[refurb]

Pretty much this.

Humans are not peaceful by nature. And when one group of humans want something another group of humans don’t want them to have, violence is the ultimate option to solving that conflict.

Thankfully many countries see the cost of solving conflict through violence and seek to avoid it, but it’s always there.

[kruuuder]

> Humans are not peaceful by nature

I also believed this until recently when I finished reading "Humankind: A Hopeful History" by Rutger Bregman. What an amazing book ... Bregman analyzes why we commonly believe that humans are not peaceful and that this assumption turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy. But there is surprisingly little evidence that being aggressive or violent is in our nature, pretty much the opposite is true.

To me, reading this book did the opposite of what reading the news usually does: I finished every chapter with an optimistic smile. :)

[int_19h]

I don't see how this squares with all the violent primitive societies (which are more common than the non-violent variety).

[refurb]

I mean peaceful societies only exist because of the threat of violence to anyone who attacks them.

[kruuuder]

Well yes, I already understood that's your point of view, but the book offers a different perspective which I found pretty convincing.

[michaelchisari]

| Humans are not peaceful by nature

You can't make a broad sweeping generalization like this. There have been so many peaceful, even pacifist civilizations throughout history.

That they have been wiped out or dominated by the violent ones is a valid historical point, but it doesn't disprove that human "nature" can just as easily be peaceful, given the right conditions. Failing to protect yourself from external violent pressure is not the same as intrinsic nature.

The only strict statement about human nature that we can confidently make is that we are extraordinarily adaptive to and malleable by the conditions we live under.

[alex_sf]

That's semantics imo. If pacifism results in extinction, then any revision of human nature that involves it is irrelevant. Humans don't exist without violence.

[michaelchisari]

It's not semantics at all. "Human nature" implies a universal, inherent state. If we have peaceful, pacifist civilizations regularly cropping up throughout history, then saying that human nature is violence just simply isn't true. It doesn't matter if the violent civilizations come to dominate. That the peaceful societies exist at all (let alone are abundant and common) means that argument falls apart.

[alex_sf]

> universal, inherent state

It's not a universal, inherent state in any humans that survive. It's an aberration.

That being said, I'm not actually aware of any of these abundant/common peaceful/pacifist societies you're referencing. It's entirely possible I'm ignorant of them, but I'm suspicious that they weren't actually 'peaceful'. Can you name a few of them?

[michaelchisari]

| It's an aberration.

It's common enough to disprove the statement "Human nature is inherently violent". It shows that understanding humanity is simply too complex to boil down to pat remarks like that.

| I'm not actually aware

Anthropology has documented plenty. The Kung! come to mind. And this is not the early-days "noble savage" anthropology, the perspective that there have been many civilizations that operate through cooperation and peaceful negotiation is not controversial in modern anthropology.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-00692-8

[alex_sf]

> It's common enough to disprove the statement "Human nature is inherently violent". It shows that understanding humanity is simply too complex to boil down to pat remarks like that.

If we accept every aberration as disproving human nature, then there is no such thing as human nature. There are exceptions to any possible definition of it. Suicide disproves self-preservation, childless adults disprove reproduction, laziness disproves innovation.

I'm not actually opposed to that argument, but it is, as mentioned and in context, semantics.

> Anthropology has documented plenty. The Kung! come to mind. And this is not the early-days "noble savage" anthropology, the perspective that there have been many civilizations that operate through cooperation and peaceful negotiation is not controversial in modern anthropology.

!Kung society absolutely had violence and homicide[1][2]. It's very much noble savage anthropology. They did not operate through cooperation and peaceful negotiation: they were just isolated hundreds of kilometers from anyone else, so the scale was smaller.

If anything, the !Kung disprove your argument. They spoke the same language, had the same beliefs, had a fair division of resources, were geographically isolated, and still killed each other.

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/680660 [2] https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-e...

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

> There have been so many peaceful, even pacifist civilizations throughout history.

> That they have been wiped out or dominated by the violent ones is a valid historical point [...]

The violent societies have also been wiped out and dominated by other violent ones. Or have caused their own collapse by other means. So violence has not yet shown itself to be a successful strategy for societial survival.

Survival, it turns out, is a game one cannot win. Everything and everyone comes to an end eventually, even the universe itself apparently. Justification of violence on the sole grounds of continued survival is therefore very suspect.