Hunter gatherer violence
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stuartw2112 wrote:And if it is a thing, might we not agree, by reference to the thing, whether or not, for all its complexity, "round" or "flat" best captures it?
You've got it now, stuart!'Agreement', 'reference' and 'best'.Just like hunter-gatherer society – we need to agree the best way of referring to it.Liberals will 'agree' that 'violence' exists, and Communists will 'agree' that 'violence' doesn't exist.It's best to clarify your own definition of what 'violence' is, and apply it to your readings of various accounts of h-g society.I think that the earth is 'round' and that h-g are 'non-violent'. But that's because of my social and historical context, and my social education, and my social ideology.I'm aware that in other contexts, neither is the earth 'round' nor are h-g 'non-violent'.As you say 'best' is what 'captures it' – 'best' being a social judgement.
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stuartw2112 wrote:You say hold a vote, LB, but how is a rational individual to vote? Surely only by making a good faith effort to decide between the alternatives based on their truth value, ie, on how they measure up to reality?Stuart, you could ask LBird how he expects a global population 7 billion to vote – and vote knowledgeably – on each of thousands upon thousands of scientific theories that are churned every year to determine their " truth value" or indeed why this is is even necessary (if I believe the earth revolves around the sun and the majority thinks otherwise I am not going to be dissuaded from what I believe just because a majority thinks otherwise). You could ask LBird but don't expect an answer – he has been dodging this question over several threads now. His views are an odd mixture of the basically sound – e.g. no branch of human knowledge including anthropology is "value free" – and the truly nutty. . But "thats just my opinion" as the guy on RT keeps on sayingFirst warning: 1. The general topic of each forum is given by the posted forum description. Do not start a thread in a forum unless it matches the given topic, and do not derail existing threads with off-topic posts.
We see eye to eye on that at least Robin! Though don't we both come from a political tradition that, in caricature at least, makes equally mad claims about billions voting? ;)To get back to the subject of the thread, though, before we get told off by the moderator again, I think socialists should be perfectly relaxed about these kinds of questions. So what if it was found that a tendency towards violence and war is innate, hard-wired into our genes? If true, we need to know it. Not least so we can create social structures that promote peace and understanding between innately crazy creatures. State repression is hardly the only or the best way to achieve this – as anthropology shows all too well.
stuartw2112 wrote:So what if it was found that a tendency towards violence and war is innate, hard-wired into our genes? If true, we need to know it.You're still assuming that 'truth' is a property of the 'object', stuart, as opposed to a property of 'knowledge'.If you think so, that's OK, but then recognise that this is 19th century positivist ideology.Since 'knowledge' is a creation of humans, and NOT a reflection of the 'object', then if certain humans want to find 'the truth' that there is a 'gene for tendency to violence and war', they'll find it.Those humans who don't want to find that 'truth', won't, because they'll find 'the truth' that 'violence and war is social'.Your 'gene for violence' notion reminds me of Itchy and Scratchy, where the mouse is chopped into a million bits by the cat, which then inhales the bits, and each cell of the cat receives a murderous little mouse, which destroys the cell, and the cat turns grey and dissolves.This search for 'gene-based behaviour' is an ideological search, not a 'disinterested search for truth', stuart.If you are disposed, ideologically, to find one, you will. You'll find hunter-gatherers had 'an innate tendency to violence and war'.I, being a Communist, and open about it, will 'find' the opposite, that class societies make war, and have a 'social tendency to violence'.If you 'need to know it', you'll 'discover' it, stuart!Humans and their 'science', eh?
So true LB. Makes you wonder why our societies spent all those billions on the Large Hadron Collider when we could have told them for nothing that they were bound to find it if that's what they were looking for. (Sarcasm alert.)
stuartw2112 wrote:So true LB. Makes you wonder why our societies spent all those billions on the Large Hadron Collider when we could have told them for nothing that they were bound to find it if that's what they were looking for. (Sarcasm alert.)Yeah, makes you wonder why, when without all that human effort, nature tells us what it is.Touche.[/21st century science]
stuartw2112 wrote:It being the Higgs of courseSo, they have found it!Wonderful news! You'll have to tell all those physicists who don't believe that it has been found.Bloody physicists! Just like anthropologists, and politicians… always arguing…Humans, or Higgs-Mirrors?
