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.
Maybe? Flintlock muskets were fairly new technology around the US revolution - less than 100 years before that, people would have been using match locks and arquebuses - relatively the difference is probably similar to the difference between a smith and wesson revolver and an AR-15.
So a man who had never fought in a battle and owned slaves thought other people's lives were cheap. Jefferson made significant contributions to both America and the world, but that doesn't mean he never got it wrong.
He was writing at a time very early in the development of democracies, and democratic institutions. If you have a free society and democracy, then there is no place for violence.
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.
FTA: “The majority of archaeologists are against the warfare theory,” says Peter Turchin, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, and the new study’s lead author. “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.”
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?
> How can you be an archaeologist and not think war has been a major part of human history?
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.
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.
Turchin isn't saying that majority of archaelogists don't believe that warfare was a major part of human history.
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.
My understanding of Turchin's argument from Ultrasociety is basically that for very early civilizations people were generally worse off individually giving up autonomy to absolute rulers, and that it goes against most people's and similar primates feelings about fairness/egalitarianism.
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.
The thing about warfare is the side that is better organized and led tends to win. Strategy and tactics play a huge role in victory, and don't arise spontaneously. I would expect it to drive society to more complexity.
Part of it is clarifying the claim. Is it "some positive effects" meaning some subset of all the effects being positive or "overall positive effect" meaning the sum of all the negative and positive effects is positive? The first one is pretty simple, you just need to find one positive effect. The second is much more difficult and requires making judgements of the relative size of good and bad effects which is much more subjective, and I could see someone's view of subjective waits making it impossible for this to ever be true.
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?
Humans would not engage in warfare if they didn't think it was of benefit.
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.
Peter Turchin likes to cast himself as a bit of a rebel "against the establishment", despite the fact that he's one of the most prominent academics in that establishment. What you are understanding from that statement is, unsurprisingly, very uncontroversial. To understand what Turchin is actually saying though, it's worth framing the underlying paper:
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.
Because they don't like the implications that "might is right". Evolution itself is survival of the fittest and "will to power", so it naturally follows that civilizations would advance along the same axis of complexity. Technology developing along with methods of conquest and war isn't a very controversial claim, not sure why this one would be.
A generous way to read it is that they don't like the idea, but not necessarily claim that it is wrong. Although the use of the word "against" would plausibly imply "opposed" rather than "made uncomfortable by"
> 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?
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.
War is an evolution on a societal organization level. Survival of the fittest.
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.
Chimpanzees engage in warfare, it is one of the few species other than humans to engage in mass combat. Is it complex? I would say to a certain degree.
Chimpanzees certainly don't engage in warfare, unless you want to anthropomorphic chimpanzees and change the nomenclature of warfare.
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.
War is a symptom of various causes, like over-population, changing geographical conditions, and just plain old greed. It is not a root cause. If humans had no bloodthirst we would still wage war, so long as we had a will to survive (something which would be difficult to take out of a lifeform).
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.
It may not be universally clear but to most people it clearly is a good thing to be in a more complex society. im definitely happy to not be sitting in a hut in a jungle with no other option.
It's possible to cooperate to survive, it seems much harder (more complex!), but I don't agree that it's impossible. Much easier, I'm sure.
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.
The book Metropolis by Ben Wilson - focusing on cities more than the empires that may or may not have been around them - provides an alternate view where societal complexity and trade and cultural development are much more linked through cities - a mostly-virtuous cycle of proximity and trade enabling specialization and unlocking additional development.
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.
Grumpy Geezer reaction to the title: "None of the kids behind that Controversial Study knew squat about the history of Rome, did they? Nor game theory. Nor..."
Isn't the idea that war is completely bad relatively new? Ancient people had gods of war, although how exactly they were regarded I'm not sure, but it seems to me there was a more balanced view of life and death, and the cycle of a society. So war was viewed as inevitable, especially since the world was so unknown and mysterious.
> 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.
Readit News
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
https://youtu.be/TxD4AwFiELM
Going from having slavery as a global institution, entrenched since the beginning of man, to the abolishment of slavery, is not a trivial problem.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Who made the shirts they are wearing and that good they are eating?
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.
Dead Comment
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.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
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.
Deleted Comment
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.
Deleted Comment
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.