We May Never Truly Fathom Other Cultures
nautil.us
nautil.us
Perhaps there was no rational reason, and we are closer to understanding than we'd like to admit.
A significant portion of modern Americans regularly enjoy blood and carnage in video games and movies. There's a cruelty, a bloodlust, deep in the human psyche that even now isn't socialized away, merely supressed, to be satisfied only in fantasy.
Yet thousands are murdered every year in our society, which harshly punishes murder. How many more would be killed, merely for sport, if that were encouraged by religion?
Yeah. it's called fiction and a more significant portion of people in the world consume all that without committing mass murder. So please, stop associating video games or movies with whatever crazy people do.
It's not my intention to suggest that enjoying those means that our socialization has failed or that we are dangerous (which I do not believe), but that those games and movies appeal to something in our nature that still exists in many of the most well socialized Americans.
To put it another way, if throwing feces was common behavior among humans, you might say "this isn't a human problem, it's a primate problem." And you'd be right, in a sense. But the key point is that throwing feces (as well as violence) is more easily avoided behavior for humans than for chimps. A human might choose to yell to express a level of anger than chimps only express with feces throwing (I might be uninformed about the feces-throwing behaviors of chimps, but you get the point). When we fail to take advantage of opportunities to avoid violence, we should ask ourselves why.
That is, I agree it is not an excuse to say "animals do it." But, it is also somewhat askew to me to have a barrier to our explanations that do not involve "humans are just animals."
I've looked several times for that quote. Not sure who it was from, but there seems to be some wisdom in it.
It's similar to how one may find archery fun, and archery was designed to kill people, but people don't find archery fun because they want to kill people, they just find it fun to shoot arrows and that gaining of fun probably was designed to make people better at violence but there's no actual direct connection.
On the other hand, the gaming situations where I have seen the negative aspects of nature come out were games that layered social aspects on top. MMORPG's, especially ones like DayZ, and, at worst, competitive games like League of Legends. When a single player game gets bad, like Doom or Nox, it gets bad over the multiplayer aspect. That's where all the nasty stuff really comes out, and it's not the art or the violence in the design of the game itself causing it, but the socializing aspect, power imbalances, etc. Meanwhile, people are cooperating pretty well in games like KSP or Minecraft as long as you avoid PvP servers, and even in the really dark, violent games like Dark Souls, again, as long as you stay away from PvP.
Human violence instincts seem to come out in situations that simulate social pressures, such as those where there is evaluation, power imbalance, and competitions. Single player games, no matter how much blood is falling on the floor, don't seem to do that to their communities as long as PvP is not involved.
Or you like doing all the silly things a game lets you do. Because, you know, it's not real and you've probably realized that.
I guess if you play Monopoly against Grandma and ream her a new one when she lands on your Boardwalk with a hotel on it deep down you want to be a slum lord. It couldn't possibly be as simple as you like winning games.
Sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar.
Come on, you can make the above case for Mario, but it's a harder sell when we are talking about Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto.
When I recently re-played Deus Ex (Human revolution), you can choose to play the game in a pretty much pacifist way. I didn't do that, but at the same time I didn't go laying a trail of carnage through the city, killing the police, etc.
The game puts you in situations where you usually have a choice about your actions -- I can sneak around (harder), I can kill the guard, I can kill the police officer, etc. I had no problem killing the mercenaries that would shoot me if they saw me, but after killing an NPC police officer (in frustration after setting off alarms), I felt compelled to do it again until I could master doing nonlethal takedowns, or knock them out with a sedative dart.
I don't think this is a matter of having a problem separating fantasy and reality. Rather, it's a lens to look at our own behavior and feelings about violence. I have no problem shooting other players in the face in a game like Call of Duty or Counter-Strike (which is effectively paintball), but I get deeply disturbed at the idea of killing (or spawning + harvesting?) non-hostile NPCs in games like Minecraft or Deus Ex.
Games with that degree of role-playing are fairly rare to begin with, and most people also don't get terribly immersed in them, so often that NPC you care about to them is just a number.
