Literacy and Patriarchy

[Bonam]

This is an ongoing experiment. I am not convinced western societies are doomed but I don't disagree with your assessment of the risk.

I don't think they are necessarily doomed either, there is still some time for the situation to change, but currently the risk is not even on the radar. But, the demographic change will take probably on order of another 30-50 years. In the meantime, it's possible we'll hit the technological singularity before then, which could make all this irrelevant.

[WIP]

This sentence just seems to pop into your post without any support from what comes before it ?

Of course there was a good amount, if not constant, war and brutal torture of innocents, too, committed by the new world hunter-gatherers.

Where's your evidence? Just because that fits your theory of human nature doesn't make it so!

The weight of evidence shows that hunter-gatherer groups have had a high stake in promoting harmony and little to gain from excessive aggression...which should be plainly obvious: until there's something to fight for, there's nothing to gain!

If violence and killing came so natural to us, it wouldn't be a universal taboo, and killing would come more naturally, with much less psychological distress. Right now, the people who can kill without remorse or psychological trauma, are considered psychopaths for good reason. Because normal people experience some level of psychological trauma from war. And people today, are no different than the ancient warriors two or three thousand years ago:

http://phdiva.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/rage-of-achilles-and-ptsd-in-antiquity.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/warriors-in-ancient-iraq-suffered-posttraumatic-stress-disorder-more-than-3000-years-ago-say-researchers-10000953.html

http://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.ca/2015/01/ancient-warriors-suffered-from-post.html#.VO7iHsm9as4

[WIP]

Patriarchal societies are still taking over the globe. Patriarchal cultures continue to have far more children than ones that are in various stages of forsaking patriarchy, and mass migration of people from patriarchal cultures into the rest of the world suggests that the Western experiment in modern egalitarianism will likely be wiped out within a relatively short time period, as the Western cultures that gave rise to it become minorities everywhere (as they already are on a worldwide scale). The present day mass migration differs from past mass migrations that replaced one culture with another only in that it is proceeding more quickly and with less resistance.

I wonder if you've given any thought to how dangerously overpopulated this world is because of the patriarchal cultures you have such high esteem for? A world with 7 billion is a temporary situation, because it's only managed now with high consumption of a non-renewable resource - oil, and the most productive agricultural zones in the world are being destroyed by topsoil erosion and depletion of aquifers and surface freshwater supplies. If populations don't drop dramatically, die-offs will be the end result! Nature has to return to a balance at some point in the future, regardless of the wishes of patriarchs.

[WIP]

I don't think they are necessarily doomed either, there is still some time for the situation to change, but currently the risk is not even on the radar. But, the demographic change will take probably on order of another 30-50 years. In the meantime, it's possible we'll hit the technological singularity before then, which could make all this irrelevant.

I'm always amazed how many atheists are putting faith in Ray Kurzweil's secular version of heaven!

[WIP]

No one has been arguing that cultural behaviors are genetic.

There are a lot of evolutionary psychologists claiming that rape, warfare, patriarchal monogamous relationships etc., are all genetic/ rather than adaptive behaviours.

What is being argued are behaviors are functions of the environment and specific behaviors are evolutionary adaptations to specific environments.

If our cultures are a product of adapting to environmental conditions, there is little time to have much of an impact on core human nature, compared to the 200,000 years living in small hunter-gatherer bands...and including the previous millions of years of evolution from earlier ancestors.

Specifically, prior to mass communication, patriarchal societies had an evolutionary advantage when survival required competition with other groups of humans for access to limited resources. And societies that adapted agriculture had a long term evolutionary advantage over societies that remained hunter gatherers.

How does "mass communication" intersect with "societies that adapted agriculture?" Permanent, fixed agriculture started becoming the normal patter thousands of years before we had TV, radio, newspapers.......what sort of mass communications existed thousands of years ago?

Regardless, most of our evolutionary adaptations are not for the kind of living we do today. Which is likely why we have such a huge percentage of the population dependent on antipsychotic and antidepressant drugs! Our genetic adaptations are for: active living - that is moving about most of the day..not being sedentary; living in small communities where we all know each other; those communities are egalitarian with food-sharing for common meals; temporary sexual pairings (none are permanently monogamous); child-rearing duties are shared.....and there's likely many other common cultural traits among hunter-gatherers that have lived in everything from forests to desert environments. These societies are where we are going to look for what is really 'natural' or hardwired as human behaviour.

