment.
O.K. fair enough. So what happened to the pirates? They became the rich establishment families of the United States. The Boston bramins, the rich Old money WASPS of New York, families on the “Social Register” these are all descendants of Pirates.
Primitive people make war with each other. Its their nature. Some people win these wars, others lose. The winners write the history books and become the rulers and create the new order, then over time they become the Status quo. they get a bunch of more domesticated herd like humans to serve them and take shelter under them.
The Indian tribes, were mostly all war like. Less warlike than Aristocrats and pirates perhaps, but more warlike than people descended from generations and generations of docile peasants.
They lacked the intensive agriculture and mastery of symbolic culture, that the European settlers had and lost the war with them. Germs weren’t the only factor.
The most successful tribe in competing with the Europeans were the Cherokee. They did it by mastering written language, creating a cherokee alphabet, printing a newspaper and buying black slaves to farm for them.
But still, they were defeated.
If you really want to rewild and strip back the layers of domestication, you will be faced with this question of power. Every body wants it and not everyone can have it. You have to fight for it. This is what people were doing before the advent of agriculture and the alphabet. They were fighting. Agriculture and the alphabet just happen to be superior weapons that create this huge positive feedback loop that europeans were able to perfect through warring with each other and ride to the top of world domination.
But take away agriculture and the alphabet and you still have tribes of people fighting for power. Its in your heart. Its in your DNA.[/quote]
Could it be possible that primitive people also embody what is seen as the dark side of human nature? Like violence and greed?
[quote=“Andrew Jensen, post:27, topic:298”]“Strength” is a domination term, it means the power to make things as you will it. Nature doesn’t respect strength. It laughs at anything we might call strength, because it is so much stronger. Far more important is flexibility, adaptiveness, the ability to adjust to circumstances. Things are beyond our control, and no matter how much power (personal or collective) we aquire, it will always be so.
It’s like the parable of the oak tree and the reed. When the storm came, the mighty oak tree did it’s best to stand against the wind, and was blown over. The reed bent with the wind, and remained standing.[/quote]
Strength to me means a firm use of one’s physiological prowess.
You are thinking about mental strength that undermines man’s own existance where I am just talking about the physical capabilities of survival alone.
Yes, but you constantly frame survival as a battle with nature, and you use your strength to win that battle.
This is wrong. A survivor cooperates with nature. It’s not a battle, it’s a dance.
Strength and courage are the highest manifestations of man eh? In other terms, physical prowess and risky behavior. Admirable under certain circumstances, I can agree to. But highest manifestation? I wouln’t go that far. Most of history’s “Strong men” were the one’s who forged civilization out of wilderness. I think a case could be made that humanity is worse off for it.
[quote=“Andrew Jensen, post:31, topic:298”]Yes, but you constantly frame survival as a battle with nature, and you use your strength to win that battle.
This is wrong. A survivor cooperates with nature. It’s not a battle, it’s a dance.
Strength and courage are the highest manifestations of man eh? In other terms, physical prowess and risky behavior. Admirable under certain circumstances, I can agree to. But highest manifestation? I wouln’t go that far. Most of history’s “Strong men” were the one’s who forged civilization out of wilderness. I think a case could be made that humanity is worse off for it.[/quote]
Yes, but you constantly frame survival as a battle with nature, and you use your strength to win that battle.
What I am talking about is the strength of an individual that battles adversity by becoming a strong balanced part of nature.
I have never spoke about battling nature.
Strength and courage are the highest manifestations of man eh? In other terms, physical prowess and risky behavior. Admirable under certain circumstances, I can agree to. But highest manifestation? I wouln't go that far. Most of history's "Strong men" were the one's who forged civilization out of wilderness. I think a case could be made that humanity is worse off for it.
The strength I am talking about is the battling of adversity within nature.
A lion utilizes its strength to battle adversity everyday and as a species does no harm to nature at all while at the same time being very ecological as a predatory species.
Only the strong survive. I believe that natural conflicts occur all the time and only one human being out of such an event can remain victorious."
