Perhaps there was no rational reason, and we are closer to understanding than we'd like to admit.
A significant portion of modern Americans regularly enjoy blood and carnage in video games and movies. There's a cruelty, a bloodlust, deep in the human psyche that even now isn't socialized away, merely supressed, to be satisfied only in fantasy.
Yet thousands are murdered every year in our society, which harshly punishes murder. How many more would be killed, merely for sport, if that were encouraged by religion?
Totally agree. Have you ever seen the movie The Imitation Game? There's a great quote from Turing's character when he is talking about being picked on and beaten up by bullies at school - "Do you know why people like violence? It is because it feels good. Humans find violence deeply satisfying"
It's that simple, really. It is in our nature, just like sex. We like it. It feels good.
The only reason we try to eschew and condemn such violence in modern society is because it is in our best interests and more productive to society as a whole to not be like that. No other reason. If we all lived in fear and were huddled in our homes in small communities we wouldn't have even half the modern luxuries we do today. Plus, on the larger scale, if it's war you are talking about - well, they cost a lot of money/resources. So they are tough to maintain for the long haul without noticeable economic harm.
People like to say that love is stronger than anger and hate. I have always disagreed. Hate and anger run deeper than most imagine. And they motivate people like nothing else in this world, except perhaps fear.
The one and only reason people aren't butchering each other in the streets is because we have figured out a way that we can all survive. If that were to crumble, you can be damn sure society would look a lot closer to The Walking Dead or Children of Men than Star Trek.
No. If anything you have to radically desensitize the average person to be even able to commit violence, and in general when they can, people flee it. The whole point of boot camp and military training is to make sure the individual recruit is dehumanized enough and identified with the unit enough to be able to commit violence as needed.
Even then, desertion usually is epidemic in non-volunteer armies, and even in volunteer ones. And if violence is so good, we wouldn't see so many soldiers or police officers suffering from severe psychological trauma over committing it.
The issue with the kinds of pagan societies described in the article is that the society has successful and mass dehumanization programs in place for their elite. They select for people to commit violence and encourage people to dehumanize the act through their religious grounding. It doesn't have to be religious...gangs can create dehumanization, or secular ideology. But in general people really are peaceable, and societies like the Mexica tend to be aberrations over the long term.
I think you might misunderstand just how love is stronger than anger and hate. Love is reinforced by interaction with all types of others. Anger and hate can be socially reinforced but usually at most tribally against another group. It has a more limited virality because eventually it hits a limit.
Feelings are heavily interpreted. Some people find sexual stimulation painful, not just physically, but emotionally. In the end, all feelings exist as an interpretation inside the mind, and we know for sure that we can reinforce them through conditioning and other methods so that the full stack of causes which might initially cause a feeling aren't necessary to recreate it. Just a scent or a memory can be enough to evoke the full force of an emotion.
Violence isn't enjoyable for everyone, even simulated in movies or games. For a lot of people, putting it inside a safe context is a way to address something terrible and cope with the realities of violence, what causes it, and even find some common ground to empathize with the people who choose violence in real life.
Love is stronger than violence because we've seen the benefits and chosen to make it stronger. It's infinitely reinforcable and non-destructive. A system built around love can survive better than a system built on hate. As thinking beings, we don't just reactively respond to emotion. We build reinforcement systems into family, friends, culture, work, play and more, and all of these systems feed back into our behavior. Feeling good is just the beginning.
Anger and hate is socially reinforced just fine inside a group - no tribalism is required. Just look at the cycle of physical and emotional abuse in any broken household.
Yes, it's reinforced at small scales too. I said usually it's reinforced at most tribally against another group, meaning that this is about the largest scale you can take anger and hatred as a social force. At that point, you're on the edge of war. These kinds of emotions can be very easy to exploit to build a movement, and they scale very quickly, but at some scale, they inevitably sabotage the cause and turn it against itself. Building a movement based on love and empathy does not hit these same limits.
Modern research suggests that you are utterly wrong when it comes to violence. Violence damages people (those who commit it I mean), and they have many built-in impediments to it. Military training is not simple. It is difficult to take an average person and make them willing to kill. Ability isn't the sticking point, humans are really quite easy to kill, we're pretty fragile.
One big reason people aren't butchering each other in the streets is because those who butcher, by and large, are crippled by the trauma of it. Having a rational justification for violence (protecting ones self, protecting ones family, protecting ones nation) does nothing to assuage the deep-rooted trauma that inflicting violence on another human being causes. PTSD is a neurological malady, not a psychological one.
I'm a grown-up man and I've never played a violent game and I still look away from violent scenes in movies and tv. I've been exposed to some very violent imagery by accident in movies and I didn't like it and I didn't want to see it ever again. Is it genetic ? Is it because I was raised a Christian and only allowed to watch tv after the age of 8 ? I'm atheist now, but maybe my Christian upbringing was a factor. Or maybe my parents were Christians because they genetically don't like violence. None of my friends like violence either. They're all really nice people with kind loving hearts.