I generally treat everything in Minecraft very mechanically, as numbers, because Minecraft just feels that way to me. But in a proper RPG, it's not so simple.
Most people would not enjoy child rape simulator 3000 because most people do not have embedded instincts to do such things. Some people, however, may enjoy CR3000, and I would venture to guess that there is an underlying reason (i.e. pedophilia).
Being used to see violence in fantasy doesn't make you violent deep inside, you just don't give it that much importance in fantasy. This doesn't mean that you won't despise real violent acts.
I've played games as a cop where you're rolling through a rough neighborhood and everyone's immediately got their guard up, they're automatically on-edge. The tension between police and civilians experienced this way is nothing like reading headlines or hearing stories. It's long, empty periods of nothing punctuated by life-threatening situations which can build empathy for what some cops have to endure.
Movies edit down for length. Books are building a narrative, they're cherry-picking by necessity. In a game you can spend dozens of hours immersed in an environment, experiencing both the intensity of the situations and the mundanity of the gaps between.
I'd love to see some games put out by people in these difficult to understand cultures to better experience what they think and feel, the challenges they face, and to see the world through their eyes.
The latest installment of Deus Ex lightly touches on the issues of race relations, there using an analogy where "augmented" humans are suddenly the Acceptable Thing To Hate and are subjected to endless scrutiny, carded constantly for no reason other than being augmented.
The old "walk a mile in my shoes" principle applies here, and in most games you walk way, way more than a mile.
It's that simple, really. It is in our nature, just like sex. We like it. It feels good.
The only reason we try to eschew and condemn such violence in modern society is because it is in our best interests and more productive to society as a whole to not be like that. No other reason. If we all lived in fear and were huddled in our homes in small communities we wouldn't have even half the modern luxuries we do today. Plus, on the larger scale, if it's war you are talking about - well, they cost a lot of money/resources. So they are tough to maintain for the long haul without noticeable economic harm.
People like to say that love is stronger than anger and hate. I have always disagreed. Hate and anger run deeper than most imagine. And they motivate people like nothing else in this world, except perhaps fear.
The one and only reason people aren't butchering each other in the streets is because we have figured out a way that we can all survive. If that were to crumble, you can be damn sure society would look a lot closer to The Walking Dead or Children of Men than Star Trek.
That's an incredibly simplification of what originates violence.
People can become violent because of their frustration towards something and their lack of tools to manage their emotions, because of their past and what they have been taught, as an easy way to subjugate most of the people...
And it's not like I was born seething with violent imagery in my growing mind and had to be taught it was bad and not to be violent. I never had any bad thoughts about other kids. I did bad things like lying and stealing but never violence.
Just saying, there are many people who don't think violent thoughts, don't want to do anything nasty, who are nice people who don't need laws to stop them from doing things.
Had Roman and Greek values triumphed we might be in a better world. Perhaps we wouldn't have needed monks on lonely islands copying ancient texts had we not had a Dark Age.
> There are many people who don't think violent thoughts, don't want to do anything nasty, who are nice people who don't need laws to stop them from doing things.
And you shall curse those same people as weak if the enemy comes to town to slaughter everybody. As you would also were the Army to round up members of your faith for the deathcamps.
Surely you see the irony of a powerful God ruling the Earth being a necessity in order for the meek to inherit it.
See antihumanism.
“For Althusser, Marx viewed the human individual as a product of society. His or her beliefs, desires, preferences, judgements are inculcated in him/her by society and its ideological, political and economic practices. A person's view of him-/herself as a subject whose actions can be explained by his or her beliefs and thought is not innate; rather the role of a subject is imposed upon him or her by society and its ideologies.”[1]
Feelings are heavily interpreted. Some people find sexual stimulation painful, not just physically, but emotionally. In the end, all feelings exist as an interpretation inside the mind, and we know for sure that we can reinforce them through conditioning and other methods so that the full stack of causes which might initially cause a feeling aren't necessary to recreate it. Just a scent or a memory can be enough to evoke the full force of an emotion.
Violence isn't enjoyable for everyone, even simulated in movies or games. For a lot of people, putting it inside a safe context is a way to address something terrible and cope with the realities of violence, what causes it, and even find some common ground to empathize with the people who choose violence in real life.
