Is it natural for humans to make war?

[Wesley]

Is it natural for humans to make war? New study of tribal societies reveals conflict is an alien concept

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/is-it-natural-for-humans-to-make-war-new-study-of-tribal-societies-reveals-conflict-is-an-alien-concept-8718069.html

 

 

Is it natural for humans to make war? Is organised violence between rival political groups an inevitable outcome of the human condition? Some scholars believe the answer is yes, but new research suggests not.

A study of tribal societies that live by hunting and foraging has found that war is an alien concept and not, as some academics have suggested, an innate feature of so-called “primitive people”.

 

The findings have re-opened a bitter academic dispute over whether war is a relatively recent phenomenon invented by “civilised” societies over the past few thousand years, or a much older part of human nature. In other words, is war an ancient and chronic condition that helped to shape humanity over many hundreds of thousands of years?

 

The idea is that war is the result of an evolutionary ancient predisposition that humans may have inherited in their genetic makeup as long ago as about 7 million years, when we last shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees – who also wage a kind of war between themselves.

 

However, two anthropologists believe this is a myth and have now produced evidence to show it. Douglas Fry and Patrik Soderberg [umlaut over o] of Abo Akademi University in Vasa, Finland, studied 148 violently lethal incidents documented by anthropologists working among 21 mobile bands of hunter-gatherer societies, which some scholars have suggested as a template for studying how humans lived for more than 99.9 per cent of human history, before the invention of agriculture about 10,000 years ago.

 

They found that only a tiny minority of violent deaths come close to being defined as acts of war. Most the violence was perpetrated by one individual against another and usually involved personal grudges involving women or stealing.

....

More in the article.

[FreedomPhilosophy]

 Chimps are predators, humans are not - that's a big biological difference. Chimp "warfare" is territorial in nature and means that victors may get better provisioned. Mass human warfare is ideologically motivated although there are clearly material interests for the elite classes.

 

Most animals that engage in intra-special conflict don't tend to kill their opponents. It's good enough just to see them off.

[Lowe D]

What an incredibly stupid study.

 

Oh, heaven's no, hunter gatherers don't make war!  They just kill each other.  That's totally different, because I say so.

[Heath Long]

Is it not true that evolution has made it so our evolution is self driven? We can learn of our past from these studies, but nature has selected us to our current state, and we are now able to evolve while being conscience of our own evolution. I am not sure that any other life form on this planet has this luxury. I am certain that most are not consciencly aware that this is true...or not aware enough to care. We are at a tipping point. We will either evolve or devolve. The numbers show devolve, unfortunately. Those who are conscience of our role in evolution are not reproducing. These are the numbers as they are today...perhaps something will change.

[st434u]

Other research, such as those conducted by Lloyd deMause, shows the opposite. That war is very natural among primitive hunter-gatherer tribes. He finds not only that wars were common, but that the child-rearing method used by primitive peoples generates a psyche that is prone to war.

 

But I think there's more to this than deMause has uncovered. You can use economic theory to predict that war, as well as tribal communism and the rejection of private property, will be beneficial and selected for in hunter-gatherer societies. And this in turn will tend to select for the child-rearing methods that will produce the bloodthirsty, tribal communist warriors.

 

Because primitive hunter-gatherers can only extract the food that the land naturally provides, but cannot increase this production, two things will happen.

 

1) With respect to intra-tribal relationships (relationships between members in the same tribe), almost all if not all property will be regarded as communal, and any attempts by any individual to increase production and keep it for themselves or their family will be met with utmost resistance, and will be characterized as greedy and exploitative (in fact, the very concept of "family" is foreign to most hunter-gatherers, as is the concept of marriage, both of which only become beneficial after the introduction of agriculture). Because when an individual hunts an animal or gathers food and keeps it for themselves, there is less food available for everybody else. What's more, in many cases increasing production this year will result in lower production the next year, such as in the case of over-hunting a pack of animals, or removing too many bulbs/root vegetables from the land, so even if the individual is sharing the production equally amongst all tribe members (or "from each according to it's ability, to each according to it's need"), production of food will tend to be highly regulated/controlled by either the leaders (representative democracy), or the tribe as a whole (direct democracy). This explains why in the modern world, there is a clear natural tendency for people who do not understand economics to become socialists/communists. For all it's ills, religion did a great job at curtailing this tendency in the past, even in the lack of economic understanding, but as the world becomes ever more secular, this effect is wearing off.