And it's not like I was born seething with violent imagery in my growing mind and had to be taught it was bad and not to be violent. I never had any bad thoughts about other kids. I did bad things like lying and stealing but never violence.
Just saying, there are many people who don't think violent thoughts, don't want to do anything nasty, who are nice people who don't need laws to stop them from doing things.
Had Roman and Greek values triumphed we might be in a better world. Perhaps we wouldn't have needed monks on lonely islands copying ancient texts had we not had a Dark Age.
> There are many people who don't think violent thoughts, don't want to do anything nasty, who are nice people who don't need laws to stop them from doing things.
And you shall curse those same people as weak if the enemy comes to town to slaughter everybody. As you would also were the Army to round up members of your faith for the deathcamps.
Surely you see the irony of a powerful God ruling the Earth being a necessity in order for the meek to inherit it.
> "Do you know why people like violence? It is because it feels good. Humans find violence deeply satisfying"
That's an incredibly simplification of what originates violence.
People can become violent because of their frustration towards something and their lack of tools to manage their emotions, because of their past and what they have been taught, as an easy way to subjugate most of the people...
I remember reading something by John Searle about how the means that people have of expressing themselves will determine what they express. If you don't give people good alternative ways of expressing anger, what can you expect them to do really?
It's that simple, really. It is in our nature, just like sex. We like it. It feels good.
Untrue. Whatever humans do has a purpose. If this was in our nature, men will kill and leave their victim behind and move on to the next target.
However what we've observed over thousands of years is different. Men kill for a purpose, be it land, safety, women, rain, or whatever idiotic reason. Where men saw no purpose for killing, they did not. Therefore it is not part of our nature just like sex.
If you leave one man and one woman together for enough time, they will have sex together. If you left two men together most likely they will cooperate and not kill each other.
What's more. If it were in our nature to kill one another, then it would have been a trait shared with women as well. So far it appears Male are more likely to shed blood.
> It's that simple, really. It is in our nature, just like sex. We like it. It feels good.
See antihumanism.
“For Althusser, Marx viewed the human individual as a product of society. His or her beliefs, desires, preferences, judgements are inculcated in him/her by society and its ideological, political and economic practices. A person's view of him-/herself as a subject whose actions can be explained by his or her beliefs and thought is not innate; rather the role of a subject is imposed upon him or her by society and its ideologies.”[1]
If it "[i]s in our nature, just like sex" then why wouldn't violence be in our best interest? Why wouldn't we be more productive just doing what we want? If it really is our nature, then how is our "modern luxur[y]?" It has been established that while violence is the human condition, altruism also has an evolutionary origin[0].
I feel like the "sweet water/bitter water" dichotomy that the Christian tradition left us[1] has been so damaging because it has formed this perspective that we can only be bad and we can only be good, rather than we can be both. I do believe some people might have different tendencies than others and some may be prone to violence or prone to love but to assume your inclinations extend to everyone else is stupid.
Because our best interest is not the same as evolution's interest.
We, or, at least, some of us, have figured out, after a long time, that violence is not a good thing. But violence is what evolution runs on, because it wants the weak to die and the strong to reproduce. Altruism happened because groups of people ended up stronger than individual people, so there needed to be mechanisms to override violence impulses to enable groups. But the groups of people were still supposed to kill each other over and over to make stronger groups of people. The altruism is not universal. Hence all the ingroup biases. And much of that still remains to this day. All of us are violent directly or by proxy towards animals. Even if people are not violent, many are mean, they create pecking orders, they measure status, they compete, etc. They are executing adaptations developed to categorize people or groups of people as "should not be selected". The old programming is still there.
Except our combination of intelligence, empathy, sympathy, altruism, and strength "backfired" and resulted in us slowly deciding, for ourselves, that maybe we don't want to live like that.
I believe Christianity was designed to oppose this programming (original sin), but it's a 2k old religion, what do you expect? So much has changed since then, our methods in many places got better; Christianity is out of date and has too many dependencies.
I also don't think your characterization is fair, anyway. Christianity doesn't say we can only be bad or only good, it says that goodness demands complete purity, and through that, it says we're all bad, due to an influence inside of us, as well as an influence outside. While there are people more prone to violence and those more prone to love, there's nobody completely free from the programming or the situation.
> I believe Christianity was designed to oppose this programming (original sin), but it's a 2k old religion, what do you expect? So much has changed since then, our methods in many places got better; Christianity is out of date and has too many dependencies.
I think this holds for a bunch of old religious beliefs. A lot of the old, seemingly arbitrary laws from Judaism had practical purposes in ancient times.
If someone tries to explain stuff based on the "human psyche", it's important to understand that people aren't the same. If someone talks about "we" or "humanity" as a whole, he/she doesn't takes this into consideration - which makes the whole argument questionable.