Love is stronger than violence because we've seen the benefits and chosen to make it stronger. It's infinitely reinforcable and non-destructive. A system built around love can survive better than a system built on hate. As thinking beings, we don't just reactively respond to emotion. We build reinforcement systems into family, friends, culture, work, play and more, and all of these systems feed back into our behavior. Feeling good is just the beginning.
Actually sex, violence and dominance are intimately connected. More so than most people would like to admit.
Even then, desertion usually is epidemic in non-volunteer armies, and even in volunteer ones. And if violence is so good, we wouldn't see so many soldiers or police officers suffering from severe psychological trauma over committing it.
The issue with the kinds of pagan societies described in the article is that the society has successful and mass dehumanization programs in place for their elite. They select for people to commit violence and encourage people to dehumanize the act through their religious grounding. It doesn't have to be religious...gangs can create dehumanization, or secular ideology. But in general people really are peaceable, and societies like the Mexica tend to be aberrations over the long term.
I feel like the "sweet water/bitter water" dichotomy that the Christian tradition left us[1] has been so damaging because it has formed this perspective that we can only be bad and we can only be good, rather than we can be both. I do believe some people might have different tendencies than others and some may be prone to violence or prone to love but to assume your inclinations extend to everyone else is stupid.
[0] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/prefrontal-nudity/20130...
We, or, at least, some of us, have figured out, after a long time, that violence is not a good thing. But violence is what evolution runs on, because it wants the weak to die and the strong to reproduce. Altruism happened because groups of people ended up stronger than individual people, so there needed to be mechanisms to override violence impulses to enable groups. But the groups of people were still supposed to kill each other over and over to make stronger groups of people. The altruism is not universal. Hence all the ingroup biases. And much of that still remains to this day. All of us are violent directly or by proxy towards animals. Even if people are not violent, many are mean, they create pecking orders, they measure status, they compete, etc. They are executing adaptations developed to categorize people or groups of people as "should not be selected". The old programming is still there.
Except our combination of intelligence, empathy, sympathy, altruism, and strength "backfired" and resulted in us slowly deciding, for ourselves, that maybe we don't want to live like that.
I believe Christianity was designed to oppose this programming (original sin), but it's a 2k old religion, what do you expect? So much has changed since then, our methods in many places got better; Christianity is out of date and has too many dependencies.
I also don't think your characterization is fair, anyway. Christianity doesn't say we can only be bad or only good, it says that goodness demands complete purity, and through that, it says we're all bad, due to an influence inside of us, as well as an influence outside. While there are people more prone to violence and those more prone to love, there's nobody completely free from the programming or the situation.
I think this holds for a bunch of old religious beliefs. A lot of the old, seemingly arbitrary laws from Judaism had practical purposes in ancient times.
One big reason people aren't butchering each other in the streets is because those who butcher, by and large, are crippled by the trauma of it. Having a rational justification for violence (protecting ones self, protecting ones family, protecting ones nation) does nothing to assuage the deep-rooted trauma that inflicting violence on another human being causes. PTSD is a neurological malady, not a psychological one.
Because we are 7 billions. A least, we have enough love to take care of the children.
Untrue. Whatever humans do has a purpose. If this was in our nature, men will kill and leave their victim behind and move on to the next target.
However what we've observed over thousands of years is different. Men kill for a purpose, be it land, safety, women, rain, or whatever idiotic reason. Where men saw no purpose for killing, they did not. Therefore it is not part of our nature just like sex.
If you leave one man and one woman together for enough time, they will have sex together. If you left two men together most likely they will cooperate and not kill each other.
What's more. If it were in our nature to kill one another, then it would have been a trait shared with women as well. So far it appears Male are more likely to shed blood.
Few have satisfactory explanations. (The most common ones don't stand up to basic scrutiny. Folk answers, ideological answers to explain away the ideology's problems, etc.)
The answer to all these questions could be that democracy has stopped working.
Also, only few voters vote in the party primaries.
