5 ms·
Beyond violence, it's hard for people to contextualize how fragile life was prior to about 300 years ago - a scratch, some bad food, a broken finger, or any of
by observationist 3y ago
Beyond violence, it's hard for people to contextualize how fragile life was prior to about 300 years ago - a scratch, some bad food, a broken finger, or any of a million tiny things that we just take for granted could kill you. Without an educational system, nobody knew anything except essentially what they gossiped about, learned from their trade or family, or picked up through direct experience. The world was a lot darker and scarier, and that made preemptive violence an effective cultural strategy. Things that reinforced tribal integrity and weakened other tribes, like violent traditions and religions, were effective memes for perpetuating lineages.
There are no humans alive who do not have horrific monsters for ancestors. We are alive and civilized because our ancestors did terrible, monstrous things.
It's wonderful that the dark, terrible things are the anomalies in this period of history, but we need to eliminate the notions of peaceful, paradaisical societies living in harmony with nature before the evil industrial revolution came along and ruined everything.
Humans are vicious, territorial, tribal, warlike animals with a nearly unbroken history of brutality, terror, and murder of outsiders. Our modern civilizations are marvels, even as deeply flawed and imperfect as we are.
It's important to honestly understand the good and the bad of our present situations, it helps us set the expectations for the trajectory of progress.
You could take a human baby from 200,000 years ago and raise them in a modern family in New York and they'd be perfectly adapted to these times. The corollary to that is a little darker - any one of us could have been raised in any of the savage societies thousands of years ago, and we'd have been just as brutal, ignorant, and murderous as any others.
The default assumption about anything before about 500 years ago should be that of a desperate fight for survival. The exceptions are few and far between vast and violent swathes of dead people.
- DyslexicAtheist 3y agolanguage matters. we are not more "monsters" than all the other animals. our hate is just more potent because we harness technology better than the average murderous ape. luckily we will end and we will not matter going forward.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> we are not more "monsters" than all the other animals We’re not. But the chimpanzee-bonobos violence disparity, together with our eradication of the Neanderthals (with some interbreeding) seems to point to humans being, naturally, on the more violent end of the spectrum. That isn’t immutable. But it means our tendency to be angry and vengeful is probably too high; we should be mindful in trusting those emotions.
- DyslexicAtheist 3y agoyou had me here, and I would love to read more about that. > seems to point to humans being, naturally, on the more violent end of the spectrum. I read Agner Fog's work on this topic (https://books.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp.0128.pdf https://books.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp.0128.pdf) but I always lumped humanity in with other animals and attributed our numbers of violent casualties to our weapons. But maybe we are really more viscous and violent on this spectrum. I wonder though would other primates be equally prone to it if they had the tools (and same disease of consciousness).
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> maybe we are really more viscous and violent on this spectrum To my knowledge, the two species with genocidal tendencies are humans and chimpanzees [1]. The drive for not only defeating but thoroughly eliminating an adversary appears to be, at least in modern biology, unique. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War
- aurareturn 3y agoMost of what you described didn’t happen 500 years ago. Try 5000 years ago. 500 years ago, people were already living together in huge numbers. Cities already formed.
- imbnwa 3y ago4K years ago there was urbanized international trade in just the Mediterranean with tin coming in from Britain