An estimated 2-5% of all humans are so called "psychopaths", people without the ability to feel empathy for other peoples pain. Those people are at the same time overrepresented as inmates in jails as well as in holders of executive positions. It's totally possible that most violence in human history is a result of those kind of people while the remaining 95-98% are simply victims of those people.
>If someone tries to explain stuff based on the "human psyche", it's important to understand that people aren't the same.
It's also very important to understand that people are more alike than different.
The "not the same" thing I've found to be mostly based on superficial differences, whereas all the basic imperatives (sex drive, evolutionary instincts, core cultural values, etc are mostly the same wherever).
While people are of course more alike to each other than, for example humans and cows, there are still a lot of differences between single persons. People tend to assume that other think as they do, but that's one of the most common sources for misunderstandings.
There are people who can torture a child to death without feeling the smallest amount of guild (maybe they even find it funny or satisfying), others who could do it with the right amount of indoctrination, others who would only do it if their life is in danger (and would feel horrible afterwards) and others who would rather die than doing it.
And it's not possible to shift a person people into all of those categories, it's mostly inborn (like sexual orientation, hair color, etc).
Sure, all those people have lots of other "basic imperatives" in common, but the small difference that some could inflict as much pain as possible to others without feeling even a little bit guilty is a difference with should have quite severe consequences for society as a whole.
So if we try to understand why there is so much violence in the world, it would be quite an oversight to not take those kind of differences into account.
Are you doubting the results of personality research or that personality is genetic? A simple google search would tell you that there is plenty of evidence that personality is partly genetic:
An estimated 2-5% of all humans are so called "psychopaths", people without the ability to feel empathy for other peoples pain
And another 90% have herd mentality, people that can easily mold their personality to match the dominant type in their in-group. There have been numerous studies that show that group mentality can override people's personal moral boundaries.
Psychopaths have the ability to not feel other people's pain. Super important distinction. Unless you're just hate-mongering. In which case sure, they're as good a scapegoat as any.
My notion of these people (developmental and increasingly genetic) is that they exist as the scar tissue of humanity. I fear this new propaganda will only leave more scars than the old.
Pardon, I do agree there is still an unresolved desire for violence in even our own culture that we are no closer to understanding. What I found distasteful was pinning that on religion. I think there are ancient forms of knowledge -- often passed on by a story which becomes abstract after many generations -- passed on as culture, with clear evidence that parents pass on their behaviors, attitudes and values. Cultures I think blend discretely so that there are many subcultural currents. I would say all of these currents are in the same broad kind, but that their being alike in type does not imply one following the other. Even as a dire skeptic one must admit the possibility of at least a subset of religious teachings to hold some truth; perhaps passed on merely as culture, our most ancient (yet perhaps still most powerful) form of knowledge; or perhaps self-perpetuating due to its very own divine truth. I'm not a trained historian so I'd love further opinion, but the Romans did not seem to very much actually believe in their pantheon, and yet were a very mighty and violent culture indeed.
The article we're discussing "pinned" the violence on religion.
> I don’t think any of us living today can comprehend the violence of worship in the Mexica culture (or Aztecs, as they are more popularly known), which I’ve written about for Archaeology. The Mexica waged war not principally to defeat rival states or gain territory, but to gather warm bodies for human sacrifice.
Related for violence is I think a desire for glory that we seem to lack in this day and age. Where you can sacrifice yourself fighting a lion to save your tribe, and your tribe honors you for that sacrifice.
It appears a little bit in sports, and a lot in suicide bombers.
> There's a cruelty, a bloodlust, deep in the human psyche that even now isn't socialized away, merely supressed, to be satisfied only in fantasy.
I would argue that we express it in ritualized form: in the U.S., that's NFL, college, and high school (and younger) football. And for those looking for a stronger dose, mixed martial arts.
A very good point. Personally, I don't particularly enjoy watching football, though I can follow the game. I also don't particularly enjoy watching MMA, though I can appreciate good technique (having trained in martial arts for many years). I cringe when actual damage is done, but at the same time I can't look away.
Personally, my favorite form of simulated violence is the sport of fencing[1], though when I fence, I'm not imagining running my opponent through, or imagining that I've eviscerated them when I score a touch, I'm simply imagining the green or red light turning on; it's really just about the game and the technique for me.
1)I do also very much enjoy the Metal Gear Solid series of games, but generally (on the most recent edition) I always try for a no kills finish for a mission, and not just for the points.
> A significant portion of modern Americans regularly enjoy blood and carnage in video games and movies
Yeah. it's called fiction and a more significant portion of people in the world consume all that without committing mass murder. So please, stop associating video games or movies with whatever crazy people do.
This article also completely misses the point that games are an incredibly immersive media and can teach you a lot about a point of view.
