Archaeological analysis suggests warfare helped societies become more complex
science.org
science.org
What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?
Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them.
What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
It is its natural manure.
He seemed to believe in warfare theory
Cannons are pretty neat devices to construct, especially if you try to do bore drilling with any period accurate methods.
And yes, the armory would have had cannon that would be practiced on.
Violence imposes an inequality in power in favour of those who are more violently inclined over those who are not. It further empowers the strong and further disenfranchises the weak or disadvantaged. Heinlein called voting the exercise of force, but that’s wrong, it is the ultimate exercise of speech. It’s having a say. The process of voting is one of giving all a voice. Violence is inherently anti freedom, anti speech, it is an attempt to silence or coerce others through intimidation or death. They are opposites. He called an armed society a polite society. Democratic societies shouldn’t have to be polite, they should be free to be impolite. Free speech means freedom to say things others don’t want to hear, otherwise it’s no freedom at all. Vetoing that with a threat of violence is tyranny.
So no, I’m sorry, I know Jefferson and the founding fathers of the war of independence are heroes in the US, but in the context of a democratic state he’s just flat out wrong.
If you have no voice, have no vote, or if the system is corrupt or unfair then sure. In that situation you don’t have a say, so violence might be justified. They were justified in taking up arms against Britain. But if you do have a say and resort to violence to impose your views anyway, that’s oppression.
Going from having slavery as a global institution, entrenched since the beginning of man, to the abolishment of slavery, is not a trivial problem.
It’s great he said some abolitionist things, but abolitionists had existed and had even successfully abolished slavery since before the birth of Christ. There are people after Jefferson and his contemporaries that actually abolished slavery from then into the present day. I’m not sure why the US founding fathers who came up with shit like the 3/5th’s compromise deserve any special credit.
I would give more credit to the white abolitionists who lived in the 1800s and the slaves themselves.
Jefferson and others were proven right when it took a war to end slavery in the US. That's what they wanted to avoid. It's uncharitable to blame them for not fighting that war; it would have been their lives on the line. Meanwhile we're sitting in the present, benefitting from that war without the need to die in it.
The abolitionist movement predates Christ. The Qin Dynasty are the first abolitionists we have written records of. So if anything the evidence points to the abolitionist movement starting in China.
IMO this is unfair description of the US's fight for freedom from the tyranny of a country that was an ocean away and still meddled in literally every country's affairs.
I find it really concerning if this is actually true. How can you be an archaeologist and not think war has been a major part of human history?
The need to wage war to defend or gain resources seems like a major driver of complexity. To maintain a military it needs equipped and fed, requiring large supply chains, and hence, more complexity. If you didn't need to defend your food stores, you wouldn't need such complexity.
Not sure why you are having so much trouble with this.
I doubt peaceful means could achieve what war can.
It works the other way as well, I doubt war can achieve what peace can.
> Warfare will push the society to create better weapons (metallurgy, chariot making etc,), better logistics, solidify hierarchies etc.
In many historical examples this also involved the destruction of knowledge. The Roman empire set mathematics back a thousand years. The Greeks were very close to calculus.
Large hierarchies often stagnate societies.
The result of the Peloponnesian War was a diminished Athens and stagnant slowly dying Sparta.
Did WW1 help Europe by killing two generations of French and German Mathematicians? Königsberg was one of the top intellectual centers of the world for 300 years? How is it doing now? Can you even find it on a map?
Warfare isn't just on thing that we isolate and ask, "is it beneficial?" The impact of a war on a society depends enormously on context and the chaos of history. Did WW2 result in massive advances in human science, I think so. How can we know what the world would have looked like if so many human lives had not be lost? The world got really good jet engines but what did it lose?
Did WW1 set science back, I also think that is true. WW1 also helped set in motion the end of European colonialism which is a long term good for the world.
There is no meaningful answer to this question when set at a scope as large as you have set it.
I'm replying to a comment that says the idea that it has not is obviously impossible to entertain.
That said, this might all be recency bias on my part. Historically war has been a big drain on scarce resources, most of all non-agricultural manpower. It's hard to advance society if everyone who isn't on the fields is working on war-related things.
Then again, without the military demand for better barrels and stronger steel, would we have developed the technology that enabled the pistons and steam engines that powered the industrial revolution?
But both views still require deciding if something is positive, which isn't exactly a scientific question. It is a bit like asking if evolution has positive effects. From a purely scientific view, is life or increased complexity of life a positive?