So what we have is evidence for violence and non-violence from our ancient hunter gatherer ancestors, with some investigators seeing war and others not.Back to the drawing board people.
SocialistPunk wrote:So what we have is evidence for violence and non-violence from our ancient hunter gatherer ancestors, with some investigators seeing war and others not.Back to the drawing board people.No, on with science, SP!Don't despair. Human science provides us with 'choices', and we have to 'choose' which one we prefer.Whether that's Higgs Boson or Hunter Gatherer.Because we now know that science doesn't provide 'THE ONE TRUTH' (tm. religious productions), doesn't mean that 'THERE IS NO TRUTH' (tm. po-mo productions).The materialists insist, since Engels, that if one doesn't believe in the former (ie. materialism), then one must believe in the latter.The good news, as Marx pointed out in the Theses on Feuerbach, is that there is a third position.Humans, using theory and practice, produce social and historical truths, and then have to decide which, for them, is the 'truth' they wish to believe for their own good social and historical reasons, at any time.Since this is a human social task, it makes sense that, in a society like socialism that is run on democratic lines, that the choice made from the available 'truths' produced, is made on democratic lines.Our third choice is 21st century science, allied with socialism.Don't listen to the followers of god-matter, SP! They're religious fanatics, and deny democracy, because they claim to be at one with matter, and don't need 'mob rule' to tell them their 'TRUTH'.
No despair from me, LBird.The beauty of science (or human discovery) is in it's constant state of flux, without which we wouldn't be here.
SocialistPunk wrote:No despair from me, LBird.The beauty of science (or human discovery) is in it's constant state of flux, without which we wouldn't be here.Glad to hear of your high spirits, SP!Yeah, 'flux', but you try and say that to the 'disinterested' seekers of 'The Truth', who think that their 'knowledge' is a perfect copy of 'object', and so must be eternally true, outside of any social considerations, and watch them fume!The believers in 'objective knowledge' don't like talk of 'flux'.They like certainty, fixity, and the assurance that, if they bother to read something, that they now know the Truth Of The Matter.They don't like having to deal with the 'flux' of various positions, the 'flux' between hunter-gatherers being 'violent' and 'non-violent', and trying to understand why both answers can be 'true'.I hear that they're not too keen on 'beauty', either! That's because we all know that "it's in the eye of the beholder", and they will not have 'beholders' in science! They really think science is 'The View From Nowhere'.Have a beautiful day, SP, and long may you enjoy your state of flux!
Stuart, you're onto a good point,moving the decision over that is truth to any sort of vote just brings back the same questions as it arouses for an individual (and adds the further question of deciding what is the voting polity: whites in the the early 20th century US outnumbered blacks, and literally voted to make them inferior, so I guess black people must have been inferior, by that logic).Of course, if an observable event happens, and people accept it happened, then some logical deductions fall ineluctably. If, say, a group of people managed to send a coke can into space, and it travelled 12 million kilometres in four seconds, then we would know that it is possible for information to travel faster than the speed of light (and we would know that Einstein passim was wrong).I suppose it would be possible to vote on whether people believed that happened or not, but I don't see much point in that. What is more useful, would be if they were voting that it was valid sscience: validation is different from verification, and defintiely, to my mind, belongs to the social sphere.Of course, the problem with anthropology is that its objects aren't amenable to repeat experiments, and everything is subject to interpretation.There are masses of evidence that inter human viuolence occurs within hunter gatherer tribes,and that violence has occurred in history. The real argument is how do you define war? Now, the first archaeological evidence for war, IIRC is about 7,000 BCE, where there is evidence that a group of humans stood their ground and died in a ditch, we've found that mass grave. The problem is such actions might have occurred before.Anyone who has been out on a saturday night and seen two gangs of lads kicking at each other is witnessing something on the size and scale of what would have been a war between HG groups. But we don't call Cardiff a warzone, do we? These fights do lead to deaths, especially in London, but the numbers of deaths are small.Stuart is right that it's obvious that in the right circumstance we all have the capacity and prepensity for lethal violence, the point is do we have to organise it on a permenant and official basis?
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