sciencedaily.com/releases/20 … 214132.htm
just like hunter-gatherers have been seen doing *CURRENTLY.
How many examples/mass graves do we need to dig up/scientists investigate before people are happy, that our ancestors, were more savage than we could imagine baring being in those circumstances ourselves.
a grave of 30 hunter-gatherer’s, is the modern equivilent of fire-bombing an entire city. (For women)
Another so called “Shred” of evidence.
What would be the mechanism of this shift?
Can we even compare modern-day man to hunter-gatherers? hunter gatherers abide by the laws of nature i.e. beyond good and evil, therefore there is a difference between us carpet bombing a city and two tribes clubbing each other to death.
has the human animal suddenly evolved? because of some human invention of moral guilt?
nope… the only difference is that a carpet bomb is more effective…
-Imp
They didn’t raid them for food, they didn’t raid them for shelter, granted that these people probably genuinely believed that the other males posed a threat, but because humans are naturally fearful/superstitious/violent doesn’t really excuse it… I’m not saying that we all wouldn’t be the same in that situation, i’m not saying that in modern day we don’t have a much huger responsibility for the decisions we make (because their educated decisios).
They specifically raided them for… women. You’re not going to tell me that they couldn’t keep the male babies/children alive. They didn’t have that inclination because living in the natural world, under natural conditions hardens people.
I’m talking about strictly violence rates comparing the statistical amount of violence (30% of the males killed. 40% of the m ales killed) percentage statistics, not the actual number comparisons.
Or whether we can compare modern-man’s decisions to hunter-gatherer decisions in terms of morality. I’d be brutal, you’d be brutal, most of us would be savages they still have normal minds/ability to spin morals though.
We can make the comparison but I don’t think it’d be fair to *blame them for specifically being brutal over us.
I’m not judging them for their violence/savagery (i’m largely largely interested in it. And I largely admire their skills/ability to survive in the insanely harshest of conditions) I’m just saying that they were that savage and violent.
More so than us. And i’m only making that claim because 1. the truth has scientific value making predictions about human behavior/knowing thyself. 2. Its the truth. 3. Inadequate and idiotic conceeptions of human nature, produce inadequate and idiotic explanations for why people aren’t happy in modern settings and why people are the way they are.
My continous insistance that they were savage, violent and skilled at it, isn’t because I judge them, but because i’m interested in the truth.
More so than us?
less than 200 years ago we had american genocide and slavery…
less than 70 years ago we had auschwitz
More savage and violent than us?
LMAO!
-Imp
If you take the statistical amount of people that died in hunter-gatherer groups YES. if the population % which dies in hunter-gatherer wars/raids, was extended to include modern population sizes, the number of deaths which would have occured would have positively eclipsed our history.
Last time i checkeed 2 billion is more than 100 million, right?
There it is again.
violence, brutality and savagery doesn’t come into it, these are modern-mans conceptions of nature. Ignore our perception of nature, then how do we describe Cyrene’s profile picture, it isn’t violent or savage or brutal, I say man of 5000bc existed in the same state of nature as this tiger does.
Brutality and savage, or savagery are words, they have dictionary definitions, like all words they are meant to convey a specific meaning. Obviously my meaning in ‘savage’ and ‘brutality’ are using the dictionary definitions of the words.
What hunter-gatherer’s do are brutal and savage by any standards of the definitions of the word. Whether this is ‘brutal’ and ‘savage’ for hunter-gatherer life in general, maybe not, maybe thats the normal thing for them to do, maybe by their standards ‘brutality’ is somthing of an alltogether beast (like torturing someone to death for no reason everyday just for fun, not for women, ,at risk to the your own tribe etc)
Brutality/savagery are words with definitions, I am using them correctly. Your point about whats normal/natural doesn’t hold any weight.
What a tiger does can be explained as brutal and engaging in brutality, its behavior can be described as savage. Because this is normal for the tiger is irrelevant. I’m not going to say “The tiger’s attack was peaceful. Its behavior was calm as it tore the person’s flesh from their bones”
Whether predatory behavior is normal for a tiger or not is irrelevant in deciding to use the words ‘savage’ and ‘brutal’ they’re descriptive states, not moral judgements or commentary on ‘whats natural’
Whats natural is usually savage and brutal. thats the words we use to describe them, because by our standards (fuck by *any standards) thats what nature is and thats the definitions besed used to describe them.
they’re only definitions that mean specific things.
If savage means fierce, and fierce means menacingly dangerous or wild, then how is a tiger’s attack not savage?
Words are human conceptions/thoughts with a fixed definition. Sure. We use those words to explain the world around us.
Nature has no conception of ‘savage’ because nature has no conception of anything, organisms are naturally selected against an environment, some organisms can think and form fixed sounds which correspond to fixed ideas, when those words/ideas accurately correspond to what we’re seeing, we can use those words to explain the thought/visual experience, etc.
correct?
nature can’t conceptualize an ideea of ‘savage’ but we can, and the word ‘savage’ corresponds to what a tiger does when it attacks. The words are descriptive tools that humans use, thats it. A tiger’s attack is ‘savage’ because by definition thats what we mean by ‘savage’. by definition, we’re reffering to actions like that, whether or not nature outside us has a conception of it.
Nature doesn’t concieve ‘savage’ because savage is a human conception, a word, thats meant to be an informative/descriptive tool in explaining the outside world/environment to other humans. There-for whether or not a tiger is savage, entirely depends upon the accepted definition of savage, and not whether the tiger is aware of savagery, or if nature is, or if anything else is.
