People don’t realize this but, non violent societies is a relatively recent phenomenon. Anytime you hear about different human populations moving to a new area that was previously occupied by another population, if the narrative doesn’t include violence, be very skeptical.
There are no humans alive who do not have horrific monsters for ancestors. We are alive and civilized because our ancestors did terrible, monstrous things.
It's wonderful that the dark, terrible things are the anomalies in this period of history, but we need to eliminate the notions of peaceful, paradaisical societies living in harmony with nature before the evil industrial revolution came along and ruined everything.
Humans are vicious, territorial, tribal, warlike animals with a nearly unbroken history of brutality, terror, and murder of outsiders. Our modern civilizations are marvels, even as deeply flawed and imperfect as we are.
It's important to honestly understand the good and the bad of our present situations, it helps us set the expectations for the trajectory of progress.
You could take a human baby from 200,000 years ago and raise them in a modern family in New York and they'd be perfectly adapted to these times. The corollary to that is a little darker - any one of us could have been raised in any of the savage societies thousands of years ago, and we'd have been just as brutal, ignorant, and murderous as any others.
The default assumption about anything before about 500 years ago should be that of a desperate fight for survival. The exceptions are few and far between vast and violent swathes of dead people.
We’re not. But the chimpanzee-bonobos violence disparity, together with our eradication of the Neanderthals (with some interbreeding) seems to point to humans being, naturally, on the more violent end of the spectrum.
That isn’t immutable. But it means our tendency to be angry and vengeful is probably too high; we should be mindful in trusting those emotions.
> seems to point to humans being, naturally, on the more violent end of the spectrum.
I read Agner Fog's work on this topic (https://books.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp.0128.pdf) but I always lumped humanity in with other animals and attributed our numbers of violent casualties to our weapons. But maybe we are really more viscous and violent on this spectrum. I wonder though would other primates be equally prone to it if they had the tools (and same disease of consciousness).
To my knowledge, the two species with genocidal tendencies are humans and chimpanzees [1]. The drive for not only defeating but thoroughly eliminating an adversary appears to be, at least in modern biology, unique.
500 years ago, people were already living together in huge numbers. Cities already formed.
War could have been anything ranging from killing everyone to two groups tussling like soccer hooligans until someone gets hurt and one group backs off.
They can apply to join NATO/OTAN.
My comment here is just as daft as yours!
I do think it is, once it becomes a part of the culture it is very hard to get rig of. Just read about Maori culture how it escalated with arrival of Europeans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musket_Wars
and there are countless other examples
Contention for meagre resources was intense. We did not have modern grains (yield and resistance) or farming methods (fertilizers, etc) nor weather prediction. For the great majority of history, it was more or less subsistence living, whether you were farmer, fisherman, etc. Famines were not so extraordinary, maybe once per decade, so yeah, people stole, raided and fought over food. It was essential to survival.
Is there anything like this which goes back even further?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anthropogenic_disaster...
I hope we don't top it this century!
Although, we have recently sleepwalked all the way to ~168,842 dead people due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrain...
There is strong evidence (no definite proof though) that it was made or at least cultivated in the lab in China. Also it came out at just at time when China didn't know what to do with pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong
I have only heard of the biolabs theory from sources that I don't put a lot of faith in. But, I could have missed something. Could you share the best source on that?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chris-wray-covid-origin-likely-...
The WHO had plans to test animals and people around various locations to pinpoint the origin, but because their investigation was also going to include another look at the lab leak theory, they caved to pressure from China and abandoned the investigation:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00283-y
Not evidence per se, but suspicious, and casts doubt on their earlier conclusions.
There's plenty of coincidental and other high suspicious things, but if there were hard proof it wouldn't be much of a controversy.
1) We should tighten up all infectious disease labs
AND
2) We should have higher global food standards (wet markets, etc)
AND
3) Improve indoor air filtration, everywhere
As far as I can tell, we've done none of those things.
In terms of QALYs lost War in Ukraine is most likely worse.
Every premature death is a tragedy, but death of a 20 year old is much more tragic than that of an 80 year old.
Also all the genocide and mass rape and bioweapons and those numbers very easily add up. When you have one society that views the destruction of humanity as the greatest sublime pleasure, and others doing whatever they can to stop them, a lot of people are going to die.
There has always been war waged somewhere since humanity has been capable of defining the word "war". There have never been non violent societies, recently or otherwise.