I've played games as a cop where you're rolling through a rough neighborhood and everyone's immediately got their guard up, they're automatically on-edge. The tension between police and civilians experienced this way is nothing like reading headlines or hearing stories. It's long, empty periods of nothing punctuated by life-threatening situations which can build empathy for what some cops have to endure.
Movies edit down for length. Books are building a narrative, they're cherry-picking by necessity. In a game you can spend dozens of hours immersed in an environment, experiencing both the intensity of the situations and the mundanity of the gaps between.
I'd love to see some games put out by people in these difficult to understand cultures to better experience what they think and feel, the challenges they face, and to see the world through their eyes.
The latest installment of Deus Ex lightly touches on the issues of race relations, there using an analogy where "augmented" humans are suddenly the Acceptable Thing To Hate and are subjected to endless scrutiny, carded constantly for no reason other than being augmented.
The old "walk a mile in my shoes" principle applies here, and in most games you walk way, way more than a mile.
It's not my intention to suggest that enjoying those means that our socialization has failed or that we are dangerous (which I do not believe), but that those games and movies appeal to something in our nature that still exists in many of the most well socialized Americans.
Some time ago I came across a quote from maybe Huxley or Orwell saying, in effect, that as modern society advances it will become necessary to find a nondestructive means to express the impulse to violence that is a fundamental part of human nature. Maybe I've got it wrong, but it seems that things like video games and paintball serve that function.
I've looked several times for that quote. Not sure who it was from, but there seems to be some wisdom in it.
I don't know about that. I play many games, including violent ones, and I don't really think the appeal is associated with some sort of a natural bloodthirst. I think the #1 reason for large amounts of violence in video games is because a violent conflict is much easier to make a narrative and game mechanics about, and a lot of fun activities are associated with previously violent pursuits, but I believe it exists in a completely different sphere from real life violence and doesn't really connect.
It's similar to how one may find archery fun, and archery was designed to kill people, but people don't find archery fun because they want to kill people, they just find it fun to shoot arrows and that gaining of fun probably was designed to make people better at violence but there's no actual direct connection.
On the other hand, the gaming situations where I have seen the negative aspects of nature come out were games that layered social aspects on top. MMORPG's, especially ones like DayZ, and, at worst, competitive games like League of Legends. When a single player game gets bad, like Doom or Nox, it gets bad over the multiplayer aspect. That's where all the nasty stuff really comes out, and it's not the art or the violence in the design of the game itself causing it, but the socializing aspect, power imbalances, etc. Meanwhile, people are cooperating pretty well in games like KSP or Minecraft as long as you avoid PvP servers, and even in the really dark, violent games like Dark Souls, again, as long as you stay away from PvP.
Human violence instincts seem to come out in situations that simulate social pressures, such as those where there is evaluation, power imbalance, and competitions. Single player games, no matter how much blood is falling on the floor, don't seem to do that to their communities as long as PvP is not involved.
There's a good case to be made that a significant factor is the association of masculinity with violence in American culture, which explains why men commit significantly more violence than women (and also explains some of the success of violent video games). From this perspective, much of our fascination with and performance of violence is far from inevitable.
If we're blaming culture for male violence, "animal culture" would seem the more fitting one, since violent males are a feature throughout the animal kingdom and exceptions are, well, the exception. American culture is not much different from iguana culture or toucan culture in this respect.
Yeah, there are definitely a lot of similarities between humans and other animals in that respect, but that's the problem. It should worry us that humans, an animal capable of resolving conflicts in many different ways, chooses violence so often.
To put it another way, if throwing feces was common behavior among humans, you might say "this isn't a human problem, it's a primate problem." And you'd be right, in a sense. But the key point is that throwing feces (as well as violence) is more easily avoided behavior for humans than for chimps. A human might choose to yell to express a level of anger than chimps only express with feces throwing (I might be uninformed about the feces-throwing behaviors of chimps, but you get the point). When we fail to take advantage of opportunities to avoid violence, we should ask ourselves why.
My question is if we are going astray looking for a "human" solution to what is ultimately an "animal" behavior. :)
That is, I agree it is not an excuse to say "animals do it." But, it is also somewhat askew to me to have a barrier to our explanations that do not involve "humans are just animals."
I wouldn't be surprised if, except for cases of extreme violence, if video games (especially, much more than TV since the audience takes part in the action) and the like serve to pacify their audience in the long run. Perhaps a pacifistic steady-state solution to human nature doesn't involve denying this part of human nature, but indulging it in such harmless ways?
His point was that you find something gratifying in the fantasy of murder and violence. If you don't find GTA to be abhorrent, then that means deep down some aspect of the anarchy and violence is appealing to you.
> deep down some aspect of the anarchy and violence is appealing to you.
Or you like doing all the silly things a game lets you do. Because, you know, it's not real and you've probably realized that.
I guess if you play Monopoly against Grandma and ream her a new one when she lands on your Boardwalk with a hotel on it deep down you want to be a slum lord. It couldn't possibly be as simple as you like winning games.
