Barbarian Virtues | Hacker News Reader

Barbarian Virtues

thenation.com

34 pointsbenbreen16 comments

Given the choice between having to constantly fight the masses and having to sometimes fight a state that was designed to safeguard freedoms but sometimes infringes upon them, I'll take the latter.

A quick look at how the natural world works is a good enough deterrent: https://www.reddit.com/r/natureismetal/

This seems like a false dichotomy. Finding the right balance between individual autonomy and working together for mutual benefit might be a better way to frame it.

>A quick look at how the natural world works is a good enough deterrent: https://www.reddit.com/r/natureismetal/

What does this prove? No being can survive without destroying another being. Moreover, no plant or animal has threatened the entire Earth moreso than nuclear armed States

counterpoint: nuclear-armed USSR, and since then nuclear armed former Soviet Republics with poor nuclear security, definitely including Russia in this. second-counterpoint: global warming is also bad, actually damaging the earth instead of potentially damaging it.

"Moreover, no plant or animal has threatened the entire Earth moreso than nuclear armed States"

Cyanobacteria have accomplished far more than we have on that front: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event

Has there been a peaceful time before civilization, where people weren't fighting over territory?

Without modern political organization and agriculture, we'd spend all of our time either trying to hunt food or steal hunting grounds from others, or we'd wind up right back where we are (likely after another 10,000+ years of slavery).

Possibly, though in large part because the population densities and portability of food afforded were insufficient to allow for widespread warfar.

You'd have had inter-tribal conflicts, but almost certainly of limited and brief duration. Quite probably intra-tribal as well.

I believe it's Jared Diamond who discusses how the introduction of the potato (a calorically-dense, portable foodstuff) changed the nature of warfare in New Zealand as tribes with the potato could sustain far longer military campaigns than those without. "An army marches on its stomach."

Not so much "weren't fighting" as "couldn't fight as much, as hard, as long, or in as organised a fashion".

Evidence of cannibalism, violence, etc in early hominids suggests that low population numbers didn’t offer a cure to the problem. We are the problem.

Agreed. Again, it's not the existence of conflict I'm considering, but the scale.

Fair enough, but remember to put a “per capita” section in the scale.

It's ... more complicated than that.

I've just recently run across a reference to a metric for military force and capability, though I can't recall at the moment what it is based on. Though I believe it related to the capacity to project force.

The size of an army, its relation to the total population size, the distance / range at which it can act, the quantity, accuracy, and efficacy of force project, and much else.

Just by way of example, I've been looking at WWII history, particularly the fall of France. On base specifications, French armour was actually more capable than German, with one critical exception: German tanks had radios. The ability to act in concert and respond in realtime to changing battle circumstances proved critical. Against a relatively numerically-balanced French force, the German military was tremendously more effective. Blitzkreig tactics didn't work against numerically-superiour, and largely technically-matched, US and British forces on and after D-Day, though.

Quantifying fitness metrics is complicated.

That Scott presents as his major finding that eons separated the development of cultivation and the rise of the state not only cuts against any conclusion that the pathways into state bondage were inevitable; it also goes far to undermine Scott’s entire outlook. The fact that nothing about the innovations of fire and agriculture and “incipient urbanism” necessarily required states and their iniquities means that many of the good things “civilization” has brought are indeed separable from its greatest evils and therefore do not necessarily deserve the opprobrium implied by both the title and the argument of his book. Though Scott does not observe it, the first half of Against the Grain reads like a paean to a different style of agricultural civilization in the making: the best of a stateless hunting-and-gathering society tweaked in the name of bread. It also suggests a lesson that Scott would never draw: that the state itself has never been given on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. He acknowledges that there is no decisive moment when the state emerged and no single feature that defines it. In his challenge to the inevitability of the state after fire and even agriculture, Scott misses the chance to develop a theory of the variety of governments, not only in the past but also in the future.

This has a hint of a valid criticism, but isn't logical enough to get there. I haven't read this book, but in general Scott is most critical of the state and its direct effects, and mostly considers agriculture and urbanity guilty by association. It is no contradiction of this position to observe that these behaviors emerged before the state did (after all, many theorists consider these prerequisites to the creation of the state), nor does the proposition that some states could be of net benefit to humans necessarily follow.

TFA explicitly associates Scott's leftist anarchism with Those Damned Libertarians. In this context that's (unintentionally) amusing, since it reads so much like the standard anti-libertarian status quo-affirming don't-waste-your-vote-also-don't-say-voting-is-a-waste screeds that are so banal where politics is discussed online. When one's response to criticism of a way of life is a desperate "it's not that bad!" rather than a curious "how could it improve?", it's clear that one values the maintenance of power over the refinement of its exercise.

That is ultimately pretty scathing review. Is the book really just another iteration of the noble savage idea?

I do wonder why this landed on the frontpage, is it because the attractiveness of the basic idea, or because the dialogue here presented some new insight (that I might have missed)?

No idea why it was posted. I've only started this one, but what Scott seems to be advocating is essentially Anarcho-syndicalism.

Where Marx said that hunter-gatherers were engaging in Primitive Communism, Scott argues that they were engaging in Political Anarchy. He kinda has a point (at least when you look at hunter-gatherers who are still around 10,000 years later). We just assume that Marx must have been right since he was taking a diagnostic approach, but without archeological, genetic, and anthropological evidence, can we be certain that it was anything other than hypothesis? If Marx was wrong about man's "year zero", what else was he wrong about?

Not that I'm totally on board with Scott and his critique of civilization, but I do think he has some useful views when it comes to pre-history.

Could not read the article (the paywall locked me out) but the benefits of states in reducing violence are discussed in Jared Diamond's "The World Until Yesterday".

https://outline.com/72Fz7D

too many dangerous questions..

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