That’s Violent talk. That’s dividing the world into winners and losers.
Hell, you have an entire thread called “survival of the fittest through might” filled mostly with your own posts wherein you do nothing but type out excerpts from someone else’s work. I’d go on pulling quotes out, but frankly I have better things to do than go through your dozens of identically-themed threads. When did this site become your livejournal?
Let me shed some light on "survival of the fittest. It isn’t the most “fit” who survive. Those who survive are declared fit afterwards. It’s a naturalist mask for Calvinism.
Ran Prieur has an essay where he explores the difference between violence and vigor. Surviving certainly requires vigorous activity, but it is not a battle. Or rather, it doesn’t have to be, and it’s more enjoyable when it’s not.
I wrote a post on idle theory over on Anthropik, and it goes over one of the points of idle theory: how the “survival of the fittest” tells us more about the culture Darwin grew up in, than anything that actually happens in the natural world.
This war of nature was perhaps Darwin’s most enduring contribution to the theory of evolution. What had been seen, until then, as a harmonious natural order, became a bloodbath. And in the rest of Origin, Darwin rams home the image of struggle, war, murder, extermination.
It is not particularly hard to see where this idea comes from. Given more mouths to feed than the limited amount of food available, the image is easily conjured of hungry, jostling, struggling animals, wedged together, biting and tugging and trampling over each other to reach that food. And, given this image, it is clear that the strongest, fastest, and most aggressive are likely to come out the winners. And, indeed, that an animal would increase its chances of survival if it took to actively exterminating its competitors.
But hidden in this vision of competition is an unstated supposition that the natural world provides its bounty in a concentrated and localized formâ€â€as if Nature, like a farmer, feeds the creatures by unloading its produce in one great pile, in a particular place and a particular time, before the hungry livestock. In this artificial circumstance, as they all rush in, direct competition is inevitable.
That's Violent talk. That's dividing the world into winners and losers.
Hell, you have an entire thread called “survival of the fittest through might” filled mostly with your own posts wherein you do nothing but type out excerpts from someone else’s work. I’d go on pulling quotes out, but frankly I have better things to do than go through your dozens of identically-themed threads. When did this site become your livejournal?
Andrew makes an excellent point, TheJoker. I actually just locked your “Survival of the fittest through might” thread because it really doesn’t fit with the theme of this forum.
I too feel tired of having to patrol through your multiple threads on the same topics that all seem to miss the point. If you want to propound your own beliefs ad nauseum, I would appreciate you doing it on your own blog and not on this forum.
I definitely appreciate different views on rewilding topics, but the same off-track view expressed in multiple posts on multiple boards just clogs the forum experience for all the other users.
As of this point, I am calling your out in terms of our [iurl=http://www.rewild.info/conversations/index.php?topic=313.msg3087#msg3087]conflict resolution policy[/iurl] and asking that you curb your own posting habits. If I feel like you are abusing the forums and filling them with excessive amounts of the same arguments, then I will lock your posts. If you continue your actions then I will escalate the conflict resolution to a temporary ban and a permanent ban if necessary.
Please take this opportunity to show some restraint in your posting habits, TheJoker. Thanks.
Who’s meaning is that? I’ve never heard ‘forager’ defined that way.
Which I guess is another way of pointing out the obvious truism that foragers are different from us because they live differently from us. :
No. There is no evidence of horticulture among any of Australia’s aboriginal groups past or present. There is suggestive evidence, though, of past warfare as depicted in Arnhem Land rock paintings (Cambridge Archaeological Journal Oct. 1994). This coincides with similar oral legends from that region.