It hasn't stopped working, for an example close-to-home, look at the corruption in SF, that has been there for over a century. As long as voters don't pay attention, we'll have lousy government. Voters are the watchdogs.
> I don’t think any of us living today can comprehend the violence of worship in the Mexica culture (or Aztecs, as they are more popularly known), which I’ve written about for Archaeology. The Mexica waged war not principally to defeat rival states or gain territory, but to gather warm bodies for human sacrifice.
It appears a little bit in sports, and a lot in suicide bombers.
An estimated 2-5% of all humans are so called "psychopaths", people without the ability to feel empathy for other peoples pain. Those people are at the same time overrepresented as inmates in jails as well as in holders of executive positions. It's totally possible that most violence in human history is a result of those kind of people while the remaining 95-98% are simply victims of those people.
And another 90% have herd mentality, people that can easily mold their personality to match the dominant type in their in-group. There have been numerous studies that show that group mentality can override people's personal moral boundaries.
It's also very important to understand that people are more alike than different.
The "not the same" thing I've found to be mostly based on superficial differences, whereas all the basic imperatives (sex drive, evolutionary instincts, core cultural values, etc are mostly the same wherever).
There are people who can torture a child to death without feeling the smallest amount of guild (maybe they even find it funny or satisfying), others who could do it with the right amount of indoctrination, others who would only do it if their life is in danger (and would feel horrible afterwards) and others who would rather die than doing it.
And it's not possible to shift a person people into all of those categories, it's mostly inborn (like sexual orientation, hair color, etc).
Sure, all those people have lots of other "basic imperatives" in common, but the small difference that some could inflict as much pain as possible to others without feeling even a little bit guilty is a difference with should have quite severe consequences for society as a whole.
So if we try to understand why there is so much violence in the world, it would be quite an oversight to not take those kind of differences into account.
You're making a helluvan assertion there. You're going to need a citation, because psychology has no clue about this.
-signed, A Psychopath
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...
Non-psychopaths simply dehumanize their victims to suppress that empathy.
I think we all have the ability to not feel another's pain. For instance, dehumanization is a classic technique in war propaganda.
I would argue that we express it in ritualized form: in the U.S., that's NFL, college, and high school (and younger) football. And for those looking for a stronger dose, mixed martial arts.
Personally, my favorite form of simulated violence is the sport of fencing[1], though when I fence, I'm not imagining running my opponent through, or imagining that I've eviscerated them when I score a touch, I'm simply imagining the green or red light turning on; it's really just about the game and the technique for me.
1)I do also very much enjoy the Metal Gear Solid series of games, but generally (on the most recent edition) I always try for a no kills finish for a mission, and not just for the points.
A common problem that's cropped up in a number of modern countries is weddings getting more and more expensive. If weddings are an important means of displaying status, and it might shame the family to seem poor, then there is clearly going to be a drive that direction. Pretty soon, people are bankrupting themselves on weddings that seem excessive to everyone involved.
Cultures that engage in religious sacrifice seem to have the same sort of problem. Sacrifice shows off both status and religious zeal, so there's incentive to try to sacrifice more than others. If sacrificing slaves is allowed, ending up in an extreme state isn't all that surprising.
It's easy to distance ourselves from things that didn't happen in our country or in our lifetimes, but the reality is that we're just as bloodthirsty as anyone else.
Anyway, as far as I know, although my country has committed its share of horrible massacres around the world, none of it has happened in my lifetime... I just hope it'll last.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_of_U.S._Marines_urinatin...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007_Baghdad_airstrik...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisone...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp
(not all are Iraq, but you get the picture)
The modern military recognizes the need for PR. Abu Ghraib was mostly still pictures because it was mostly leaks--press was allowed nowhere near the place. Contrast this with videos of Hussein's statue being pulled down or the "Mission Accomplished" press conference
If you cherry-pick specific instances, sure, there was negative coverage of the Iraq War, but the big picture of Iraq War coverage versus Viet Nam War coverage is very different.
http://i.imgur.com/sYuPCWP.png
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2...
