[ExI] [extropy-chat] Back to Causes of War

[Lee Corbin]

Keith writes

>>Yes, those places would today soon revert to a "Lord of
>>the Flies" scenario. But I *thought* that our inquiry was
>>more general, namely into the causes---proximal or distal
>>---of war throughout history.
> 
> It is.  And my case, if you read EP memes and war, is that wars are largely 
> if not entirely due to human psychological mechanisms out of our stone age 
> past.

Yes.  If there was no such thing as human nature, or we altered it
some way, then wars could indeed become a thing of the past.

An important point, however, is that to a very large extent, wars
are already becoming a thing of the past (on a per-capita basis).
 
>>Yes, of course.  Such growth went hand in hand with leaders of
>>nations being less rapacious.
> 
> Right.  And while there was no doubt feedback both directions, I make the 
> case that the sea change in wars was due to the population on average *not* 
> seeing a bleak future.

The way that this is difficult to accept as a proximal cause of war is
that history---at least recent modern history---does not tend to bear it out.
The French peasantry were worse off in the 17th century than in the 18th
when they finally revolted.  And, yes, Louis XVI did start a lot of wars to
extend the boundaries of France (which happen to be France's present
boundaries).  But the two had *nothing* to do with each other.  If the
peasants had had futures less bleak, then they might have provided even
more revenue for the state. (They were by no means ready yet for revolt.)

>>Au contraire, it *is* exactly the case.  Heinlein is quite wrong.  While falling
>>resources per capita is *one* reason indeed, you have been giving the
>>impression, and Heinlein certainly does above, that it is the *sole* cause.
>>It's not, as I have demonstrated with example after example.  Sometimes
>>very prosperous nations with very good prospects go to war because their
>>leaders get greedy, or they are playing a game of international one-
>>upsmanship, or they simply want to expand their nation's territory at
>>the expense of smaller weaker adjacent nations.
> 
> It is not the reality of the current situation that activates stone age 
> psychological traits, but perception of that reality no matter how 
> divergent perception is from physical reality.  And leaders don't take a 
> country into wars without population support.

Among western democracies, mainly, that is.  But one cannot generalize
over the past thousand or two years.

>  Now they are able to play off the stone age traits, especially lying about
> being attacked or in the current war, lying about who was responsible.

The democratic West needed to believe that Saddam Hussein was an
enemy. That was easy.  They also needed to believe that if not an 
imminent threat, he would be sooner or later (which I believed and
still think would have become the case---imagine the arms race 
going on right now between Iran and Iraq).  The banner of WMD
was waved over the people and they fell for it like sheep?  Not 
exactly.  Every intelligence agency in the world believed that Hussein
had the WMD, and he behaved and acted as though he did too.
Perhaps he even did, and managed to get them across the border
during the interminable allied build-up occupying the whole fall of 2002
and spring of 2003 while the U.S. waited for U.N. sanction. Anyway,
the so-called responsible leaders of Congress almost to a man and
woman---who have their own incredibly expensive staffs to help them
come to responsible conclusions---voted overwhelmingly to support the war. 

> The spread and high influence of xenophobic memes is (in this EP model) a 
> conditional response.  Humans are not automatically xenophobic like chimps 
> are.

Oh, who says?  It was entirely natural, I claim, for each American Indian
tribe to have the notion that they were "the people" embedded into their
languages, and that other tribes weren't even people. (Naturally, there
had to be a few exceptions.)  It was an ESS.  Tribes without such
xenophobia didn't thrive as well.

> Xenophobia in a population rises when people (on average) see a bleak 
> future.  I make the case this evolved trait is mechanistic.   The way to 
> correct a bleak future back in the stone age was to kill neighbors which is 
> what xenophobic memes work the warriors up to.

I dispute that xenophobia rises only when people see a bleak future.
Just visit a high school or college campus in California and see the self-
segregation happening in the cafeteria. People naturally prefer their
own "kind" (however it happens to be culturally determined at a 
given time), and a consequent diminution of trust of "the others".

>> > But the ultimate reason you get a forest fire is the slow accumulation 
>> > of fuel.
>>
>>In the forest fire case, yes, it can come to be an inevitability. That is, if
>>a people becomes deprived enough, then they will either individually
>>or socially get violent.  But to the degree---again---that this is also a
>>historical inquiry, then we simply have that this does *not* explain
>>all modern wars. Too many wars occurred in which evidence of over-
>>population, resource depravation, etc., is not present.
> 
> None of these are needed to trip wars.  As I mentioned with the US Civil 
> War, all it took was perception in the south of a bleak future, that is 
> without slaves.  And they were right.

Why need I parade the many counter-examples again?  Princes of Italian
city states, King Louis XVI, Hitler's attack on the U.S.S.R.  These simply
did *not* require perception of a bleak future on anyone's part. It was
aggrandisement of the leaders of one kind or another.

>> > The ultimate reason you get a war is the slow accumulation of people (in
>> > excess of what the economy can support).  Slow it down till the economic
>> > growth is as high or higher than the population growth and no wars.
>>
>>You don't think that of all the wars in Europe between 1300 and
>>1800 I could not find ones in which economic growth on both
>>sides was as high as the population growth?
> 
> Given the model, you can inject factors anywhere in the chain.  False 
> perception of a bleak future would do to up the gain of xenophobic memes 
> leading to war.  False belief the country had been attacked would do 
> it.  In fact this last is *widely* exploited by leaders, consider the US 
> entry into the Vietnam war or the events that triggered the 1846 war with 
> Mexico or the Spanish American war.

Either bleak futures or false perceptions of bleak futures---the hypothesis
visibly widens over the many exchanges. Now any attack or insult to a
country (e.g. 1898 or 1846) is categorized as "perception of bleak future".
Come now.

> The psychological factor at work there was the perception by the population 
> that the US had been attacked.  9/11 certainly was an event which would 
> trip the "we have been attacked!!!" sensor.  That's why a majority of the US 
> population supported the "war leader."

Quite right. Not bleak prospects or anticipation of same, but an in-built
tribal defense mechanism absolutely *necessary* to the preservation
of EEA bands, tribes, city-states, and modern nations.  France *had*
to put 4 million men on the line in 1940 against the German menace
---ten percent of their entire population!---and at least that gave them
a fighting chance.  Without any such support when attacked---or in
their case when attack was imminent (an idiot could see that Hitler
would turn on the west soon)---then there would have been no
France to fall.

> The factors involved are additive if not multiplicative.  I make no claim 
> it is easy to untangle the complexities that are partly the result of polity
> scale up from bands of at most a hundred people to nations a million 
> times larger.

Good.

> However, it is better to have a even a poor model than to have none at 
> all.  A poor model can be tested and improved or it may lead to a better 
> model.  And in this model, it leads to an understanding of the long range 
> importance of low or even zero population growth unless you want to
> have wars.

Yes, we always need better models---or, when we can't get anything 
worthy of the name---better explanations.

Lee