I’m way late in discovering this thread, and am responding to the begining (sorry if that’s rude). So anyway, I had a nasty habit of playing devils advocate, and then one of my friends called me out on it. She said, “That’s really fucking condescending.” and she was right. At least have the guts to put your own ideas out there. Playing devils advocate prevents ever being vulnerable, at least that’s why I would do it.
Well, actually… yeah. WWII is actually an excellent example of how ideological reasons are often used as rationalizations for responses to scarcity. I’d almost say it’s the textbook example, if, you know, there were a textbook that covered this.
Lebensraum, man, Lebensraum…
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.
The concept of a horticulture spectrum definitely exists. Anywhere from “forage only”, to “check up on your favorite wild plants”, to “encourage some plants to grow”, to “plant a garden”, to “grow a food forest”, and branching off tangentially from “plant a garden” you also have “plant a field” which progresses to “rape the land for as far as the eye can see”. That tangential line represents the disconnect between grand scale horticulture (i.e., a giant food forest like the amazon) and grand scale agriculture (i.e., wheat, rice, and corn fields the world over).
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.
Actually, if you want to flip the “war is rare among foragers” equations, the opposite would not be “peace is rare among horticulturalists”. it would be “peace is rare among agriculturalists.” I definitely think that statement holds true.
I also think it’s worth realizing that these are hypothesis we’re arguing, and likely to remain so. We have a somewhat limited data set to draw from, potentially untrustworthy source material, and absolutely no way to conduct a proper experiment to determine cause and effect. So we can come up with stories that explain the data set, and some may match better than others, but without a means of testing the hypothesis, we’re still dealing with conjecture.
I don’t think our arguments HINGE apon a lack of warfare among foragers. Like, if we found out that warfare was common among foragers, I’m not sure it would really change much about rewilding.
[quote=“jhereg, post:42, topic:298”][quote author=Paleo Boy link=topic=311.msg4240#msg4240 date=1188534449]
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.
[/quote]
Well, actually… yeah. WWII is actually an excellent example of how ideological reasons are often used as rationalizations for responses to scarcity. I’d almost say it’s the textbook example, if, you know, there were a textbook that covered this.
Lebensraum, man, Lebensraum…[/quote]
Lebensraum means ‘living room’ or ‘elbow room’ i.e. more room to live. It also implied expansion of German empire. There was no scarcity of land or food. It was always about greed and restoring national pride in the wake of Germany’s loss in WW1. Germany’s invasion of Austria and Poland had zero to do with scarcity caused by climatic conditions.
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.
I’d consider them all like us, at least in the regard we’re discussing: they all produce their own food. Foraging covers everything but producing your own food, e.g., everyone not like us.
Link doesn't work for me.
That’s odd. You should at least be able to see the abstract there.
D. Yibarbuk, P. J. Whitehead, J. Russell-Smith, D. Jackson, C. Godjuwa, A. Fisher, P. Cooke, D. Choquenot, D. M. J. S. Bowman (2001)
Fire ecology and Aboriginal land management in central Arnhem Land, northern Australia: a tradition of ecosystem management
Journal of Biogeography 28 (3), 325–343.
doi:10.1046/j.1365-2699.2001.00555.x
Just because the concept of forager is elastic it doesn't mean there are no pure foragers.
No, it doesn’t. There are no pure foragers because we’ve never found any. Even the most basic foragers employ some methods to favor the regrowth of their favorite plants, and that puts them somewhere on that scale from horticulture to foraging.
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.
Oh, well, in that case you’re just plain wrong. The Yanomami experienced a distinct increase in warfare, but they still had war before that. Ultimately, the warfare comes down to land.
Then so much the worse for your causal link between war and food production, since the corelation doesn't map directly.
Yes it does. There’s a spectrum from foraging to horticulture, and the further along the horticultural scale you go, the more warfare you experience. There’s a distinct correlation, and it maps directly, it just requires the observation that there are no pure foragers, and no pure horticulturalists.
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.
Actually, it is the case. Peaceful horticulturalists are equally rare. They exist, but they’re rare.
