Posted by:
Lot's Wife
(
)
Date: October 03, 2022 05:59PM
Elder Berry Wrote:
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> There is potential archeology evidence of massive
> cooperative efforts between loads of tribes here
> in The New World.
EB, I think the New World evidence supports my comparatively pessimistic view.
As I wrote above, hunter-gatherer societies are more pacific in the sense that bands of a hundred or so are small enough for everyone to have an emotional connection to everyone else. There is evidence that the same thing happened among Neanderthals, with a recent archaeological study finding evidence of small groups caring for crippled individuals who could not contribute meaningfully to their small communities. We see the same among the great apes.
What we also observe among primates is limited cooperation with other groups when resource competition is not too intense; and most "wars" are small scale and result in relatively few deaths or injuries in part because such small and backward communities lack the economic and technological power to do much more. (But researchers have observed murder* and "genocidal" multi-year wars among chimpanzees, so the capacity for mass slaughter is also present there.**)
What is clear is that when the size of the community expands beyond the stable primate level, cohesion requires an supplemental forces--in my words, "religion, the police state, [and/or] modern media."
Isn't that exactly what we see in the large states in pre-modern America? Whether it is the Maya, the Inca, the Aztec, or related civilizations, they used religion, human sacrifice, and the demonization of the "other" to hold their states together. They routinely sent warrior groups out into the neighboring territories to kidnap people to kill on pyramids or in public squares, torturing them and tearing out their hearts and throwing the bodies down the steps in front of the assembled masses.
In other words, we see relatively peaceful interactions between groups whose size is comparable to that of other primate societies--at the level at which genetics would predominate--but much more emphasis on state religion and state oppression when the size of the human community rises much above that "natural" level. What that indicates to me is that the ability to cooperate peacefully decreases with the scale of the polity, as if any pacific orientation stemming from genetics must be augmented with social innovations like religion/ideology when the number of participants grows "unnaturally" large.
*Regicide, reported by National Geographic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XP6T1CMgBQMurder:
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29237276**
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/06/does-chimp-warfare-explain-our-sense-of-good-and-evil/58643/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War