When it comes to modern cultures, we could expect the healthiest modern societies to be ones that have the most in common with early primitive societies. So, for one example: if the rise of hierarchies didn't become established until the first human societies started living in fixed or semi-permanent locations, where they could acquire possessions and build up food stores, we should expect that the most egalitarian societies, with the least amount of gaps in income and wealth, should be less violent, and have better mental and physical health stats than the less equal societies...and guess what! That's exactly what the numbers tell us from a wide array of epidemiological research cross-referenced by income disparities in both poor and relatively wealthy countries: The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger Paperback – Apr 26 2011

by Richard Wilkinson (Author), Kate Pickett (Author)

Edited February 26, 2015 by WIP

[TimG]

If our cultures are a product of adapting to environmental conditions, there is little time to have much of an impact on core human nature, compared to the 200,000 years living in small hunter-gatherer bands...and including the previous millions of years of evolution from earlier ancestors.

Social behaviors change very quickly because they do not require biological mutations. Radical changes in environment can change a society in a generation or two, however, you also need to remember that a big part of our environment today is the technology that we have available and society adapts to technology.

Our genetic adaptations are for: active living - that is moving about most of the day..not being sedentary; living in small communities where we all know each other; those communities are egalitarian with food-sharing for common meals; temporary sexual pairings (none are permanently monogamous); child-rearing duties are shared.....and there's likely many other common cultural traits among hunter-gatherers that have lived in everything from forests to desert environments. These societies are where we are going to look for what is really 'natural' or hardwired as human behaviour.

You are mixing in genetic traits with social traits. The need for activity and a diet with less sugar is different from the child rearing relationships which depend entirely on the economic structure of society. The economy of a hunter-gather society is quite different from an agricultural society which means the ideal relationships will change. Technology also changes the ideal social relationships.

When it comes to modern cultures, we could expect the healthiest modern societies to be ones that have the most in common with early primitive societies.

You have a square peg which you keep trying to pound into a round hole. The healthiest modern society is one that is best able to exploit the technology available. In particular, we need specialization to maximize productivity today and a society that supports extreme specialization is quite different from hunter-gather societies.

So, for one example: if the rise of hierarchies didn't become established until the first human societies started living in fixed or semi-permanent locations, where they could acquire possessions and build up food stores

Wealth differentials are a consequence of specialization and the fact that societies that invested in building assets had an advantage over societies that lived day to day. The development of assets also meant it was necessary to defend those assets from other groups of humans which realized that violence was a quicker way to obtain assets that take a long time to build. This, in turn, led to the development of patriarchy and hierarchies because such societies are better able to defend themselves.

we should expect that the most egalitarian societies, with the least amount of gaps in income and wealth, should be less violent, and have better mental and physical health stats than the less equal societies.

Nomadic societies had nothing that other groups of humans wanted so they had no need to defend themselves. This style of living became impossible as soon as permanent settlements became the norm. The entire "income gap" issue is an red herring. No one seriously wants to eliminate the "income gap" on a global level because that would mean transferring a lot of wealth from the middle class in wealthy countries to developing countries. It is really just a justification for using violence (e.g. the police) to take assets from some and giving them to others within the context of a local society while doing whatever is necessary to preserve income gaps between the local society and other societies. The trouble is such seizures have the downside of discouraging the creation of assets in the first place which harms the entire society. Edited February 26, 2015 by TimG

[Bonam]

I wonder if you've given any thought to how dangerously overpopulated this world is because of the patriarchal cultures you have such high esteem for? A world with 7 billion is a temporary situation, because it's only managed now with high consumption of a non-renewable resource - oil, and the most productive agricultural zones in the world are being destroyed by topsoil erosion and depletion of aquifers and surface freshwater supplies. If populations don't drop dramatically, die-offs will be the end result! Nature has to return to a balance at some point in the future, regardless of the wishes of patriarchs.

And yet, if we do end up in the situation you describe of depleting resources and various societies fighting over what remains, then as you and TimG have discussed in this thread, it is the more aggressive patriarchal ones that, historically, have performed better in such situations.

[Bonam]

I'm always amazed how many atheists are putting faith in Ray Kurzweil's secular version of heaven!

It's not a matter of faith, rather, it's a possibility that can readily be imagined by extrapolating technological trends into the future. It is not a certainty, of course. Also, while Kurzweil has certainly popularized the idea, it is not his invention, nor is he the only prominent thinker that suggests that we are headed towards it.

[WIP]

Social behaviors change very quickly because they do not require biological mutations. Radical changes in environment can change a society in a generation or two, however, you also need to remember that a big part of our environment today is the technology that we have available and society adapts to technology.

You are mixing in genetic traits with social traits. The need for activity and a diet with less sugar is different from the child rearing relationships which depend entirely on the economic structure of society. The economy of a hunter-gather society is quite different from an agricultural society which means the ideal relationships will change. Technology also changes the ideal social relationships.