There were peaceful times throughout history, and they were followed by very bloody times. e.g. If, say, bloodshed follows a sine wave, we should at least wait for a couple periods before any proclamation that we've reduced bloodshed.
I think this 'outlier excuse' works when talking about serial killers or even criminal gangs, but I'm talking about violence on a much bigger scale, a scale where cultural factors are always contributing.
Second, foreign cultures are fascinating because they are so different. Imagine Marco Polo traveling to China. It must have been like getting in a space ship and traveling to another planet. Nowadays all the airports look the same, all the center cities have the same types of restaurants, and global culture is depressingly uniform.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Carthage#Child_sac...
> Soranus, a 2nd-century Greek physician, prescribed diuretics, emmenagogues, enemas, fasting, and bloodletting as safe abortion methods, although he advised against the use of sharp instruments to induce miscarriage, due to the risk of organ perforation. He also advised women wishing to abort their pregnancies to engage in energetic walking, carrying heavy objects, riding animals, and jumping so that the woman's heels were to touch her buttocks with each jump, which he described as the "Lacedaemonian Leap."
I don't think people prescribing "energetic walking" and bloodletting have really figured this out.
We rationalize it, because the mother will not be able to give a good life to her child or whatever.
What makes us think that people from Carthage could not also rationalize with more powerful reasons than us? It was way harder to live back them than today.
PS:Most of what we know of Carthage comes from their competing beliefs, like Jews, because Cartage was totally destroyed, in the same way the Jews portray a picture of Babel totally distorted.
No we do not, that is illegal because murder is illegal. It is not a child until it is born.
Indiana General Assembly, House Bill 1337
> Requires physicians to provide information about perinatal hospice care to a pregnant woman who is considering an abortion because the unborn child has been diagnosed with a lethal fetal anomaly.
The terminology of referring to the unborn as children has a long legal history.
There's a similar history concerning how personhood is determined via paperwork: i.e. if you do not fill out the paperwork for an abortion, the unborn child is considered a person for cases of its death---such as if a pregnant woman is killed, it's considered a double homicide.
The Indiana Assembly is certainly an authority on one thing: legislating clever ways to restrict women's right to obtain an abortion. I don't consider them authorities on much else.
I had thought you meant a more general and inclusive 'we'.
Fetuses. A fetus is not a child.
I don't care about your opinion, but I do care about precise use of language.
It's an evocative analogy, but it seems like a deliberate category error to many.
Of course, I think safe inexpensive abortion is a great societal good, not a mild civil crime worthy of a hint of disapproval, so my analogy doesn't really hold up very well.
Saying one thing while meaning another doesn't make the point, it obscures it.
It's kind of a strange aspect of humanity.
Failure to imagine what it's like to be someone else, from a different place, a different time, with different ways of thinking -- is perhaps the biggest reason why we have so much violence and hatred in this world, and modern scholars are just as guilty of it as warmongers and propagandists of the past have been.
It is a failure of imagination, a failure of empathy, that every culture encourages -- sometimes subtly, but often not so subtly -- in order to keep its members loyal. One of the defining characteristics of human cultures is that each wants to have a monopoly on a person's mind.
Most of us grow up believing that their way of thinking and living is the only natural way, and parents and teachers rarely try to give us a world view that goes beyond what's considered mainstream in our own cultures. Having lived in a cultural greenhouse all of our lives, the first thing we do when faced with a radically different way of life is how different this other person is. The differences so overwhelm us that we forget to appreciate our common humanity, with all its greatness and weaknesses, that should be the first step towards truly putting ourselves in the other person's shoes.
It would seem that anthropologists and archeologists are no exception.
Is it repugnant to kill innocent children at the altar of some imaginary being? Of course it is. Is it a necessary trait of civilized people that they cannot bear to imagine themselves growing up in a culture that practices human sacrifice as a matter of course and learning to participate in the bloody rituals? No, it isn't. It's just a failure of imagination that our own culture encourages. We have learned to be unable to imagine ourselves performing such terrible things, just like Victorian culture made it look normal for young women to faint at the slightest sight of anything disturbing. The inability to "fathom" another culture, no matter how seemingly barbaric, is not so much evidence of the moral depravity of the other culture as it is a testimony to our own narrow-mindedness.