As for the earlier point: The Yanomami are actually a good example of the plasticity of the concept of ‘forager’ since they have been reported as living soley off wild foods for weeks and even months at a time, trekking between scattered gardens. In the case of the Yamomani, warfare seems to have less to do with food production and more to do with foreign intrusion (i.e. missionaries), the South American slave trade, unequal access to steel and being forced into neighboring territories. All these factors seem to have exacerbated an already high level of inter-personal violence. Contrast this with a nearby Venezuelan tribe, the Piaroa, also foragers/gardeners among whom war is absent. Despite food production, the Piaroa are, according to Joanna Overing, "almost totally free of all forms of physical violence, where children, teenagers, and adults alike never express their anger through physical means.†The Maori lived in a range of habitats, and employed a range of subsistence methods. In the South of New Zealand, they were pure hunter gatherers, while in the north, they cultivated plants where possible. All Maori engaged in warfare, a cultural practice they brought with them from the Polynesian Islands.
The point I am defending is that ‘forager’ is included in a wide range of subsistence patterns in various degrees from pure hunting and gathering to some horticulture, agriculture, pastoralism and fishing. Warfare can and does cut across all these modes. While a good argument can be made that war is more prevalent among societies with more intensive food production, and that there seems to be a corelation between the two, it is by no means a causal one. There are many reasons and factors why groups go to war-- defending or raiding food is only one. An equal corelation with war could be made for social complexity. I guess I just don’t understand this seemingly Marxian fixation on base/superstructure explanations for war.
There’s nothing difficult about waging war for hunter-gatherers, if the Musqueam, the Coast Salish, the Maori, the Calusa, etc., etc. are any examples. And climate isn’t (nor has it ever been) a reason to go to war. Saying there is “something awry” about warring parties is merely to say there is “something awry” about war itself, a circular argument premissed on the singular obvious difference between warring and non-warring pure foraging groups.
Yes you can. Warfare among foragers is an anomoly. It only happens when something quite exceptional is going on.[/quote]
No it’s not. I’d suggest broadening your database before coming to that conclusion. And the ‘exception’ can’t be found in any one feature of a given society. War springs from many sources.
Who's meaning is that? I've never heard 'forager' defined that way.
Sure you have. Maybe not in those words. They probably talked about nomadic people who hunt and gather for their food, right? Non-food producers? Well, food producers all have something in common: they produce their own food. And foragers? That’s everyone else. The people who fish, the people who hunt, the people who scavenge, the people who gather, the people who forage, the people who predate; and yes, those are all different things.
Which I guess is another way of pointing out the obvious truism that foragers are different from us because they live differently from us.
That may sound tautological and trivial, but you’d be amazed how many people get hopping mad at me for pointing that out. This is where you start in with the “Noble Savage” stuff, about how I’m romanticizing foragers by suggesting that just because they don’t live like us, they don’t face the problems we face because we live like us.
There is no evidence of horticulture among any of Australia's aboriginal groups past or present.
That’s not what I’ve read. I’ve heard of some fairly advanced horticultural techniques used in Arnhem Land, like this.
The Yanomami are actually a good example of the plasticity of the concept of 'forager' since they have been reported as living soley off wild foods for weeks and even months at a time, trekking between scattered gardens.
That’s actually a good example of what I mean about the spectrum between foragers and horticulturalists, and how there’s pretty much no culture that’s purely one or the other.
In the case of the Yamomani, warfare seems to have less to do with food production and more to do with foreign intrusion (i.e. missionaries), the South American slave trade, unequal access to steel and being forced into neighboring territories. All these factors seem to have exacerbated an already high level of inter-personal violence.
Oh, absolutely. Pretty much every native culture in North America, you have to look at as a post-apocalyptic culture. They’re dealing with this massive trauma. And we have archaeological evidence showing that violence across the Americas shot up after European arrival, because they suddenly became these post-apocalyptic cultures. But there had been violence before that; these factors exacerbated Yanamamo violence, they didn’t start it. Before that sudden trauma, the proximate causes may have been adulteries, offended honor, or personal feuds, but the ultimate cause was land.
Contrast this with a nearby Venezuelan tribe, the Piaroa, also foragers/gardeners among whom war is absent. Despite food production, the Piaroa are, according to Joanna Overing, "almost totally free of all forms of physical violence, where children, teenagers, and adults alike never express their anger through physical means.â€Â
Sure; when I note that horticulturalists tend to be the ones who make war, that doesn’t mean there are horticulturalists who don’t, just that there are so few foragers who do.