A couple of points need to be clarified here: genetics and environment do not exist separate from each other. The environment plays a large and important role in how genes code the production and direction of proteins for growth and development. On the old nature vs. nurture debate that used to go on endlessly between behaviourists and determininsts who believed that personality traits and brain development were locked in at birth and could hardly be altered throughout life. Nowadays, studies of neuroplasticity and other new research, reveal that the environmental factors that can alter brain and other physical development begin even prior to birth - when the baby is still in the womb. Nutrition is certainly a strong factor, but studies of women who went through pregnancies during major conflicts going back as far as WWII Europe, show that the stress hormones released by the mother had negative and damaging effects on the babies they gave birth to. And, even after adulthood, neuroplasticity is still going on...though at a much slower pace.

So genetic traits don't exist separately from social adaptations, and the past 10,000 years of "civilization" has no doubt altered us at least slightly, though it is very difficult to prove evolution over short timeframes. You may have noticed that there are articles popping up on a regular basis arguing back and forth whether recent changes in technology have changed the course of human evolution. No doubt they will in the long run, but the other point that needs to be stressed is that evolution does not make complete or nice and neat changes to an animal's physical development. So, giant pandas...who were once omnivores and ate large quantities of meat, shifted to a vegetarian diet for unknown reasons, and have made some adaptations to breaking open and eating bamboo chutes. BUT, their digestive tracts are still too short for a vegetarian, and they become clogged with bamboo fiber if they live to old age and die from malnutrition. Humans follow the exact opposite trend: coming from a vegetarian lineage, with a long digestive tract and teeth that though small compared to other vegetarians...are designed for eating plants...not meat. But, our high protein demands pushed our ancestors towards hunting, consuming insects, and making fire at a very early stage in human development. And, just like the Pandas, we are not perfectly adaptive to either a vegetarian nor an omnivore diet....but that won't stop anyone from arguing endlessly on the point!

So, on this recent topic, when I ask for evidence that basic human behaviour drives us (or at least males) to be violent and homocidal if we can get away with it, I want to see more evidence for the claimed widescale violence in hunter-gatherers that cannot be explained by environmental factors alone, such as fights between two individuals that may have went out of control of the group, or violence that connects with times of high stress: major environmental shifts causing food shortages or encroachment by outsiders....which is happening to the few last hunter-gatherer bands that have resisted joining "civilization" in our time.

The evidence suggests that healthy human societies develop many violence reduction and aversion strategies to limit violence. And the few who have no capacity for empathy and can commit evil without conscience, are the kinds of people who have been marginalized by all societies traditionally. This may be changing in our time, since modern industrial capitalist society seems to provide many opportunities for psychopaths to express themselves and not face repercussions. For example, a lot of circumstantial evidence gathered from many long-running conflicts would indicate that the psychopath is the most suitably adapted to life in a war zone, or to become the career soldier going from one battlefield to another. In past wars, returning veterans with PTSD have had impacts on the societies they return to, but returning psychopaths who may be lauded as war heroes for committing unspeakable crimes with no consequences in a war theater, are a threat to the general public, if and when they decide to bring the war home with them!

There have been a number of articles written in recent years questioning the business culture of short term profit, and much less willingness to prosecute financial malfeasance at the top of the pyramid. How many psychopaths are Wall Street traders or hedge fund investors these days? That's what I'd like to know! The next stage in human evolution will be to gradually turn more and more people into psychopaths as they chase the brass ring and try to become billionaires themselves.

[WIP]

It's not a matter of faith, rather, it's a possibility that can readily be imagined by extrapolating technological trends into the future. It is not a certainty, of course. Also, while Kurzweil has certainly popularized the idea, it is not his invention, nor is he the only prominent thinker that suggests that we are headed towards it.

There is still no theory to explain what consciousness is or how much of our internal beliefs about our own consciousness: unitary mind directing a physical body, and permanently existing till death (and after death for some believers) is the product of self-generated delusions and along with our sensory maps of the world, it's likely for the purpose of keeping a complex physical organism functioning in this world. Whenever a subject suffers damage to one or more centers in the brain, we find all of these perceptions, including unified consciousness fall apart.

So, exactly what sort of consciousness would Kurzweil and his acolytes be uploading to the future super-computer? It doesn't matter what technology is developed in the future, it can't transfer a sense of consciousness from a biological organism to a computer microchip if it's self-generated illusion to begin with. That computer joining the Singularity may gather information from billions of people today that hypothetically carry on like the biological organisms they gathered information from, but whatever "life" the Singularity contains afterwards in digital nirvana, will be a complete break from the hosts they gathered their information from. They will still be a computer simulation of real conscious beings. Maybe a convincing simulation, but a simulation nonetheless. Kurzweil seems to think that an exponential growth of information will continue until it 'saturates' the Universe...whatever the hell that means! I wondered if he was reading Deepak Chopra when he wrote that book. Chopra comes out with the same pointless claims of information being eternal and existing without the physical sources that created it. To me, it still sounds like another attempt to cheat death. The sense of consciousness hardwired into us put a high premium on generating fear of death.