Let's look at some of the aspect of life described in the article. Assume I'm just some artisan, good at my job, respected for my ability to work materials into goods. Making the odd innovation here and there. As a result I'm not in the ruling elite, nor the warrior "caste", but I'm doing pretty good for myself compared to most people.
Basically let's just say I'm equivalent to a decent software developer in our society.
I can imagine all sorts of things:
* I'm ashamed that I'm not a member of the fighting classes
* I don't have strong opinions of that fact
* I have a strange (to me in the 21st century USA) relationship with those of the fighting classes
* similar thoughts toward ruling elites, plus:
- Do i worship them or revile them? Do I have differing opinions on different people in that class, or do I view them as an undifferentiated mass?
- Do I expect to have any influence, or none, etc? How do I feel either way? (I can imagine having influence on the noble class but being rather upset because they are supposed to have a direct line to the gods, and why are they asking me?)
Other things I can imagine:
* Do I fear being sacrificed? Am I ashamed if I am afraid of it?
* Do I see the sacrifices as great? Or do I see them as an unfortunately necessary unpleasantry? Or do I see them as a source of shame because the rulers are out of touch? Is there an apocryphal tradition of the Gods actually being gentle and not wanting blood sacrifice, but this is being ignored by the priests?
* If my kid gets recruited to the military, am I proud or scared or both? Do I prefer his capture or his death in battle? What conduct makes me proud or not?
Basically my point here is that imagination and lack of data combined results in a truly honest answer of "I don't know which of the options for any of the questions above is right". This leads to a simple "I don't know", not because I can't fathom it for lack of empathy or imagination, but because I can see many many different ways it could be experienced.
Think of the gazillion different, mutually incompatible attitudes that modern Americans have about Hillary, Trump, and everyone else. Now re-imagine your artisan. You can be simultaneously afraid of being sacrificed and ashamed of being afraid. You might have a great deal of respect for some of the warriors but also revile the way they lick the elite's ass. You might have heard that the next village got leveled and all of their women and children enslaved because they dared to question the authority of the high priests, and have conflicting thoughts about whether they deserved it or not. Your friends might disagree with you on this matter, but some of them are afraid to speak out. But then this big customer wants his swords repaired by morning, and you don't have time to worry about those things anymore. Most of daily life is mundane, it has always been. Just because there are human sacrifices going on on that hill over there doesn't make life unrecognizable all of a sudden.
Knowledge of specific details is not a prerequisite for empathizing with someone as a human being. The point is to appreciate the many different ways that a Mexica life could be experienced (which you do very well) and keeping it all in your working memory instead of aggressively map-reducing it into answerless questions like "What did the artisans think about the warriors?" Likely, there were more than one artisan and more than one warrior.
The story is told from the point of view of a general in an insane asylum. He argues that war has been ruined by golems, creatures without souls. By golems, he means computers. The computers run scenarios for nuclear war, and always say don't do it because it can't be won - mutual assured destruction. But to him, the point of war is not about winning. That's a lie we tell. The point of war is the killing. We don't fight in order to kill enemy soldiers. We fight to kill innocent civilians. Because when you can deliberately kill a child, you become a superman, beyond morality. Nuclear weapons should be used just because we can, because it's amoral.
Models of the world must not just explain why it is all messed up; they must also explain why there is sometimes beauty, peace, art, science, civilization, love. It is not enough to only explain one side.
Could you kill a child? Of course not. What kind of monster kills a helpless child? But if you can do it - you have become something more than merely human. Humans are confined by their morality. Supermen are not. And soldiers? Soldiers kill children all the time. That's why there's war.
I suspect that people don't like psychopaths for the same reason our bodies kill cancer cells: they aren't good for society. (some argue that in small numbers they can be, but you can't run a tribe of psychopaths).
The specific mechanisms of people going against psychopaths include things like altruistic punishment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_punishment
Settle down, there, Trump!
:P
Sometimes 'atrocities' are real.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12682052
...on the front page at the same time.