You should start a VR game studio and make a game about kidnapping and raping children. People like being able to do silly things. Give them points for every rape and make sure there is a win condition (people like winning games). This type of game definitely won't appeal to people that have child sex fantasies deep down - after all, it's not real (and you've probably realized that)!
Come on, you can make the above case for Mario, but it's a harder sell when we are talking about Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto.
If you are run by your morals in a completely unreal situation that has no real effects in the exact same way as you would in a real situation, you may have problems separating fantasy and reality.
I'm not sure I agree. I think games can be a good way to explore the way you apply your morals. You can choose to be a jerk or not, be kind or be a monster -- and since the consequences don't matter, it might even be a truer test.
When I recently re-played Deus Ex (Human revolution), you can choose to play the game in a pretty much pacifist way. I didn't do that, but at the same time I didn't go laying a trail of carnage through the city, killing the police, etc.
The game puts you in situations where you usually have a choice about your actions -- I can sneak around (harder), I can kill the guard, I can kill the police officer, etc. I had no problem killing the mercenaries that would shoot me if they saw me, but after killing an NPC police officer (in frustration after setting off alarms), I felt compelled to do it again until I could master doing nonlethal takedowns, or knock them out with a sedative dart.
I don't think this is a matter of having a problem separating fantasy and reality. Rather, it's a lens to look at our own behavior and feelings about violence. I have no problem shooting other players in the face in a game like Call of Duty or Counter-Strike (which is effectively paintball), but I get deeply disturbed at the idea of killing (or spawning + harvesting?) non-hostile NPCs in games like Minecraft or Deus Ex.
I think that's going to depend on your immersion level.
Games with that degree of role-playing are fairly rare to begin with, and most people also don't get terribly immersed in them, so often that NPC you care about to them is just a number.
I generally treat everything in Minecraft very mechanically, as numbers, because Minecraft just feels that way to me. But in a proper RPG, it's not so simple.
I'm arguing nothing of the sort, only that the sheer number of people enjoying and fulfilling fantasies of violence and destruction are indicative of deep instinctual human tendencies.
Most people would not enjoy child rape simulator 3000 because most people do not have embedded instincts to do such things. Some people, however, may enjoy CR3000, and I would venture to guess that there is an underlying reason (i.e. pedophilia).
Maybe the difference is that violence is a common thing in our society and doesn't have the impact or disgusting reflect that would have CR3000.
Being used to see violence in fantasy doesn't make you violent deep inside, you just don't give it that much importance in fantasy. This doesn't mean that you won't despise real violent acts.
The aspects of GTA that appeal to me aren't deep down in my psyche at all. Are you trying to insinuate that people who enjoy the game must be burying their true feelings?
Our own cultures are mysterious to us. Why are we hurtling towards climate change? Why do we sacrifice countries full of people, like in Iraq? Why must we release toxins in water that lower people's IQs? Why do we need to cage so many humans?
Few have satisfactory explanations. (The most common ones don't stand up to basic scrutiny. Folk answers, ideological answers to explain away the ideology's problems, etc.)
It hasn't stopped working, for an example close-to-home, look at the corruption in SF, that has been there for over a century. As long as voters don't pay attention, we'll have lousy government. Voters are the watchdogs.
I think it's quite possible the level of violence seemed excessive even to the society itself.
A common problem that's cropped up in a number of modern countries is weddings getting more and more expensive. If weddings are an important means of displaying status, and it might shame the family to seem poor, then there is clearly going to be a drive that direction. Pretty soon, people are bankrupting themselves on weddings that seem excessive to everyone involved.
Cultures that engage in religious sacrifice seem to have the same sort of problem. Sacrifice shows off both status and religious zeal, so there's incentive to try to sacrifice more than others. If sacrificing slaves is allowed, ending up in an extreme state isn't all that surprising.
Or, to put it another way, "We may never truly fathom cultures that were destroyed several centuries ago and are only studied through archaeological fragments and the memoirs of late-medieval invaders."
70 years after the Holocaust, 40 years after Cambodia and Viet Nam, 20 years after Rwanda, as Syria is partly occupied by ISIS, what I truly can't fathom is how anyone would single out senseless bloodlust as "that alien thing from a distant dead civilisation we will never understand".
15 years after we invaded Iraq, a country which had nothing to do with 9/11 and no WMDs, or at least fewer WMDs than the US.
It's easy to distance ourselves from things that didn't happen in our country or in our lifetimes, but the reality is that we're just as bloodthirsty as anyone else.
Well I thought Viet Nam was a more clear cut example of America being barbarous but yeah, Iraq works as well, let's not forget Abu Ghraib.
Anyway, as far as I know, although my country has committed its share of horrible massacres around the world, none of it has happened in my lifetime... I just hope it'll last.
Yeah, agreed, Viet Nam is more clear-cut because history has given time for the politicization to settle down. But Iraq is more relatable (or in the words of the OP title, "Fathomable").
