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When a child is born there is nothing remotely resembling large scale warfare inscribed in its genes and the discretional cultural path that must be travelled b
by openrisk 2y ago
When a child is born there is nothing remotely resembling large scale warfare inscribed in its genes and the discretional cultural path that must be travelled before such detrimental collective phenomena come to be seen as innate and inevitable is enormous.
Our predicament in relation to our war "habit" is similar to many other challenges we are facing: malignant social patterns that got established before a succession of dramatic technological recolutions are now mutating into existential risks.
It is anybody's guess how things will play out. Cultural evolution is our superpower but we are not exactly in control of it. We still in a transition zone where old moralities feel secure in their "it was ever thus" denial.
It is conceivable that we'll outgrow this phase and survive. A pacified humanity is not utopic, its the only solution to a long term sustainable existence. We thus might work backwards from what we know is the only meaningful endgame and see what it takes to get there.
But we might also implode before we solve that.
- gotoeleven 2y agoYour ancestors are the ones that won wars in the past. Inasmuch as warfare can be "inscribed" in genes, it definitely is.
- openrisk 2y agoYour argument is that historical patterns of past conditions have to repeat for ever even when these conditions go extinct or get modified dramatically? What is definitely part of inate individual behavior is competitiveness and occasional propensity for physical violence. The road from this simple trait to organize millions (and now billions) of individuals to apply lethal, technologically assisted force on millions of other individuals is long. Modern organized war is business, politics, ideology and none of that is biology.
- kikokikokiko 2y agoEven purely instinct based animals, like chimps amd lions, engage in war between groups. A human child is still a primate, and no ammount of cultural bs will make your assumption of purity at birth a reality. Life is, in all it's forms, a war between organisms to see who can get more resources. Life is war, unfortunately.
- openrisk 2y agoYou seem to be confusing traits of individual competition (and even physical violence) with large scale organized war phenomena among increasingly larger and technologically advanced groups. The logic that says that the latter follows from the former is simply not there. Social organization varies enormously in time and space and it takes a lot of "cultural bs" to get to a society that celebrates organized war and considers it inevitable.