 

2) With respect to inter-tribal relationships (relationships with other tribes), there will be a tendency to regard people belonging to neighboring tribes as mortal enemies. While there can be a period of standoff between two neighboring tribes, especially if the available land is large enough and the resources plentiful, at one point or another, one of the tribes will find it beneficial to attack the other and kill as many of their members as possible. This is because the neighboring tribe is, to some extent, competing for the same overlapping pool of natural resources. And because the situation applies both ways, both tribes will know that if they wait too long, the other tribe could become too strong to defeat, and at that point the only options left are escape to foreign lands (with the huge risk that this implies) or death. Once the war is waged and won (meaning all enemy combatants are dead, with maybe a few having escaped), however, the triumphant tribe faces a decision. They can exterminate every single member of the opposing tribe, and keep all the land for themselves and their own offspring. What often will happen, however, is that there is too much land available for the one tribe to take over in one swoop, especially considering the casualties of war. So what they will do instead is kill all the males, but keep the females alive and come back repeatedly to rape them, and so spread their genes onto what's left of the other tribe, providing genetic diversity as well as maximizing the rate of reproduction. Because of this, one would expect that primitive child-rearing modes not only prepare boys to become warriors as they reach adulthood, but also rapists, and indeed that is what Lloyd deMause finds. Likewise girls will be raised in a way that will prepare them to comply to male aggressions and rape, and not try to fight off attackers from another tribe, but to instead discharge all their pain upon children and so prepare them for adult life; for this will tend to maximize their rate of reproductive success, as of that their children, under this environment.

 

Notice that none of the 2 applies under an agricultural setting, where each individual can increase the production within their own private piece of land; and peaceful cooperation (relying instead only on defensive violence, but not offensive), private property, lovemaking based on seduction instead of rape, and marriage and family unions instead of polygamy and tribal unions, are much preferable in order to maximize production and standards of living. The problem is that it takes many, many generations to shift from one childrearing mode to the other, apparently opposite one. And there is reason to believe that until very recently, nobody had even figured out what the optimal childrearing mode was for the agricultural setting, because they had not even figured out what the optimal sociopolitical system was (private property; monogamy and family unions; and no central, coercive monopoly of ultimate law enforcement, creation and interpretation). Or to the extent that somebody did figure these things out, their ideas did not become known.

 

Another problem is that even if you understand what must be done, you're still faced with the issue of getting the masses to adopt this system. It was religion that originally turned the savages into more civilized peoples, and despite the perceived benefits of a secularization of society, the results so far have not been too bright. I'm not saying religion is the only way to get the masses to behave in a civilized fashion, but so far, no other belief system has achieved this. (again, for the masses. I'm not talking about the few intellectual elites who can understand Stefan Molyneux and other writers like him)

It is true that religions aren't perfect in any sense, but maybe what I'm saying is that it could be helpful to have a new religion, one that doesn't compromise as much, and doesn't give in to the barbaric urges of the masses as much as the religions of old have had to do to remain popular. Or perhaps we have entered a new age where religion is no longer the most effective way to spread an idea among the masses. That could also be a possibility, and I'm certainly open to it. But if there is another way, the answer eludes me.

[fridolutin]

Yes , war is natural

 

Our imune system is the individual war some of our cells fight against unknown  intruders and.it is only normal that it has a macro reflection in the form of territorial protection..