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.
Right. And coming from a warlike, horticultural society, Maori hunter-gatherers continue warfare vestigially, even though it’s made more difficult by their lifestyle. The fact that they also border horticulturalists further complicates the situation, because a warlike neighbor can make war worthwhile even when it otherwise wouldn’t be.
The Maori are one of many (not a few) counterexamples.
It really is a few. The Maori are about it, perhaps some Amazonian tribes. You can’t compare !Kung homicides or Inuit duels to wars, because they’re nothing like wars. They’re violent, sure, but they’re not wars.
...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.
Yes, but switching from a society that does not need war, to one that does need war will mean you’ll always have war. Switching from a society that needs war to one that doesn’t will generally mean the abandonment of war, but probably on a fairly long timeline.
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.
I disagree. No war is ideological. Ideology is used to rationalize wars all the time, but they never make up the reason by themselves. Most ideology is never, ever acted upon. Ideology is haphazard and ad hoc. It’s too random to motivate any group to do anything. But that also means that no matter what you want to do, you can find something in you ideology to justify it. That’s the purpose ideology serves: to rationalize what you wanted to do anyway. Because of that, the ultimate cause of all wars is material need, and that almost exclusively food production, by one means or another.
Those groups are in no way horticulturalists, no planting, no seeding, no cultivating, not even close. They are not 'farther along'', farther along what?
That’s not true. We’ve already discussed the Maori, and even hunter-gatherer Maori still do a good bit of horticulture. The Musqueam and the Coast Salish, like so many other Pacific Northwest tribes, have a great deal in common with the Kwakiutl (I know the link’s down; should be back up tomorrow). The question of horticulture among the Calusa remains contested, but it does seem clear that even if there’s not enough to call them out-and-out horticulturalists, they were certainly further along the spectrum towards horticulture than many foragers.
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.
We came up with the idea of the horticultural spectrum long before we came to this question, because no pure foragers exist. They all use various techniques of varying intensity to promote the regrowth of their favored plants. By the same token, no pure horticulturalists exist, either; they need to supplement their diet with hunting and gathered wild foods. So there’s a spectrum, from the most extreme foragers who do very little to favor the regrowth of their favored foods, like Australian aborigines or Kalahari Bushmen, all the way to the most intensive horticulturalists who do the least hunting and gathering to supplement their diets.
Now, well after we came up with that, we noticed that intensity of warfare maps perfectly along that gradient, as well. While rare, some foragers do make war; and while rare, some horticulturalists are peaceful. But when you map them on this continuum, you see that the most intensive hunter-gatherers easily overlap with the least intensive hortculturalists, and the gradient works perfectly.
This isn’t something I cooked up just now to win this argument, though; this is something we’ve been working out for years now.
So scarcity caused the first world war? How about the second world war? Korean war? Vietnam? The Falkland War? The Crusades? The Peloponnesian War?
Absolutely. The First World War and the Second World War were essentially the same conflict, and it was mostly about the transition from coal to petroleum. The Korean War and Vietnam were just proxy wars between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., against the backdrop of the U.S.S.R.'s agricultural failures and the need for its satellites to succeed, in order to feed Mother Russia. The Falkland War was about the end of colonialism, which was originally created to feed an overpopulated and under-productive Europe. The Crusades were primarily a bid to conquer the center of the world, in order to jump-start Europe’s agricultural growth again. And the Peloponnesian War can hardly be properly understood without going back to the agricultural failures and soil erosion that led Athens and Sparta on their expansionist routes. I wish Anthropik was up, because I’ve actually used most of those as examples over the past few years of how all wars are fought for material gains, with ideology serving as nothing more than a fig-leaf rationalization cooked up after the fact.
Backpeddling from climate to scarcity doesn't bolster your claim that food production is the main factor behind war.
Who’s backpedalling? Climate is just another means. Still comes down to food production. If climate didn’t effect food production, it wouldn’t effect wars, either.
It's circular because you are using 'awry' to explain what it is that makes something awry.
No, I’m using “awry” to explain behaviors that are not evolutionarily stable.