So at some point in human evolution, when we started thinking about the future, we started cobbling ideas together to cheat death and live forever. Hunter-gatherers reincarnate as birds, lions, bears, whales, fish etc.., and later on we got heaven and hell and now we have the Singularity!

A psychological theory - Terror Management Theory proposes that fear of death exists in the background regardless of how much we try to accept it or drive it out of existence...it's sort of always there according to TMT, motivating our cultural developments and monument and legacy building, and wars...fear and anxiety can drive some people to commit acts of wreckless violence and risk their lives. So, I'll just wait for the boatman to take me off to hades some day and ignore the supernatural and the super-technical attempts that promise me eternal life!

[TimG]

A couple of points need to be clarified here: genetics and environment do not exist separate from each other.

This may be all true but I am not sure why it is relevant. We are discussing social evolution and the factors that affect it. These factors include the environment but also include technology and the relationships with other societies. Technology is perhaps the most important because it completely changes the way human interact with the environment and with each other. For example, the nuclear bomb has made direct war between major powers unthinkable and is a big part of the reason for the relative peace over the last 70 years.

This link to technology is why comparisons to prehistoric societies are of limited use. The societies that will succeed are those that are best able to leverage the technology available.

Edited February 27, 2015 by TimG

[Michael Hardner]

Where's your evidence? Just because that fits your theory of human nature doesn't make it so!

I read Samuel de Champlain's diary. There were descriptions of wars between tribes and brutal torture too.

https://books.google.ca/books?id=cvIflaodiYAC&pg=PA53&lpg=PA53&dq=de+champlain+indian+torture&source=bl&ots=usbiorY5u7&sig=hYpUarCT0CP3FeUFkFqX64HHodY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=UcjwVLzVIMqIsQSOv4Ao&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=de%20champlain%20indian%20torture&f=false

The weight of evidence shows that hunter-gatherer groups have had a high stake in promoting harmony and little to gain from excessive aggression...which should be plainly obvious: until there's something to fight for, there's nothing to gain!

Even modern wars happen with little to gain, so...

If violence and killing came so natural to us, it wouldn't be a universal taboo, and killing would come more naturally, with much less psychological distress. Right now, the people who can kill without remorse or psychological trauma, are considered psychopaths for good reason.

I don't believe that at all. "Murder" is not the same as "violence and killing"...

[Michael Hardner]

This entire thread is about the switch from hunter gathers to agricultural societies to modern societies. The process where certain social traits emerged and came to dominate all societies is not random. It see the process as a 'survival of the fittest' exercise.

Ok... then back to your statement "Specifically, prior to mass communication, patriarchal societies had an evolutionary advantage."

What do you mean by "mass communication" ? That's generally used to describe fairly modern communications... 20th century even. What are you referring to ?

[Michael Hardner]

Regardless, most of our evolutionary adaptations are not for the kind of living we do today. Which is likely why we have such a huge percentage of the population dependent on antipsychotic and antidepressant drugs!

I agree.

When it comes to modern cultures, we could expect the healthiest modern societies to be ones that have the most in common with early primitive societies.

I agree here too, and I think we're naturally going to technologize ourselves backwards to the point where our technologies only help us to live better, not differently, than before.

[WIP]

This may be all true but I am not sure why it is relevant. We are discussing social evolution and the factors that affect it. These factors include the environment but also include technology and the relationships with other societies. Technology is perhaps the most important because it completely changes the way human interact with the environment and with each other. For example, the nuclear bomb has made direct war between major powers unthinkable and is a big part of the reason for the relative peace over the last 70 years.

This link to technology is why comparisons to prehistoric societies are of limited use. The societies that will succeed are those that are best able to leverage the technology available.

Technology doesn't change who we are inside! That's the point I'm trying to make here. So, when new technologies are invented or placed into mass circulation and adopted by the majority of people, we may indeed have changes in culture, in personal wellbeing, and changes in the way people interact. And, I would submit that, since the introduction of television in the post-war period, these new technologies have had some benefits, but overwhelmingly negative effects on child development and the way people interact in their daily lives.

