[ExI] War ----- It's a meme!

[BillK]

John Horgan has an article in Scientific American about why tribes go
to war that might be of interest. I know that Keith has suggested that
war is caused either by hard times or an expectation of hard times,
but I feel this is a weak theory as it seems to cover all cases and
therefore is untestable. Horgan thinks that war is learned behaviour.

Some Quotes:

Analyses of more than 300 societies in the Human Relations Area Files,
an ethnographic database at Yale University, have turned up no
clear-cut correlations between warfare and chronic resource scarcity.
Similarly, the anthropologist Lawrence Keeley notes in War before
Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (Oxford University
Press, 1997) that the correlation between population pressure and
warfare "is either very complex or very weak or both."

Margaret Mead dismissed the notion that war is the inevitable
consequence of our "basic, competitive, aggressive, warring human
nature." This theory is contradicted, she noted, by the simple fact
that not all societies wage war. War has never been observed among a
Himalayan people called the Lepchas or among the Eskimos. In fact,
neither of these groups, when questioned by early ethnographers, was
even aware of the concept of war.

Warfare is "an invention," Mead concluded, like cooking, marriage,
writing, burial of the dead or trial by jury. Once a society becomes
exposed to the "idea" of war, it "will sometimes go to war" under
certain circumstances. Some people, Mead stated, such as the Pueblo
Indians, fight reluctantly to defend themselves against aggressors;
others, such as the Plains Indians, sally forth with enthusiasm,
because they have elevated martial skills to the highest of manly
virtues.

------------------


BillK