The Maori lived in a range of habitats, and employed a range of subsistence methods. In the South of New Zealand, they were pure hunter gatherers, while in the north, they cultivated plants where possible. All Maori engaged in warfare, a cultural practice they brought with them from the Polynesian Islands.
And Polynesia had its own agricultural revolution. The Maori hunter-gatherers in the south descended from some very warlike horticulturalists and even agriculturalists, and they had borders with some Maori neighbors who continued both food production and war, so that’s hardly surprising, is it?
The point I am defending is that 'forager' is included in a wide range of subsistence patterns in various degrees from pure hunting and gathering to some horticulture, agriculture, pastoralism and fishing. Warfare can and does cut across all these modes. While a good argument can be made that war is more prevalent among societies with more intensive food production, and that there seems to be a corelation between the two, it is by no means a causal one.
You’re practically repeating me until that last phrase. There is a very strong correlation; the more you produce food, the more you go to war. That is a causal relationship, because food production creates the conditions where war is a worthwhile activity. War among foragers is pointless.
There are many reasons and factors why groups go to war-- defending or raiding food is only one.
There are many rationalizations for war, but only one reason: economic benefit. Only that can provide a material reward to make the hazards of war a worthwhile gamble. Otherwise, you’re engaging in life-threatening behavior with a negative expected value. Such a group will quickly die out. So to understand war, you need a society where there’s a pattern of economic activity that would make war worthwhile (or at the very least, a historical legacy of having once lived in such a pattern, in which case war may simply be a vestigial behavior from that time that has not yet gone extinct).
There's nothing difficult about waging war for hunter-gatherers, if the Musqueam, the Coast Salish, the Maori, the Calusa, etc., etc. are any examples.
Considering that those are some of the hunter-gatherers farthest along the horticultural spectrum, that fairly well proves my point. The more hunter-gatherers hunt and gather, the more difficult it is for them to wage war.
And climate isn't (nor has it ever been) a reason to go to war.
Climate is a cause of scarcity, and scarcity is the only reason that any war has ever been fought. So yes, climate is absolutely a reason to go to war.
Saying there is "something awry" about warring parties is merely to say there is "something awry" about war itself, a circular argument premissed on the singular obvious difference between warring and non-warring pure foraging groups.
There’s nothing circular about it. War is an extremely risky venture, from an evolutionary perspective. We don’t see it in the rest of the animal kingdom, so it’s a purely human behavior. And we only see it in humans in the past 10,000 years. Something has quite obviously gone awry.
No it's not. I'd suggest broadening your database before coming to that conclusion. And the 'exception' can't be found in any one feature of a given society. War springs from many sources.
I think we’ve seen here from your own examples that that’s not the case.
Actually, we do see it in some animal populations (chimps for instance).
I realize that we only have evidence of that behaviour in the recent past, and the probable connection between that behaviour & food concentration doesn’t escape me. In fact, I think it supports the casaulity of food production with war rather than weakening it.
Sure you have. Maybe not in those words. They probably talked about nomadic people who hunt and gather for their food, right? Non-food producers? Well, food producers all have something in common: they produce their own food. And foragers? That’s everyone else. The people who fish, the people who hunt, the people who scavenge, the people who gather, the people who forage, the people who predate; and yes, those are all different things.[/quote]
Huh? You are not making any sense. "Forager is exceptionally broad, meaning “Everyone who isn’t like us”. No one would claim the Yanomami are ‘like us’ yet they garden. No one would claim the Skolt Lapps are ‘like us’, yet they herd reindeer. No one would claim Yoruk goat herders are like us either. I seriously doubt whether a lot of people even think modern Chinese are ‘like us’. You are using ‘forager’ in a very idiosyncratic way.