Who made the shirts they are wearing and that good they are eating?
It's a specific statement about theories about enabled/drove the increase in societal complexity in the last 10,000 years. The question is about the relative importance of agriculture and warfare as enablers and drivers.
Unfortunately without the whole interview/quote, it's hard to parse out exactly what Turchin means when he says "the warfare theory". We do know that Turchin is arguing that warfare (external conflict) and agriculture are together the two dominant factors in driving societal complexity.
The most charitable explanation would be that the people who are "against the warfare theory" would probably argue that agriculture is the dominant factor, with external conflict firmly in second place, as an important (perhaps the most important) secondary factor. Another reasonable reading would be that the majority of archaeologists do not believe that warfare is the dominant factor in societal complexity.
As a result there must have been some very large advantage to centralization, which he argues was likely war in order to defend against external threats or raiders.
My understanding is that clear evidence of conquest and genocide, like artifacts associated with a culture ceasing to be made while all new artifacts of a different culture begin to be made, is habitually explained away as mere cultural exchange. The hypothesis is that the resident population wasn't wiped out, it just wholesale adopted a different culture.
Another issue is that archeologically speaking it's pretty hard to tell war from migration. That's one of those clear scientific results that researchers prefer not to talk too much about on account of the political elite's position on migration.
Archaeologists are not arguing that warfare hasn't been a major part of human history, rather they don't implied idea that warfare benefited humanity.
However this isn't what the study is saying, the study is saying that "the introduction of mounted warfare and the emergence of iron weapons" resulted in an increase in social complexity.
* An increase in social complexity may or may not be a good thing for humanity overall. For instance the indicators of social complexity used here were among other things: size of bureaucracy and size of empire. The fall of the Russian empire likely resulted in a decrease in social complexity for Poland: Poland no longer part of a larger state. Many Polish people will tell you that gaining their freedom was an improvement.
* There can be different types of increases in social complexity. One might be beneficial to humanity and one might be terrible for humanity. These are not distinguished.
* The study is upfront about social complexity not being the same as cultural complexity. You can have an increase in social complexity while seeing a decrease in cultural complexity.
* They are looking at one specific innovation, iron weapons and mounted warfare. This doesn't generalize to all warfare. The war between Carthage and Rome resulted in Carthage's total destruction, this did not benefit Carthage and reduced the social complexity of Carthage to null.
It's a very big leap from, societies that gain a set specific of weapons improvements gain in social complexity as they build bigger empires --> warfare offers more benefit to humanity than it costs.
I read that as soil complexity.
In fact, the first labor saving invention was to steal someone else's food. All animals practice it when they can. That's all some species even do - we call them scavengers. Like vultures and hyenas.
Turchin is a big advocate of something he calls cliodynamics, which is essentially psychohistory. One of the fundamental assumptions underlying it is that all of human history obeys uniformitarian rules and thus figuring out those rules is simply a matter of having enough data. So, he's spent the past while gathering a dataset and in this paper does PCA against it to find the variables that are most correlated with his measure of social complexity.
Where most people would find issue is with the underlying assumptions there. A lot of people don't agree that human history obeys uniformitarian rules and if they do, they don't necessarily agree with lumping different societies together in a PCA.
Through wars, we get to find out which system better and organizational structure fits better in the current world. Is it a fake democracy, anarchy, or an autocracy? Who will survive in the end? What kind of balance between military, science and economy works the best? What is more important, human rights of all in and out groups, or cohesion of the main societal group? Should the decision makers be people we elect, or "objectively" most capable and smartest individuals.
We all played Civilization, and we know that different societies have different trade-offs and balances. The principle is the same in the real world, just more nuanced and complex. And it takes decades to show the results.
Back to the question if the warfare make societies more complex? Maybe, but only in cases where more complex societies win the war, which is not always. We may consider current Afghanistan under Taliban one of the simplest societal structure, and they won hands-down against a complex alliance of complex organized societies.
While chimpanzees certainly hit each other, they have not been observed much to kill one another, unless humans artificially modify their feeding environments and territories.
It's likely that certain pharmacological byproduct consumed shaped and formed our awareness, the same way alcohol and tobacco have produced our modern male dominated society.
Think about this. A chimpanzee encounters a strange mushroom, consumes it, suddenly begins to attain visual acuity which allows him more information gathering about the surroundings. Not to mention conceptualization, abstraction all of which are basic building blocks of human consciousness.