Can you name a country or society or population that has not been involved in a war within the - say - last 100 years?
Have another roll.
Neutral doesn’t mean non-violent. They weren’t one of the belligerents engaged in WWII but they did defend their neutrality and were a target of actions by the Nazis that didn’t amount to much by the end of the War.
There was a civilization in South America whose city/cities didn’t have defensive structures, don’t remember the name though.
Edit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chav%C3%ADn_culture
Warfare does not seem to have been a significant element in Chavín culture. The archaeological evidence shows a lack of basic defensive structures in Chavín centres, and warriors are not depicted in art, in notable contrast to the earlier art at Cerro Sechín. Effective social control may have been exercised by religious pressure, and the ability to exclude dissidents from managed water resources. The climate and terrain of the neighbouring areas outside the managed land were a daunting option for farmers wishing to flee the culture. Evidence of warfare has been found only in contemporaneous sites that were not influenced by Chavín culture, almost as if those other civilizations were defending themselves via warfare from Chavín cultural influence.
Switzerland may have been formally neutral during WW2 but some individuals had other ideas. Was Switzerland neutral through WW1? My 100 years thing goes back to 1924, so post 1914-18.
You could look at Iceland too. It was declared it's own country in 1918, and other than a brief, zero-casualty "occupation" during WW2 has never been involved in a war. It has no military and no legal mechanism to be able to declare war.
Pacifism can only endure as a privileged lifestyle on the backs of warriors. Defenseless, clueless folk get wiped out, enslaved, or subjugated by the first "Viking raid".
How many of the Caribbean states have been involved in wars? (I know Cuba had a civil war that occasionally appeared more external than civil wars reasonably should)
A hundred years isn't a very long time.
That's why I chose it.
That is quite the stretch. There are many countries that live in peace with each other and within for most of the time. Only occasional defensive operations might have been violent, but does it make the society as a whole 'violent'?
Our forefathers were just like us, and we fight, but not widespread and not frequently.
The state having a monopoly on violence is sometimes very bad, but overall it does seem to lead to fewer violent deaths.
But anyway, from your chart I'm not entirely convinced. The chart you linked seems to show a "most violent cultures that were also non-state", and it appears that it quickly decays to less than 4% chance in a dozen or two tribal societies. Out of how many? The long tail is going to include a randomly selected person almost surely, and I'd imagine a much lower rate of violent death in that long tail.
Let alone states, which include larger populations, further increasing the chance you'd randomly exist in a less violent time or place.
"The origin of everything" is a good book on how even tribal states had a strong inclination against violence and had structures in place to keep things peaceful
But if there are ten million tribes not shown on this chart that have less than 0.01% chance of violent death, then the real median is much lower, right?
This is why I find the chart misleading: It chooses the most violent non-state tribes as a basis. It therefore is not a valid way of concluding "How likely was violence" because it eschews states (which may have been more organized / less violent), and does not include anywhere near all tribes, and so a meaningful comparison with the rest of the population is impossible.
Imagine we were discussing people. You show me the top 25 most murderous people, and say "The median murders by these people were 10!", this does not mean anything about the number of murders committed by anyone else.
Where'd you get this information? These are just the tribes they have data on, they didn't cherry pick it as far as I can see.
Reexamining the chart, you're right, it is in fact the full data analyzed. It's fair to reconsider at this point, but I think my initial reservations about the selection of the data still apply - author did not choose the 25 most deadly tribes, but he did choose only data for which violence was the subject. Ostensibly, there must be some under-representation among peoples that didn't leave mass graves, burned villages, etc.
So we see a 100x increase over modern day USA murder rates among chiefdoms and anarchic tribes, which who knows how much of the population that represents. Again, I also take issue generalizing from that.
For example, here's the same author estimating state deaths. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-violent-deaths-s...
So, how many lived in states vs tribes over time? And where are all the other states and tribes? I'd expect a power-law relationship, with the worst atrocities being highly visible, and a long tail of less-awful areas to live. The problem is did lots or a little people live in those places
All I'm saying is "Was life basically nasty brutish and short for everyone?" I doubt it was all that bad, though I would never want to go back.
Conan the Barbarian was fictional, yes, but it was fiction written by a guy who was obsessed with ancient history and Nietzsche, in many ways its more true than any historical or archeological account.