The US military learned its lesson in Vietnam: don't let the media see what you're doing. We'll simply never know how US soldiers behaved in Iraq as compared to Vietnam.
Yes, these exist, but a few notable stories that broke are little compared to the relentless onslaught of news from Viet Nam during the war there. It was the first time that TV news from a warzone was readily available, and footage of the fighting was still shocking to people, so it attracted viewers. As a result, new footage from Viet Nam was aired every day for literally years.
The modern military recognizes the need for PR. Abu Ghraib was mostly still pictures because it was mostly leaks--press was allowed nowhere near the place. Contrast this with videos of Hussein's statue being pulled down or the "Mission Accomplished" press conference
If you cherry-pick specific instances, sure, there was negative coverage of the Iraq War, but the big picture of Iraq War coverage versus Viet Nam War coverage is very different.
There were peaceful times throughout history, and they were followed by very bloody times. e.g. If, say, bloodshed follows a sine wave, we should at least wait for a couple periods before any proclamation that we've reduced bloodshed.
What's interesting is that, during the roughly 40 years between German & Italian unification and WWI, it was one of the most peaceful times in history for Western Europe. Yes, there were wars, but they were mostly small conflicts in far away lands. However, if you look at many of the great thinkers from the era (its been a while since I studied the period, but Lord Kelvin jumps to mind first), they are extremely pessimistic and think the end of days is soon approaching.
In your examples, it's about (many) individuals who chose to do bad things together. The article is talking about cultural violence, in the sense that a whole nation was behind it. I see it more comparable to "circus" games in Colosseo, or legally approved slavery, wherever and whenever it happened, rather than to Nazis or ISIS.
I disagree completely with you on this. Nazi violence was just as much a product of culture and social forces than Aztec violence, it's merely much closer to home and we know a lot more about it.
I think this 'outlier excuse' works when talking about serial killers or even criminal gangs, but I'm talking about violence on a much bigger scale, a scale where cultural factors are always contributing.
I think there is a limit to cosmopolitan universalism, and that's a good thing. Whether separated by time or space, it's good that there are unknowable cultures. First because to expect that every culture is understandable from the perspective of another (usually wealthier, more sophisticated, and "civilized") culture (in the business of writing history books) limits other cultures' freedom to express themselves as they see fit. Where the rubber meets the road is when a culture foreign to the metropole flouts what the metropole considers universal values. Imperialism usually ensues.
Second, foreign cultures are fascinating because they are so different. Imagine Marco Polo traveling to China. It must have been like getting in a space ship and traveling to another planet. Nowadays all the airports look the same, all the center cities have the same types of restaurants, and global culture is depressingly uniform.
Well, we abort children legally, so it is not like we have improved so much. In Spain and other countries it is legal to abort creatures that would live if taken out of the womb.
We rationalize it, because the mother will not be able to give a good life to her child or whatever.
What makes us think that people from Carthage could not also rationalize with more powerful reasons than us? It was way harder to live back them than today.
PS:Most of what we know of Carthage comes from their competing beliefs, like Jews, because Cartage was totally destroyed, in the same way the Jews portray a picture of Babel totally distorted.
> Requires physicians to provide information about perinatal hospice care to a pregnant woman who is considering an abortion because the unborn child has been diagnosed with a lethal fetal anomaly.
The terminology of referring to the unborn as children has a long legal history.
There's a similar history concerning how personhood is determined via paperwork: i.e. if you do not fill out the paperwork for an abortion, the unborn child is considered a person for cases of its death---such as if a pregnant woman is killed, it's considered a double homicide.
You're posting a link to anti-abortion propaganda from the 2016 Indiana Assembly as an argument for why those of us who strenuously disagree that fetuses deserve the legal rights of children should agree with calling fetuses children?
The Indiana Assembly is certainly an authority on one thing: legislating clever ways to restrict women's right to obtain an abortion. I don't consider them authorities on much else.
The point being made is "I think a fetus is valuable." I get that. Duh. But even if everyone agreed, a fetus is still a different thing than a child. Believe it or not, there is hardly any disagreement about whether "abortion" of children should be legal.
Saying one thing while meaning another doesn't make the point, it obscures it.
Likening abortion to infanticide is akin to equating copyright violation with theft of tangible property.
It's an evocative analogy, but it seems like a deliberate category error to many.
Of course, I think safe inexpensive abortion is a great societal good, not a mild civil crime worthy of a hint of disapproval, so my analogy doesn't really hold up very well.
IMO a lot or even most child sacrifice (especially infant sacrifice) in the ancient world can be understood as ritualizing the process of killing children one does not have the means to raise.
I've seen it suggested that abortifacients of various kinds and effectivenesses were pretty widely known and used, actually. The Catholic Church and cultures influenced by it may well be the odd ones out here.