We might be a decendant of group of primates that successfully mastered fire manipulation. Cooked meat has far more nutrients and proteins that further help develop ouir brain.
Just running on bits and pieces I read here and there and its fun to entertain the thought of how we emerged as a dominant species. I'm under the school of thought that there was some informational/knowledge transfer that radically set us apart from the rest. Emergence of consciousness and our continued expansion of our awareness seems very much real.
The actual article only asserts that military innovation is a predictor for social complexity, which is pretty different from saying that "war makes society complex".
> “Nobody likes this ugly idea because obviously warfare is a horrible thing, and we don’t like to think it can have any positive effects.”
The implicit assumption being that a more complex society _is_ a good thing, which is not clear to me.
We'd need to forgo some autonomy to achieve it IMO, for example: we'd need to get a handle on population rises; we'd need to limit resource usage using some mechanism other than financial affordability; and lots else.
This bit from the linked article makes me wary of their correlation/causation jump: "But she thinks the time between advances in agriculture and military technology and the development of social complexity is too long to be confident about their impact. She says a lag time of 300 to 400 years between the arrival of ironworking and horses and the rise of an empire suggests “military technology must be viewed as a very remote predictor of the outcome.”"
Part of Metropolis, though, can also be read as a cautionary tale about neglecting weapons development. The problem is that someone else can always be a bigger asshole: a thriving trade network across many different civilizations in the Indian Ocean was wrecked, conquered, and colonized by religious-driven aggression by the Portuguese when European civilization finally caught back up and was much more armed since Europeans had spent the time just before that in years of fighting amongst themselves.
> competition is what drives societies to become more complex, building more hierarchical armies to fight ever-more-complex wars and organizing increasingly bureaucratic governments to manage diverse resources and growing populations.
This reminds me how the competition between the different species of humans millions of years ago engaged in a cognitive race, making more complex tools and language. The bigger brain homo-sapiens won the war it seems, but we then had to deal with our internal competition. Maybe war is some kind of continuation of the cognitive race.
Moreover, technology as we know it got a tremendous boost during the big wars. Think about V2 (which made NASA and the moon landings a possibility), Enigma, Turing's computer, lots of advances in biology (for warfare purposes at first), advances in aviary, etc.
It's as if the humanity needed a _boost_. Too sad that it was war that did the trick.
We can't extrapolate the findings about the ancient societies to the post-industrial age.
- satellites and space travel
- the internet
- GPS
I'm sure we can add many more things to this list. (Please do in reply.)
I don't think it's a contradiction to acknowledge this and at the same time be anti-war, just as it isn't a contradiction to acknowledge greed and selfishness as a strongly motivating factor in human nature (such acknowledgment is the very basis of capitalism) and at the same time advocate for human society to find a way to transcend our base natures and evolve a society and economic system not built on them.
Transcending our base nature is the whole point of culture.
Does war require that the participants have some sort of shared goal? It is not an infrequent occurrence that in human wars the planners and decision makers are not unified around the aims of the war.
It reminds me of the scene in Anathem where two of the monks wage a garden battle.
My pet theory is that markets strive towards market freedom as opposed to a free market which is purely defined by a lack of regulation and then followed by processes that fill the power vacuum. No, market freedom is about giving everyone the ability to participate in the division of labor to the extend that they want, the ability to refuse to be trapped by debt against their will, the freedom from being forced to grow the economy against their will, the freedom from rent seeking and the freedom from being deprived of basic humans needs like land and food via the division of labor.
As you can see, these freedoms aren't granted by default, a free market does not grant them. We introduced states with their monopoly on violence to protect people from violence. The right to life has to be enforced by competent officials as otherwise a small portion of the population will inevitably use murder for their own benefit.
Because of this constant striving toward market freedom, people resist authoritarianism and this necessitates guard labor which forcibly distorts the market away from market freedom. At some point half the population engages in guard labor at which point the ruler will be overthrown by the guard labor leading to a military dictatorship which will be overthrown again. If this doesn't happen, then the ruler will be overthrown by the rebellion instead leading to an economy that is closer to market freedom.
"Smart" rulers notice that they should avoid becoming a villain, instead they blame someone else, a foreign country and their leaders. During market saturation, money fails to circulate, leading to mass unemployment as the productivity of a handful of people is enough to produce most products and the jobs are unfairly allocated to people who do not need their additional income. This encourages governments to invest the surplus labor force in the military and for building and stockpiling weapons to fight the villain country. Because the choice to only work for their rent and food has been taken away from them through the unfair concentration of work, people are forced to engage in wartime production, they simply have no choice.