The expert consensus today is firmly established that TV should not become a large part of young children's daily lives, and no young child should have a TV in their bedroom. TV has not only worked against literacy, it has also made modern consumerism...where masses of people buy products on impulse to try to fill deep-seated psychological needs/ rather than the consumer of previous times, who generally bought new products when they felt they were needed. The new consumerism, made possible with absorbing media like TV and all of the new personal technologies added since, have created an average consumer who is slightly neurotic at best, and at worst - puts things ahead of people in their lives.

So, sure enough technology is changing us....but most of the changes are not for the better! Because the majority of our physical and mental adaptations are for an active life in wide, open spaces, carrying few (if any) personal possessions (negating the formation of organized hierarchies), being resourceful and hunting and gathering food from the land and bringing it back to camp for a common meal shared by all the tribe members. That is most of the common features of life for most of human history, and ever since "civilization" began a few thousand years ago, we have already had to adapt, with varying degrees of success to life in more crowded environs...especially cities, extreme hierarchies, occasional wars and genocides, a poorer diet, and the simple fact that modern technologies have not improved the lives of the majority of people.

There was a long decline for most people after the advent of agricultural life, and in modern times even today, it's a tough case to make that the billions living on less than two dollars a day, and having to pick through garbage and eat substandard food with no access to safe drinking water working in hell-on-earth sweatshops....are living better than our distant ancestors 10 or more thousand years ago!

[WIP]

I read Samuel de Champlain's diary. There were descriptions of wars between tribes and brutal torture too.

https://books.google.ca/books?id=cvIflaodiYAC&pg=PA53&lpg=PA53&dq=de+champlain+indian+torture&source=bl&ots=usbiorY5u7&sig=hYpUarCT0CP3FeUFkFqX64HHodY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=UcjwVLzVIMqIsQSOv4Ao&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=de%20champlain%20indian%20torture&f=false

Did you bother reading anything I posted before? I never said there were no wars prior to the Euro Conquest; I pointed to the archaeological evidence showing that the periods of wars and violence over the ages in the Americas correlate with population densities and transitions back and forth between hunter-gatherer migratory life (times of peace), and times when the horticulture portion of farming was widely adopted (the ages that led to wars). Which was where the eastern woodlands were at the time of Champlain's arrival!

But, it has to be noted that there had also been a trend towards forming larger alliances, like the Iroquois Confederacy, and establishing clear territorial boundaries, and judicial bodies, to reduce the likelihood of raids and inter-tribal skirmishes. Needless to say, Champlain's strategy...which is evidenced right in his diaries, was to pick a side and exacerbate the differences for his own advantages. Unfortunately, he didn't understand what was actually happening on the ground and picked the wrong side....similar to empire-builders today!

I don't believe that at all. "Murder" is not the same as "violence and killing"...

The effects of having to kill, on most normal people are not different from murder...whether they or their leaders concoct fanciful ways to justify the killing.

[Bonam]

Technology doesn't change who we are inside! That's the point I'm trying to make here. So, when new technologies are invented or placed into mass circulation and adopted by the majority of people, we may indeed have changes in culture, in personal wellbeing, and changes in the way people interact. And, I would submit that, since the introduction of television in the post-war period, these new technologies have had some benefits, but overwhelmingly negative effects on child development and the way people interact in their daily lives.

Indeed, technology doesn't change "what we are inside", but it does provide for our basic needs, thus preventing people from having to fight and die over the basics like food and shelter. Elimination of scarcity allows humans to live in a more peaceful way.

The expert consensus today is firmly established that TV should not become a large part of young children's daily lives, and no young child should have a TV in their bedroom. TV has not only worked against literacy, it has also made modern consumerism...where masses of people buy products on impulse to try to fill deep-seated psychological needs/ rather than the consumer of previous times, who generally bought new products when they felt they were needed. The new consumerism, made possible with absorbing media like TV and all of the new personal technologies added since, have created an average consumer who is slightly neurotic at best, and at worst - puts things ahead of people in their lives.

The current generation is the most literate ever... doing the majority of their social interaction through the written word rather than through speech.

As for consumerism... those who could afford it have always accumulated frivilous objects and luxuries. This used to be restricted to the nobility/aristocrats, who kept the rest of the population as either literal or virtual slaves. Today, it's available to a far greater portion of the population.

So, sure enough technology is changing us....but most of the changes are not for the better! Because the majority of our physical and mental adaptations are for an active life in wide, open spaces, carrying few (if any) personal possessions (negating the formation of organized hierarchies), being resourceful and hunting and gathering food from the land and bringing it back to camp for a common meal shared by all the tribe members.

Silly idolization of a time period you have no first hand evidence for. Reality is people were killed often and early in those times, by disease or by injury on those hunts or through conflict with neighboring groups or rivals within their own groups. The majority of skeletons preserved from the time period show signs of damage due to violence throughout their lives.