A phone is a phone not because a phone has some innate ‘phone’ quality, but because the noise/word “phone” is what we decided to call a device we could communicate over distances with.
So if someone says that walkie-talkie has ‘phone like properities’ going on about how nature has no concept of phone and how its not ‘truly phone like quality’ doesn’t really make a lot of sense.
“The walkie-talkie is not phone-like, thats human conception/perception, nature has no conception of phones”
This is what I am saying. I too being a modern-man say nature is savage, so a hunter-gatherer existing within his natural environment is savage too. They on the other-hand alive in their natural state simply shrug their shoulders. But can we compare them to modern-man, is a world-war a natural event? Can we shrug our shoulders at our actions?
We can’t shrug our shoulders at our own actions, hardly, in light of how hunter-gatherers live, and how we do, the fact that we engage in so much violence, is eye-brow raising and beyond horrifying. But realizing that we’re adapted to *live like them, helps explain why.
world-wars are natural, humans are naturally violent, they fight in groups, and engage in tactical raiding, on larger scale, tribal/hunter-gatherer groups engage in wars.
a world war is just one very very big tribe against other tribes.
‘natural’ just not common throughout human history.
This is an interesting clip; Howard Zinn on Human Nature and Aggression:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=subwDAZtEN0
The conclusion this leads me to is that the difference between hunter-gatherers and modern-man is the control we have over our environment and to simply disregard violence as human nature is maybe irresponsible?
I don’t know who this guy is, but that sounds like an accurate conclusion. I’ll check that link out, thanks.
Actually, I don’t much like Zinn, the guy may know what he’s talking about when it comes to politics and such, but I have found better commentators on human nature and war.
Theres two contradictory aspects of human nature.
We’re peaceful and have peaceful urges.
we’re violent and have violent urges.
These things are both in us and I find that Zinn underplays our violent nature, but I do like the fact that he does focus on the circumstancial nature of it. As in, a lot of the time, you or nations, have to tease it out of people.
As in when you ‘demonize’ someone, you’re projecting animal qualities on people which make it easier to ignore unbidden sympathy, your mind switches to viewing them as a dangerous predator, theres way to make people fear ‘filth’ or dirt/disease in people, it goes on and on.
For instance, Zinn says not all tribal groups are violent and that its circumstancial. Sure, thats true, some groups don’t engage in warfare, *MOST DO, those who don’t, have either 1. eliminated their enemies, or engage in warfare less frequently.
*anyway.
I like that zinn clearly discounts the ‘demonic ape theory’ (that human nature is warlike and demonic) but I don’t like that he tries to discount that we’re ‘innately’ violent and that it comes from circumstance.
Sure. our innate mechanisms are sparked during circumstances which they’re meant to.
For example:
Males have a predispostion towards having erections. Because all stimuli doesn’t normally produce an erection does not mean that, its not human nature for males to get an erection, it is, its just circumstancial. We’re adapted to deal with a normal adaptive problem - females, when the stimuli isn’t there, we don’t usually have the adaptive solution.
Zinn is ignorant about human nature in-so-far that he hopelessly simplifies it for a political end; to avoid suggesting that citizens are responsible for war. Other than that I’d have to agree with him, ,its just so hopelessly simplified.
Zinn just oversimplifies issues. He’s right, we have a penchant/urge for peace.
he’s wrong when he say’s its not innate, and that its circumstancial. (it is both INNATE and circumstancial)
have no fear, we’ll turn the planet to radioactive dust before too long…
-Imp
We have the same adaptations for violence, I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point in human history the death-rate did hit that.
I sure, hope not, and it hasn’t as of yet. We’ve also been getting more peaceful the further we get from nature, but I guess that doesn’t much matter when we’re talking about weapons, which one day, might be able to blow up a planet.
We have weapons now of such destructive force that our imagination alone doesn’t do it justice, ,let alone, the weapons of a thousand years from now. (or say, 50years)
Zinn hopelessly confounds the truth trying to simplify it brutally to support a political end. He says people are not innately violence and that we’re circumstancially capable of it.
But the case is: We possess the innate potential to burst into violence, c ircumstancially. Like almost every adaptation ever, its meant to deal with *aspects of the environment.
Its like saying that humans aren’t predisposed towards potentially being able to throw up under circumstance because humans don’t normally throw up, introduce a bacterial infection and you’ll see enough puke to last you a lifetime. Just because humans aren’t innately blood-thirsty like a mindless demon or mechanical construct built for slaughter, ,doesn’t mean we’re not innnately adapted to expload into violence dedpending on circumstance.
How can zinn highlight the circumstance but continously try and sweep the innate part under the rug? He says people need to be massively proagated against t o support a war, thats true, but heres the thing, people are naturally receptive to that propaganda, because we’re naturally receptive to justifying violence and violence towards others, even when originally we abhor it.
Its a game where he grabs what he wants/finds acceptable, spends all his time highlighting that, and then taking unlikable aspects of human nature, and sweeping them under the rug.
Zinn has a lot of respect from me for writing the masterpiece that he has, but… as far as I can respect his opinions about human nature/origins of violence, its a bit pick/choose.
about the time when he admits it became ‘an important goal for him to deny it’ (that humans were innately violent) it gets a bit questionable.