The "safely" and "reliably" qualifiers are important here. Consider this text from the WP article about the history of abortion:
> Soranus, a 2nd-century Greek physician, prescribed diuretics, emmenagogues, enemas, fasting, and bloodletting as safe abortion methods, although he advised against the use of sharp instruments to induce miscarriage, due to the risk of organ perforation. He also advised women wishing to abort their pregnancies to engage in energetic walking, carrying heavy objects, riding animals, and jumping so that the woman's heels were to touch her buttocks with each jump, which he described as the "Lacedaemonian Leap."
I don't think people prescribing "energetic walking" and bloodletting have really figured this out.
I think there's something else going on here, other than the humility of researchers who claim to be unable to understand Mexica culture.
Failure to imagine what it's like to be someone else, from a different place, a different time, with different ways of thinking -- is perhaps the biggest reason why we have so much violence and hatred in this world, and modern scholars are just as guilty of it as warmongers and propagandists of the past have been.
It is a failure of imagination, a failure of empathy, that every culture encourages -- sometimes subtly, but often not so subtly -- in order to keep its members loyal. One of the defining characteristics of human cultures is that each wants to have a monopoly on a person's mind.
Most of us grow up believing that their way of thinking and living is the only natural way, and parents and teachers rarely try to give us a world view that goes beyond what's considered mainstream in our own cultures. Having lived in a cultural greenhouse all of our lives, the first thing we do when faced with a radically different way of life is how different this other person is. The differences so overwhelm us that we forget to appreciate our common humanity, with all its greatness and weaknesses, that should be the first step towards truly putting ourselves in the other person's shoes.
It would seem that anthropologists and archeologists are no exception.
Is it repugnant to kill innocent children at the altar of some imaginary being? Of course it is. Is it a necessary trait of civilized people that they cannot bear to imagine themselves growing up in a culture that practices human sacrifice as a matter of course and learning to participate in the bloody rituals? No, it isn't. It's just a failure of imagination that our own culture encourages. We have learned to be unable to imagine ourselves performing such terrible things, just like Victorian culture made it look normal for young women to faint at the slightest sight of anything disturbing. The inability to "fathom" another culture, no matter how seemingly barbaric, is not so much evidence of the moral depravity of the other culture as it is a testimony to our own narrow-mindedness.
Is it failure of imagination? I don't know that's true.
Let's look at some of the aspect of life described in the article. Assume I'm just some artisan, good at my job, respected for my ability to work materials into goods. Making the odd innovation here and there. As a result I'm not in the ruling elite, nor the warrior "caste", but I'm doing pretty good for myself compared to most people.
Basically let's just say I'm equivalent to a decent software developer in our society.
I can imagine all sorts of things:
* I'm ashamed that I'm not a member of the fighting classes
* I don't have strong opinions of that fact
* I have a strange (to me in the 21st century USA) relationship with those of the fighting classes
* similar thoughts toward ruling elites, plus:
- Do i worship them or revile them? Do I have differing opinions on different people in that class, or do I view them as an undifferentiated mass?
- Do I expect to have any influence, or none, etc? How do I feel either way? (I can imagine having influence on the noble class but being rather upset because they are supposed to have a direct line to the gods, and why are they asking me?)
Other things I can imagine:
* Do I fear being sacrificed? Am I ashamed if I am afraid of it?
* Do I see the sacrifices as great? Or do I see them as an unfortunately necessary unpleasantry? Or do I see them as a source of shame because the rulers are out of touch? Is there an apocryphal tradition of the Gods actually being gentle and not wanting blood sacrifice, but this is being ignored by the priests?
* If my kid gets recruited to the military, am I proud or scared or both? Do I prefer his capture or his death in battle? What conduct makes me proud or not?
Basically my point here is that imagination and lack of data combined results in a truly honest answer of "I don't know which of the options for any of the questions above is right". This leads to a simple "I don't know", not because I can't fathom it for lack of empathy or imagination, but because I can see many many different ways it could be experienced.
There is no need to decide whether the artisan worships or reviles the ruling elites. No society is so homogeneous as to make that question black-and-white. If someone does give a black-and-white answer, that's as good evidence as any that they don't really understand how cultures work.
Think of the gazillion different, mutually incompatible attitudes that modern Americans have about Hillary, Trump, and everyone else. Now re-imagine your artisan. You can be simultaneously afraid of being sacrificed and ashamed of being afraid. You might have a great deal of respect for some of the warriors but also revile the way they lick the elite's ass. You might have heard that the next village got leveled and all of their women and children enslaved because they dared to question the authority of the high priests, and have conflicting thoughts about whether they deserved it or not. Your friends might disagree with you on this matter, but some of them are afraid to speak out. But then this big customer wants his swords repaired by morning, and you don't have time to worry about those things anymore. Most of daily life is mundane, it has always been. Just because there are human sacrifices going on on that hill over there doesn't make life unrecognizable all of a sudden.