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.
Right. Because war is not evolutionarily stable. If they wage war “just 'cause,” then they would have gone extinct long ago.
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.
No, they don’t. You should take a deeper look at Goodall; she caused the chimp warfare she observed by her manner of observation. It was simply a badly constructed experiment. Now THAT is begging the question. (And how, you ask? By creating a hoarded food supply–the bananas.)
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.
It has. The only examples you can find are the ones further along the horticultural spectrum. Your examples are consistent with the fact that war is rare, and that it is caused by food production, so the more you hunt and gather, the more war is absent. Your examples show that war is anomolous, all it takes is a closer look at the examples you’ve provided.
Actually, if you want to flip the "war is rare among foragers" equations, the opposite would not be "peace is rare among horticulturalists". it would be "peace is rare among agriculturalists." I definitely think that statement holds true.
Peace is all but impossible among agriculturalists, but it’s certainly also true that horticultural peoples tend to go to war a great deal. Keeley at least got that much right.
I don't think our arguments HINGE apon a lack of warfare among foragers. Like, if we found out that warfare was common among foragers, I'm not sure it would really change much about rewilding.
It would present an argument that hunting and gathering isn’t sustainable, either, since over the long term, hunter-gatherers would wipe themselves out in war. But that also raises more questions than answers. How did humanity survive as long as it did, if that’s the case? Why is there a perfect correlation between warfare and food production? Why is there no evidence whatsoever of warfare, whether from violently-killed skeletons or from artistic representations, until the advent of food production, when both types of evidence suddenly appear in abundance? The simplest explanation I can offer for that evidence is that warfare is a function of food production, but if you want to try to deny that obvious explanation, I think you’ll have your work cut out for you trying to answer all the questions that denial raises.
Lebensraum means 'living room' or 'elbow room' i.e. more room to live. It also implied expansion of German empire. There was no scarcity of land or food. It was always about greed and restoring national pride in the wake of Germany's loss in WW1. Germany's invasion of Austria and Poland had zero to do with scarcity caused by climatic conditions.
Lebensraum refers directly to more agricultural land, and arose directly from restricted production in the post-WWI era. There was a great deal of scarcity for both land and food in the Weimar era. Greed and national pride added some fuel to the fire, but the basic driving factor was Germany’s restricted resources. The invasions of Austria and Poland had everything to do with scarcity, both of productive agricultural land, as well as their dwindling coal reserves, which they needed to produce and transport their food.
What exactly about war is unsustainable? Periodic warfare, followed by a rest period where new births make up for the losses fighting, could be sustained long term, especially because it could serve as a population limiter. What definition of war is being used here, and why can’t it be sustained?
I beleive, (and fear) that many forms of life could become sustainable. Some are nice, many are horrible. My darkest fear is a sustainable suburbanization. I’m now mentally adding sustainable warfare to my fears.
Sustainable does not necessarily mean nice, and I’m glad you mentioned that distinction, because for whatever reason, it has become blurred in many people’s minds.
But there is a difference between raiding and war. Raiding doesn’t even have to involve violence; some societies “count coups” or have other contests. The point of raiding is to intimidate your enemy, and that is a peace-keeping strategy. You see the same thing in animals; animals don’t fight to the death for every scrap of meat they find contested. There’s an escalation of grand-standing and threats, giving each side plenty of time to back down. That’s an ESS. Going full-tilt for everything is not; when you take it all the way, you only have a 50/50 chance (all things being equal) of surviving.
War, as we know it, is not an ESS. It is about eradication, not intimidation. It isn’t about ensuring that you have peaceful neighbors, it’s about conquering your neighbors and absorbing them. In that, war is precisely the unstable strategy that the rest of the animal kingdom took such care to avoid. That’s what makes it unsustainable.
sigh
Ok. I’ve just put “write an article on frith and how it applies in the context of rewilding” on my list of things to do. It’s time to resurrect some good ideas, and gain some perspective. May take a week or so, tho’.
Actually, I’ve got to flesh this out, myself; this becomes full thesis in the book form of the Thirty Theses.