That’s not what I’ve read. I’ve heard of some fairly advanced horticultural techniques used in Arnhem Land, like this.[/quote]
Link doesn’t work for me.
That’s actually a good example of what I mean about the spectrum between foragers and horticulturalists, and how there’s pretty much no culture that’s purely one or the other.[/quote]
Just because the concept of forager is elastic it doesn’t mean there are no pure foragers.
Oh, absolutely. Pretty much every native culture in North America, you have to look at as a post-apocalyptic culture. They’re dealing with this massive trauma. And we have archaeological evidence showing that violence across the Americas shot up after European arrival, because they suddenly became these post-apocalyptic cultures. But there had been violence before that; these factors exacerbated Yanamamo violence, they didn’t start it. Before that sudden trauma, the proximate causes may have been adulteries, offended honor, or personal feuds, but the ultimate cause was land.[/quote]
No, you missed the point again. Yanomami warfare was not ultimately caused by their horticultural ways, scarcity or land, but by a combination of factors mentioned above that did not produce the same effects in other similar horticultural tribes like the Piaora.
Sure; when I note that horticulturalists tend to be the ones who make war, that doesn’t mean there are horticulturalists who don’t, just that there are so few foragers who do.[/quote]
Then so much the worse for your causal link between war and food production, since the corelation doesn’t map directly. Parity of reasoning would entail that if food production were the main cause differentiating warring and nonwarring small-scale societies, that is, if war among hunter-gatherers is indeed rare, then peaceful (for lack of a better term) horticulturalists would be equally rare, which we know isn’t the case.
But your claim is that war is rare or absent in hunting and gathering societies because there is something about hunting and gathering that nullifies it. The Maori are one of many (not a few) counterexamples. It doesn’t therefore matter whether they were “descendants” from a previous horticultural culture,; if you want to play that ad hoc game, then you could just as easily say those same Polynesian horticultural societies were themselves once descendant from hunting and gathering cultures.
It is causal only in the sense that food production adds one more reason to wage war, a big reason perhaps, but nevertheless only one. You are placing way too much emphasis on food production; it’s just not that cut and dried. Modern warfare is often ideological, and only sometimes has it anything to do with scarcity or resources in general.
Considering that those are some of the hunter-gatherers farthest along the horticultural spectrum, that fairly well proves my point. The more hunter-gatherers hunt and gather, the more difficult it is for them to wage war.[/quote]
Those groups are in no way horticulturalists, no planting, no seeding, no cultivating, not even close. They are not ‘farther along’’, farther along what? Some evolutionary tautology you have in mind? You can’t seem to deal with the fact that some pure foragers wage war so you make up something called a ‘horticultural spectrum’ in an attempt to shoehorn those groups into your theory.
Climate is a cause of scarcity, and scarcity is the only reason that any war has ever been fought. So yes, climate is absolutely a reason to go to war.[/quote]
Just bizarre. So scarcity caused the first world war? How about the second world war? Korean war? Vietnam? The Falkland War? The Crusades? The Peloponnesian War? Backpeddling from climate to scarcity doesn’t bolster your claim that food production is the main factor behind war.
There’s nothing circular about it. War is an extremely risky venture, from an evolutionary perspective. We don’t see it in the rest of the animal kingdom, so it’s a purely human behavior. And we only see it in humans in the past 10,000 years. Something has quite obviously gone awry.[/quote]
It’s circular because you are using ‘awry’ to explain what it is that makes something awry. i.e. Foragers who wage war must have something awry within their culture[food production] because there must be something awry[food production] about any foraging group that would wage war. It’s also called begging the question. There may be something rather awry about war. But it’s part of life and nature. Chimps wage war (and don’t produce food by the way) as do many species of ants.
I think we’ve seen here from your own examples that that’s not the case.[/quote]
Nice try. And who’s ‘we’? I’m not sure what you think you’re seeing, but my examples are consistent with the fact that war is not rare or absent among hunting and gathering peoples. Uncommon perhaps, but not an anomoly. Nothing you’ve mentioned has proved otherwise.