That is most of the common features of life for most of human history, and ever since "civilization" began a few thousand years ago, we have already had to adapt, with varying degrees of success to life in more crowded environs...especially cities, extreme hierarchies, occasional wars and genocides, a poorer diet, and the simple fact that modern technologies have not improved the lives of the majority of people.

If life in cities was so much worse, then people wouldn't have kept moving into them.

There was a long decline for most people after the advent of agricultural life, and in modern times even today, it's a tough case to make that the billions living on less than two dollars a day, and having to pick through garbage and eat substandard food with no access to safe drinking water working in hell-on-earth sweatshops....are living better than our distant ancestors 10 or more thousand years ago!

Those people are living that way precisely because the areas they live in have not yet developed/implemented the needed technology/infrastructure to make things better.

[WIP]

Indeed, technology doesn't change "what we are inside", but it does provide for our basic needs, thus preventing people from having to fight and die over the basics like food and shelter. Elimination of scarcity allows humans to live in a more peaceful way.

Elimination of scarcity, is only a temporary achievement, if the fundamentals aren't changed. That was the point Norman Borlaug - the primary developer of the new Green Revolution hybrid seeds tried to make back in the late 60's! At the time, Earth's human population was half of what it is now, and many highly populated regions, like China and the Indian Subcontinent, were being plagued with food shortages. Borlaug warned the global policymakers NOT to receive the Revolution (which was equally dependent on pumping down aquifers and more aggressive use of fertilizers) as a permanent solution to food shortages and expect new improvements in food production to keep fixing the problem in the coming years. But....guess what happened! In the 70's, population reduction steps like guaranteeing access to birth control, were abandoned, and populations started rising significantly again as more children began having children of their own in the last 15 years.

Today, the world has over 7 billion and climbing; and our world is struggling with declining agricultural zones, because of exhausting the soil and more volatile climate changes. And yet we are told, that population will rise above 9 billion before there is any chance of a plateau and a modest decline in population numbers.

What happens when there are too many people and too little food available? There are rising food prices for sure, but the negative fallout, like food riots, mass migrations, civil wars etc., will make the world a more dangerous place to live in in the coming years, because of the failure to plan ahead effectively. There are no more rabbits to pull out of the hat! Further food production increases will have to come at high cost: an increased destruction of natural environments/leading to increasing the already alarming rates of species extinctions....we're already in the sixth mass extinction, in case nobody is aware of it.

The current generation is the most literate ever... doing the majority of their social interaction through the written word rather than through speech.

Are you sure of that? Why have newspapers been dumbed down to a grade six level today? I was struck by how far we've fallen back when the Lord of the Rings movies were in the theaters, and I was motivated to finish the first book and the other three...and then I decided to buy The Hobbit...even though it had been traditionally tagged as a children's book. I doubt the reading level of any 10 year old today is high enough to read the Hobbit. Even most highschoolers probably would fail the test also.

As for consumerism... those who could afford it have always accumulated frivilous objects and luxuries. This used to be restricted to the nobility/aristocrats, who kept the rest of the population as either literal or virtual slaves. Today, it's available to a far greater portion of the population.

If you're old enough to have parents who came of age during the Depression and before the modern age of consumerism, you would find that the only thing they would consider buying on credit was a house. Aside from a mortgage, nobody of the pre-WWII generation ever wanted to take out a loan on anything. They never bothered applying for credit cards either. It's a whole different world today. We're being told now that the reason for our latest economic malaise is because most consumers are already maxed out on their credit, and can't borrow to buy any more now.

Those people are living that way precisely because the areas they live in have not yet developed/implemented the needed technology/infrastructure to make things better.

Regardless of what you were told at business school, slavery never actually ended in our world! The strategy called Enclosure of the Commons in 17th century England, was applied in large part to force peasants off the land and provide a cheap and desperate source of labour in the new factories that were being constructed, and supplied with the slave labour from the plantations of the colonies. Formal slavery may have come to an end, but the strategy of driving people in third world nations off the land and into already crowded cities to fight for dismal jobs in textile factories is still the same basic strategy. And I still would argue that the Bangladeshi or Sri Lankan (or wherever the cheapest sweatshop labour is today) textile worker is living a poorer existence than the hunter-gatherer who had none of modern technology's benefits.

Edited February 27, 2015 by WIP

[Bonam]

Elimination of scarcity, is only a temporary achievement, if the fundamentals aren't changed. That was the point Norman Borlaug - the primary developer of the new Green Revolution hybrid seeds tried to make back in the late 60's! At the time, Earth's human population was half of what it is now, and many highly populated regions, like China and the Indian Subcontinent, were being plagued with food shortages. Borlaug warned the global policymakers NOT to receive the Revolution (which was equally dependent on pumping down aquifers and more aggressive use of fertilizers) as a permanent solution to food shortages and expect new improvements in food production to keep fixing the problem in the coming years. But....guess what happened! In the 70's, population reduction steps like guaranteeing access to birth control, were abandoned, and populations started rising significantly again as more children began having children of their own in the last 15 years.

