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The MoA Week In Review – Open Thread 2018-37
Last week's posts on Moon of Alabama:
Bloomberg fell for Netanyahoo's trick:
To limit Iran’s role, Russia had proposed a 100-km (60-mile) buffer zone on the Syrian side of the border that would be off limits to Iranian forces and their allies. But Israel is demanding further protections, including the removal of long-range Iranian missiles from Syria and limits on weapons supplies, according to media reports in Israel and Russia.
The MoA piece provides that it was Israel that claimed Russia had set the 100 km range, something it had not done, and it is Israel that demands even more.
This was, for several reasons, an unproductive week for your host. Next week the blog will, hopefully, be back to (nearly) daily posts.
Use as open thread …
James @81. Thanks. I’m afraid my traveling days are behind me.
Someone up there suggested that this “modern” world appears to be the most deadly in all of humans’ time on earth, but I neglected to note who wrote that. I’m really sorry because I wanted to give a giant shout out!
There is a powerful, well-funded movement within academia, reaching out to “science popularizers” like Steven Pinker that claims that “primitive man” was far more violent than today’s “civilized” societies. This is malarky, or at the very least, unsubstantiated.
Of course, violence has been a part of the human condition for as long as there have been humans. But there is little to no evidence that prehistoric societies were more violent than the Western societies of today. If anything, there is more evidence for the opposite.
I won’t go into all the details, but in general, these claims arise from two data sets.
First, is anthropological studies of current hunter/gatherer societies, most especially the “work” of Napoleon Chagnon. Chagnon had an ideological view which he set out to “prove.” He did this by fomenting conflicts between individuals in his field studies, and even then, falsifying some of his data. He wasn’t alone in this, but he was the most influential, leading to the most thorough reexamination of his “work,” which found multiple frauds and deceptions.
But even if any given modern H/G society is violent, is that really analogous to the ancestors of Western Civilization? Well, there are a number of important differences. Here’s a top three:
1. Most of today’s H/G societies live in marginal ecosystems. The most verdant, productive regions were transformed into farmland, evolving into cities.
2. Most of today’s H/G societies are under constant outside pressure from encroaching “civilization,” forcing them into closer contact with neighboring H/G groups, leading to conflicts.
3. All of today’s H/G societies are influenced by “civilization” which didn’t exist tens of thousands of years ago. Even the so-called “uncontacted” groups found now and again have known about “us” all their lives, and often have manufactured items they got in trade with other people who are in direct contact with “us.”
Secondly, these “researchers” claim to have evidence of heinous violence in the archaeological record. Again, yes there’s been violence all along, but I’m not aware of any real archaeological study that shows this pattern of greater per capita violence in ancient times, and the pacification of “naturally” violent humans as we become “civilized.”
The archaeological record is not total by definition, nor is it universal in that there is evidence of greater or lesser violence throughout time and space. But in terms of this alleged evolution from greater human-to-human violence to greater peacefulness, if anything, the record shows the opposite.
I’d earlier mentioned an Indian village we excavated. It had been occupied for about two thousand years. We excavated more than 400 human burials, and precisely one of them showed signs of human-caused violence. (there were many burials that were so deeply touching that they literally brought me to tears, as with presumed mothers with their infants, and couples wrapped eternally in one another’s arms – eternal until we archaeologists came and defiled them at any rate). But only one that had clearly deliberate violence.
What broad, sweeping generalization can be drawn from that fact?
None!
Maybe that site was unique (it wasn’t). Maybe the Indians didn’t generally bring victims of deadly violence back to the village for proper burial. Maybe this site just happened to have been occupied during some sort of “pax Ohlonia,” and before that, there were horrible wars.
But what we can say is that all around the world, we find sure evidence of human-to-human violence on only a small percentage of individuals. So, these over-arching claims of ancient humans “red of tooth and claw” are ideological statements meant to rationalize current events, and not careful analyses of all the data.
Posted by: Daniel | Jul 30 2018 23:01 utc | 105
Daniel: #46
I saw this very year in Myanmar a lot of roadworks – literally dozens of cases -, roads being rebuilt and enlarged because the country’s getting slightly richer and people are getting cars. Didn’t see much in the 2 big cities of Yangon and Mandalay, but apart from that, the bulk of roadworks was done by hand, with no machine at all. So of course they work on 100m piece a time, but they’re grinding stones, spreading them on thinner layers, mixing tar and pouring it all over, all by hand, and for every work, you have a dozen or more locals working on it, including all-female teams sometimes. The only place where I saw machines being used was for the major trade road going to China, with a sizable truck traffic, and I suspect China might already have poured some of its own money to improve the thing – a 1st step before going full BRI in future decades.
