[extropy-chat] War Is Easy To Explain - Peace is Not

[Damien Broderick]

At 10:16 PM 3/13/2007 -0700, Lee wrote:

>If you were to just
>look at the wars between France and England over 500 years alone,
>the advance of peace is relentless.
>
>Whereas you can scarcely pick up a history book on pre-literate peoples
>without accounts of almost constant warring, or at least preparation for
>war.

I don't have immediate access to numbers, or time to search for them, 
but I suspect your scaling is misleading. Tribes and clans that make 
"warfare" a bloody and deadly recurrent part of ordinary life are 
very much smaller than nation states, even those of 500 years ago. 
The equivalent of Australian aboriginal and Amazonian tribal 
"warfare" seems to me more likely the territorial tussles and 
drive-by slayings between gangs in parts of LA and the Bronx (if 
that's where they hang out these days), and equivalent ghettoized 
regions of European nations, except that the cops constitute an 
intrusion from a larger imperial realm--although police probably stay 
clear of the internal dynamics, knowing full well that such "wars" 
are inevitable, so why get in the middle?

Fractal warfare dynamics, that's my guess. Or maybe that's expressing 
it wrongly, if the drivers are *not* self-similar at various scales. 
Is there a sociologist in the room?

Damien Broderick