What warfare represents is just a way to keep capital gains and interest rates high in an economy that has no need for further growth. People quite literally destroy capital because they haven't learned how to allocate it properly. Market saturation is as if capitalism was a video game that can be beat, but when you finish it, you and everyone realizes that beating capitalism doesn't solve poverty whatsoever and people get become aware and angry that the problem wasn't a lack of growth to begin with and eliminating poverty is purely about wealth and income distribution for which capitalists have no answer. Hence the endless need to grow and if you can't, to go to war, to keep people busy and sweep the inequality under the rug.
Maybe there will be a day in the future where firearms will be banned worldwide.
Of course firearms will still exist but will be rare, making armed conflict almost impossible, and they would only be produced in very small quantities, to defend against people who make them illegally.
One thing that should be definitely be banned, are long distance rockets mounted on trucks. Those are very inaccurate and should not exist.
How would it enforce it’s authority with non-compliant actors?
Also, have you considered what the term "authority" means?
But then again, a bunch of people still also think communism or socialism are great ideas, so...
As China and India have demonstrated recently, this is not the case. Firearms are not the source of conflict.
I also question whether you truly mean all firearms would be banned as it would not be possible to enforce this ban without your UN-controlled authority possessing firearms. So this is yet another proposal for only the government to have a monopoly on weapons.
Well, banning nuclear weapons (and establishing an inspection schedule) would be a good start: https://www.icanw.org/
Unfortunately, NATO is currently opposed to this.
Moving the needle to zero is vastly more difficult than arms reduction; any leftovers are humongously dangerous which makes me question who actually thinks trying to do this is a good idea.
I have to say, I consider MAD theory to be completely misguided, and also morally wrong to engage in nuclear retaliatory attack.
However, I understand the worry. It would be possible for NATO to propose an aggressive, world-wide nuclear arms reduction schedule (and possibly even lead it), but they are not doing that (they are rather doing the opposite, expanding).
START I, SORT, and New START (which is currently ongoing) don't count? And INF, though that was shelved due to Russian breaches (Kaliningrad cough), but even without that it wouldn't have had much more of a future due to it being bilateral, with no Chinese involvement.
> I have to say, I consider MAD theory to be completely misguided, and also morally wrong to engage in nuclear retaliatory attack.
MAD is irrelevant for this question. It's about stable vs unstable conditions. When everyone in the room has a gun, there is balance. If everyone in the room provably has no gun, there is also a balance. The former balance is vastly more stable than the latter, because even a fractional gun in the latter scenario changes the picture dramatically, while doing approximately nothing in the latter. Consequently, the value of an individual gun goes up hugely as the total number of guns in the rooms approaches zero. Russia having one more nuke today? Buys them virtually nothing. Someone finding a nuke in the basement in the utopian nuke-free world? They own the world.
It's an inherently unstable setup. Nukes will never go away and trying to do so is the most dangerous thing anyone could try to do. It's perhaps the least probable example of trying to put the genie back in the bottle. The best we can do is multilateral reduction in lock-step and preventing proliferation to more states.
> (they are rather doing the opposite, expanding)
Elaborate
I disagree with the idea that if everyone has a gun, the world is more stable (with respect to gun use) than if nobody has a gun. We see something similar play out in mass shootings in the U.S compared to other countries.
I also don't think we can't, with diplomatic effort, put genie back to bottle. I think we owe it to future generations to try.
NATO is expanding to Finland and Sweden (which was actually considering to sign nuclear weapon ban), not to mention earlier expansion. They are part of the problem (NATO is pretty much designed as a nuclear pact). There is plenty of countries without nuclear weapons or umbrella and doing just fine.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic...
> Gort is an eight-foot tall, seamless robot apparently constructed from a single piece of "flexible metal". He is but one member of a "race of robots" invented by an interplanetary confederation (described as "A sort of United Nations on a Planetary level" by Klaatu, who is a representative of that confederation) to protect their citizens against all aggression by destroying any aggressors. Klaatu describes "him" as one of an interstellar police force, holding irrevocable powers to "preserve the peace" by destroying any aggressor. The fear of provoking these robots acts as a deterrent against aggression.
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gort_(The_Day_the_Earth_Stood_...
The gunless world will arise when everyone voluntarily puts them down together and they rust along with the factories that made them.