So, this was very like what you saw in Mexico. My take on it, in both cases, is that with a hint of demographic growth and of standardization of agriculture, and them not being the full factory of the world but having mostly industries and factories for their national needs (and obviously not being having a big service-industry that cater to Western needs), they have a vast amount (or surplus) of workers that can be used to do any kind of work; just like Rome had plenty of slaves and little incentives to mechanize, such countries have enough people to have large teams of workers do manual labour and can put them to work wherever they need in vast numbers. This changes in the long run – it obviously has already changed in Mexico – when the economy morphs into something else.
This is also a way for these countries to limit unemployment, because it’s the less worst way they have. I don’t think people should forever be stuck in that kind of job – pouring burning tar when it’s already 35°C outside, with no protection at all against burns and fumes isn’t a healthy way of living -, but for a transition phase, it’s probably better than the alternative. In the long run though, it’ll be mostly a matter of redistributing resources and wealth; of course, if we’re stuck in a capitalist crappy system, better ensuring most people work and therefore have wages and money to survive, by such a kind of hard work, but ideally we can afford a degree of mechanization, as long as we get rid of our economic system for a better fairer one – improving our living and working conditions has been quite constant throughout the ages, otherwise we’d still be living in the agricultural-heavy Bronze Age.
That said, the irony is that, despite its pretenses to being advanced, the US also relies on cheap labour in vast numbers. Anyone who’s been to both US and European restaurants and stores has seen that the former are manned by at least twice the crew that their EU counterparts usually man. Or, to be blunt, the only reason why the US hasn’t a far higher unemployment rate is because businesses aren’t as ruthless as you’d expect in cutting down their number of workers – mostly, I suppose, because they’re underpaid at slave-wages.
#105
At the very least, one could assume that the people in these settlements had limited intra-group violence. Which makes a lot of sense, small tribes and clans of H/G can’t afford internal violence, it would endanger the whole group’s survival. This is in line with pretty much everything we know about them, both ancient ones (through archaeology) and more recent ones (field studies and recent testimonies). For most of such groups, a lot of their social construct was meant to minimize violence and settle conflicts without getting out of hand into eternal cycle of revenge.
Thing is, we have no way of knowing about inter-groups violence. Odds are that they discarded the bodies of the slain enemies, and surely they wouldn’t bury them with their own dead. The real question being how often beaten tribes would get back their dead and bury them.
I think Jared Diamond has a point when he assumes many of the recent H/G tribes had a high degree of external violence, being able to gather testimonies of people who had close memories of pre-contact Papua for instance. Still, he also thinks that it’s not that such peoples were constantly killing each other or even that conflicts were very bloody; it’s just that if for all your life, you risk being killed by some outer tribe, odds are far higher that you might die this way than if you live all your life in 2000s Manhattan – but external conflicts for H/G is limited with very few victims, most of the time, it would probably just be one guy meeting another group and being killed on the spot.
Of course, I also had the same reservations that you have: the best areas with plentiful of easy food have been plundered and transformed millennia ago, so we don’t know how good they had it then. And we mostly have recent observations about overcrowded or poor places, and tribes who had some degree of modern influence. Funnily too, Jared Diamond might be of the opinion that violence did exist and might have been common – under very different circumstances – in the past, and even if some of his Papuan acquaintances admit to prefer the modern life, because it’s less hazardous – antibiotics and less risk of being killed in a chance encounter -, but he’s also on the record pondering if the invention of agriculture wasn’t the worst thing that ever happened to mankind.
My own suspicion is that, as long as H/G tribes had plenty of space and resources and were close to the edge of truly uninhabited areas, friction and conflicts were very low if not absent, because there was place enough beyond that hill or valley to settle a new group. Once a group was surrounded on all sides by many other H/G groups, and when overall density grew, on the other hand, either it would migrate over a very long distance until it found some empty land, or there would be increasing – until the point of being the norm – conflicts with some neighbouring groups. “Some”, because they weren’t stupid either and there was always some understanding, friendship or alliance possible between groups – just not with all of them at the same time, since we’re talking about humans after all.
Of course, I fully agree with you about Pinker. The guy’s either a fraud that knows he talks bullshit or he’s massively delusional and will have to be put under suicide watch when the shit will hit the fan in a few decades (or less). Sure, there might be less internal violence nowadays, compared to *some* agricultural and industrial societies, but it’s still definitely higher than for pretty much all H/G societies, without any doubt – at least H/G societies that survived for more than a couple of decades. External violence might be better most of the time; but it’s “most of the time” that matters. I didn’t have to read Nassim Taleb’s criticism of Pinker to know he was out of his mind, because as long as we can all die in a nuclear war, all talk that we should be happy and quiet because violence is decreasing is stupid; we’re one button click away of Pinker being definitively proven wrong.
Posted by: Clueless Joe | Jul 31 2018 9:07 utc | 134
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