> Civilization emerged around settled agriculture, not to wage war. The point of central agriculture was to produce more bodies, to wage war, if you're to beli

> Civilization emerged around settled agriculture, not to wage war. The point of central agriculture was to produce more bodies, to wage war, if you're to believe the argument in the Origins of Political History, and I do. This necessitated bureaucracy, hence Civilization. > Arguably this was a movement away from violence, as compared to nomadic tribes constantly competing over hunting and foraging territories. Well we have a cleaner record of the violence after that point in History, the scale for which got more brutal and concentrated over time. When your population is small, territories over the globe are vast and plentiful; I fail to see an angle where centralization was necessitated for peace, as opposed to conquest. > How exactly do we “calibrate our compasses” without reference to our past? To be clear: it's not a question of reference, as the past shaped and developed the morals you and I have today. Though judging it broadly in a detached sense, through our morals, renders most of our past evil, which is banal. It's not a person. Looking to the past can help identify and inform what we deem to be wrong today, which is different than saying the past is evil. What we take for granted here is consequentialism, which is retrospective. Leading up to WW1, war was widely romanticized and considered virtuous and even the upper classmen partook (see: the War That Ended Peace), likened to skirmishes that ended fairly quickly, and of course it was a different animal by then, war was hellish once more. Colonialism in concept was not considered wrong, though perhaps consequences as a result (e.g. atrocities) would not have been considered good if you quizzed the average person. When we judge colonialism, we largely judge the consequence such that atrocities are unjustifiable no matter the other benefits. Sure. But I say to you: that's all of History, that's all of what led us here today, that led us to be "enlightened" (to be "good" as we understand it to mean today) and type on computers. We'll shift our course to avoid the bad stuff, and I'm sure in the future looking back we'll find evils.