Knowledge of specific details is not a prerequisite for empathizing with someone as a human being. The point is to appreciate the many different ways that a Mexica life could be experienced (which you do very well) and keeping it all in your working memory instead of aggressively map-reducing it into answerless questions like "What did the artisans think about the warriors?" Likely, there were more than one artisan and more than one warrior.
So......do you understand what they were doing with all those human sacrifices? Because I sure don't. I can make guesses, just as the article does, but I sure don't understand it.
Mostly, this reminded me of one of my favorite short stories - "Von Neumann's Second Catastrophe", by Robert Anton Wilson. This story changed my view of why we have wars.
The story is told from the point of view of a general in an insane asylum. He argues that war has been ruined by golems, creatures without souls. By golems, he means computers. The computers run scenarios for nuclear war, and always say don't do it because it can't be won - mutual assured destruction. But to him, the point of war is not about winning. That's a lie we tell. The point of war is the killing. We don't fight in order to kill enemy soldiers. We fight to kill innocent civilians. Because when you can deliberately kill a child, you become a superman, beyond morality. Nuclear weapons should be used just because we can, because it's amoral.
I hope by "it changed your view", you don't mean that that is your current view. Look out into the world. It is not a model that makes any sense for why humans have wars. That model predicts not what we see, but an all-out bloodbath until civilization is dead. That model and civilization can not coexist in any form, and no, cynically trying to strike a pose that we aren't really "civilized" is not an out; even what we have, imperfect as it may be, would not be possible. It is not even clear that such a model would permit humans to exist as individual nomads, let alone stone age tribes. Such an attitude would be rapidly bred out of any species that somehow got into a state where that was its attitude, or the species would go extinct.
Models of the world must not just explain why it is all messed up; they must also explain why there is sometimes beauty, peace, art, science, civilization, love. It is not enough to only explain one side.
Clearly Beat meant that the book explained the viewpoint of those who cry for war and destruction. The 'glory' and 'power' they feel must surely be an addictive sensation.
Within the story, it's not glory or power either. Glory comes from defeating equals - but the point is to kill the defenseless. Power comes from victory, but the victory is irrelevant.
Could you kill a child? Of course not. What kind of monster kills a helpless child? But if you can do it - you have become something more than merely human. Humans are confined by their morality. Supermen are not. And soldiers? Soldiers kill children all the time. That's why there's war.
Or something less than human, I'd argue. In the same vein, a cancerous skin cell becomes a "supercell" and gets to live an immortal life, no longer constrained to the cycle of death.
I suspect that people don't like psychopaths for the same reason our bodies kill cancer cells: they aren't good for society. (some argue that in small numbers they can be, but you can't run a tribe of psychopaths).
Oh, it's not my view - but it explains why war happens, in a very interesting way. I mean, everyone hates war, why do we have wars? Everyone says it's about fighting enemy soldiers, why are more civilians killed? It's a consistent, if horrible, explanation.
What ? It's ridiculous. Leaders start wars to conquer territory and obtain material goods and sexual dominance. Followers go to war for economic opportunity or necessity. Murdering civilians for fun is a niche interest, often only the result of intense indoctrination by leaders with ulterior motives.
> Because when you can deliberately kill a child, you become a superman, beyond morality. Nuclear weapons should be used just because we can, because it's amoral.
The article itself addresses your point, saying, "modern writers have tried to show that the Spanish conquistadors exaggerated the human sacrifice; archaeology has shown that, if anything, they lowballed it."
I feel that the article is missing something that is very important - the violence of the Spaniards. Did not the Spaniards stamp and erase the culture & religion of the Mexica? If the Mexica culture had been allowed to exist could we not understand them better? I feel the title is a little clickbaity and would wager most civilizations can barely fathom their own past.
Westerners can relate to the Spanish conquistadors, because we share the same cultural family tree. Westerners can understand why something like greed could be such a motivator that the Spaniards would cross an entire ocean to pursue violence against a people... because they had land and gold. You can probably find cultures today who would find that concept alien and unknowable. The point is not the violence per-se, but how it's difficult to grok the deeply ingrained motivations of cultures (especially ones that are long-dead).
Well, this was interesting, but certainly does not persuade me of the thesis stated in the title. I mean, sure, if we have limited records of them we can't know a lot about ancient cultures, but who's surprised to learn that?
Well the Nobel Prizes are awarded by Swedish and Norwegian institutions, so it doesn't really say anything about how Americans themselves view these immigrants. (While the rise of a presidential candidate like Trump certainly speaks for a portion of the American population)
Perhaps there was no rational reason, and we are closer to understanding than we'd like to admit.
A significant portion of modern Americans regularly enjoy blood and carnage in video games and movies. There's a cruelty, a bloodlust, deep in the human psyche that even now isn't socialized away, merely supressed, to be satisfied only in fantasy.
Yet thousands are murdered every year in our society, which harshly punishes murder. How many more would be killed, merely for sport, if that were encouraged by religion?