Today, the world has over 7 billion and climbing; and our world is struggling with declining agricultural zones, because of exhausting the soil and more volatile climate changes. And yet we are told, that population will rise above 9 billion before there is any chance of a plateau and a modest decline in population numbers.

What happens when there are too many people and too little food available? There are rising food prices for sure, but the negative fallout, like food riots, mass migrations, civil wars etc., will make the world a more dangerous place to live in in the coming years, because of the failure to plan ahead effectively. There are no more rabbits to pull out of the hat! Further food production increases will have to come at high cost: an increased destruction of natural environments/leading to increasing the already alarming rates of species extinctions....we're already in the sixth mass extinction, in case nobody is aware of it.

Increased production of food so far has been allowed for by new technologies. The same will continue into the future. In the nearest term, food yields from a given area of land can be increased substantially through the continued use and development of various GMOs.

Are you sure of that? Why have newspapers been dumbed down to a grade six level today? I was struck by how far we've fallen back when the Lord of the Rings movies were in the theaters, and I was motivated to finish the first book and the other three...and then I decided to buy The Hobbit...even though it had been traditionally tagged as a children's book. I doubt the reading level of any 10 year old today is high enough to read the Hobbit. Even most highschoolers probably would fail the test also.

Why have newspapers been dumbed down? I dunno... the only people who read newspapers are old fogies in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. Maybe their minds are getting slow in their old age and they need easier language to read? As for the Hobbit, English is a living language and the style used in the Hobbit is noticeably dated for many of today's readers. It will not be long before it seems as archaic as Shakespeare's prose. Nonetheless, most people that I know that are currently in their 20s read both the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings in their childhood.

If you're old enough to have parents who came of age during the Depression and before the modern age of consumerism, you would find that the only thing they would consider buying on credit was a house. Aside from a mortgage, nobody of the pre-WWII generation ever wanted to take out a loan on anything. They never bothered applying for credit cards either. It's a whole different world today. We're being told now that the reason for our latest economic malaise is because most consumers are already maxed out on their credit, and can't borrow to buy any more now.

What a silly historical perspective, based on one single event in history... the depression. It might have left a big imprint on the Western psyche but it was a non-event in other parts of the world. The broader historical perspective is that people with the means have always spent frivolously, all throughout history. While people without means have always saved and been reluctant to spend. The same continues today. Nothing's changed.

Regardless of what you were told at business school, slavery never actually ended in our world! The strategy called Enclosure of the Commons in 17th century England, was applied in large part to force peasants off the land and provide a cheap and desperate source of labour in the new factories that were being constructed, and supplied with the slave labour from the plantations of the colonies. Formal slavery may have come to an end, but the strategy of driving people in third world nations off the land and into already crowded cities to fight for dismal jobs in textile factories is still the same basic strategy. And I still would argue that the Bangladeshi or Sri Lankan (or wherever the cheapest sweatshop labour is today) textile worker is living a poorer existence than the hunter-gatherer who had none of modern technology's benefits.

Never went to business school. Slavery has a particular definition and working voluntarily at a job that might not be so great is not it. The quality of life of menial laborers in a rapidly industrializing area is indeed crap, worse than roaming free in the wild I'd agree, but the quality of life of their children/grandchildren will be vastly better, as we saw with industrial revolutions in Western countries.

[cybercoma]

I read Samuel de Champlain's diary. There were descriptions of wars between tribes and brutal torture too.

Were you considering Champlain's audience? Later, the Jesuits often exaggerated their situations to receive more funding and support from abroad. Edited February 27, 2015 by cybercoma

[TimG]

Ok... then back to your statement "Specifically, prior to mass communication, patriarchal societies had an evolutionary advantage."

Prior to the printing press the only way to keep a mass society together was with myth, fear and rigid hierarchies where people higher on the pyramid had a vested interest in preserving the system in order to protect the advantages they had over those lower on the pyramid. Patriarchy is one type of hierarchy that extended a small advantage to one half of the population which made it very stable. The other advantage of patriarchy is it tended to produce more children which could serve in armies.

Once the printing press arrived the need for hierarchies to keep a society together declined.

