Peter Turchin’s, ‘Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth,’ necessarily implies that the West needs a popular war within or near its borders. He reluctantly confesses, “A reactionary catchphrase of the 1970s used to go, “what this generation needs is a war,” a deplorable sentiment but one that in terms of cultural evolution might sometimes have a germ of cold logic.”[i]
THE STORY OF MAN AND WAR
Turchin’s main project is to explain the existence of civilisations. To this end, he tells the story of social cooperation’s rise and expansion. Being an evolutionary anthropologist he starts by describing chimpanzees use of violence to maintain their group cohesion and hierarchy.
But, by the Pleistocene era, (2 million – 10,000 BC), evidence indicates that man, (homicide aside), was largely peaceful and egalitarian. Why? Stone weapons! Upstart bullies could be pounded in the head with stones during their sleep. So weapons enforced egalitarian cooperation.
At the end of the Pleistocene era, because the weather became stable, populations boomed. At this point, you get brutal unequal chiefdoms. TAhe standard model says that agriculture created the archaic states. Turchin convincingly argues that this is not true, war did.
For thousands of years, after agriculture became widespread, people continued to do hunting and gathering as well. Those with these blended economies were free and equal. And these folks’ had much better diets than those who only did agriculture. So agriculture does not explain the rise of states.
Using math, history and evolutionary logic, Turchin argues that one group switching to a centralised hierarchical state system could dominate and enslave the others. Once one group had switched, others had to do so or be beaten. So hierarchical cooperation was born and brutally enforced. War made people do agricultural, not vice versa. Societies’ roots are in war.
But, starting about 500 BC, Turchin explains, military horse use decisively tilted the military advantage to whoever could field the largest army. Large armies require big population bases. Hierarchical archaic states' control via violence limited their size and created internal disunity.
Universal monotheistic religions enabled larger societies. Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Confucian taught rulers to treat their subjects with care. In turn, these religions legitimised supporting the king. But these egalitarian ethics, again, were there to create larger populations in order to win wars.
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3 comments:
Well, I don't know about the other points in this article, but one thing I believe is for sure. The only way we will get our selves out of this self-destructive behavior of our nation is a war that will unite us and throw out the Leftist Progressive garbage that has accumulated over the last 50 or 60 years.
This kind of cycle is nothing new. It happened in the 20th Century.
The Progressive Left can not be bothered by anything like foreign enemies that only hinder their forward advance to the Leftist utopia until it's too late. Then the sane rescues them from an enemy that seeks to devour them. And once that is done, they return, like blissful bovines chewing their cud, back to their progressive social agendas as if nothing had happened.
I give you WWII - before and after - as an example. I give you Churchill. He saves the Brits's ass and as a reward is voted out of the office by the people who then submit to the wind song - one again - of a promise of a Leftist utopia.
It's happening now and it will happen again.
I hate to be brutal but a good war blows away the extreme and restores a proper balance between sanity and rationality.
The Spartans would not have felt reluctant about expressing such a conviction. Nor with George Patton.
God-believing people might even be tempted to think God wants us to earn our Freedom and the Privileges thereof.
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