Edited February 28, 2015 by TimG

[Michael Hardner]

Did you bother reading anything I posted before? I never said there were no wars prior to the Euro Conquest; I pointed to the archaeological evidence showing that the periods of wars and violence over the ages in the Americas correlate with population densities and transitions back and forth between hunter-gatherer migratory life (times of peace), and times when the horticulture portion of farming was widely adopted (the ages that led to wars). Which was where the eastern woodlands were at the time of Champlain's arrival!

Yes I read it - but I didn't realize that it happened to coincide with Champlain's arrival. This back-and-forth comes from my commenting on your point: "The summary again is that violence is not something that is part of human nature....something genetically predestined even for more aggressive males."

I guess "part of human nature" is the part that I didn't understand. We both acknowledge that humans go to war, but you seem to be attributing that to certain causes in the case of the violence observed by Champlain.

And you note that the Iroquois Confederacy and territorial boundaries were emerging as methods to reduce the likelihood of war. Fine, but how is that different than what happened in the old world ?

TimG had posted: "Humans are tribal. They co-operate with members of their tribe but fight with members outside of their tribe. That was true 100,000 years ago and it is true today."

Your response was "NO it isn't." and you proceeded to give an example of a peaceful society... a society that likely met some kind of violent end when the economic conditions went sour.

Maybe your point is that "Humans are peaceful when times are good." which I could agree with more, but still allows for TimG's point about fighting with members outside when there is any kind of competition for resources.

Also, the idea that the very detailed descriptions and scenarios in Champlain's writing are lies does not ring true to me. The detail and the randomness of the events surrounding what he describes doesn't, as far as I remember, make one tribe seem much different than the other when it comes to violence.

The effects of having to kill, on most normal people are not different from murder...whether they or their leaders concoct fanciful ways to justify the killing.

Fighting, though, is different from murder. Which makes me realize now that there's no commandment against fighting...

[TimG]

Fighting, though, is different from murder. Which makes me realize now that there's no commandment against fighting...

The human fist is a carefully engineered weapon that other primates do not have. I think people trying to argue for the inherent 'non-violence' of humans need to explain the evolution of the fist.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-20790294

"There may, however, be only one set of skeletal proportions that allows the hand to function both as a mechanism for precise manipulation and as a club for striking," the researchers write.

"Ultimately, the evolutionary significance of the human hand may lie in its remarkable ability to serve two seemingly incompatible, but intrinsically human, functions."

Our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos do not generally form fists, and the researchers think they are unable to: when a chimp curls up its fingers it forms a doughnut shape.

Prof Carrier commented: "The question for me is 'why wasn't this discussed 30, 40 years ago.' As far as I know it isn't in the literature."

Asked whether the idea that aggression may have played a key role in shaping the human body might previously have been unpalatable to researchers, Prof Carrier explained: "I think we're more in that situation now than we were in the past.

"I think there is a lot of resistance, maybe more so among academics than people in general - resistance to the idea that, at some level humans are by nature aggressive animals. I actually think that attitude, and the people who have tried to make the case that we don't have a nature - those people have not served us well.

"I think we would be better off if we faced the reality that we have these strong emotions and sometimes they prime us to behave in violent ways. I think if we acknowledged that we'd be better able to prevent violence in future."

Edited February 28, 2015 by TimG

[Bonam]

The claim that violence is "not part of human nature" is so inherently absurd I'm not sure why you guys are even debating it. Of course violence is part of human nature... every aspect of the human machine is a carefully honed tool to do violence with. The brain, which lets groups of humans cooperate and form complex strategies in order to enhance their success in killing larger/stronger animals. The opposable thumb, which lets humans grip tools... the very first ones of which were tools of violence. The cardiovascular and musculoskeletal systems, which enable humans to run tirelessly for hours on end, covering dozens of miles every day (an ability matched in very few if any other land animals), tiring out other creatures so they can kill their weakened/exhausted prey.

And all known human history is basically the history of violence... one tribe conquering or slaughtering another, one king/chief/emperor/etc subjugating surrounding peoples, etc. Wars, rebellions, conquest, destruction, slavery, etc. Almost all the religions of humankind are filled with tales of violence and suffering, done both by the humans within these mythologies as well as by the idealized gods within these mythologies. The heroes remembered from ancient times are remembered for one thing only: their deeds of violence. And even today, the greatest efforts in the fields of science and technology (which are now the fundamental driving forces of change in human societies) are to develop ever more effective instruments of violence.

Violence is as inseparable from humanity as water.

Edited March 1, 2015 by Bonam

[TimG]

The claim that violence is "not part of human nature" is so inherently absurd I'm not sure why you guys are even debating it. Of course violence is part of human nature.

Well there is a real question of whether violence is intrinsic and needs to be suppressed or whether it is simply an adaptation that depends on the environment. I think it is the latter and don't subscribe to the notion that violence is inevitable part of human society.