> There is no empirical basis for this dark view of human
> nature. Are people capable of nasty behavior (e.g., blowing
> up their enemies)? Sure. But is this the "natural" state of
> humans, once we peel away the veneer of civilization? No
Just think what happens during wars or pogroms, when otherwise respectable people are told that the normal rules of civilization are suspended, and they can do with their neighbors as they please. The likely outcome is that they will go on a rampage rather than restore the rules of civilization that the authorities suspended. In such situations it is not the people that have changed but the rules of social interaction - and that explains the difference between civilization and barbarism. Here is your empirical proof.
> way. Think about it for just a second: if humans were
> incessantly brutal to each other, how could the species have
> survived for so long? In order to survive in a difficult
> world, humans have the capacity to cooperate and help one
> another. There's no way humans could have survived on this
> planet if they were Hobbesian malevolent brutes.
That is a good question to ask. Since we know from experience that the humankind did survive in relative peace (thus avoiding war of all against all) - there must be something else than their individual selves that allowed them to do so. That soemthing is rules of social interaction - or civilisation if you will.
>
> --And consistent with this argument, we find relatively low
> levels of aggressive and malevolent behavior in most hunting
> & gathering societies.
We do not know with certainty what was the level of violence in hunting and gathering societies - and I assume there must have been a great deal of between-region variation. But one thing must be taken into consideration - the opportunity to engage in violence. Since the population was rather sparse, human groups had little opportunity to interact with one another. They also did not have effective means of violence (weapon technoilogy was not that advanced). Third, they had little incentive to engage in violence, since they did not invest in the land which they were occupying at the moment. That means that their opportunity for engaging in violence was quite low. So even if theur did not engage in violence as often as we do, that was likely a result of the lack of opportunity than their supposedly less bellicose nature.
Thus Woj presents a nice example of
> presentism and ethnocentrism here ("we're like this, so that
> must be how it's always been").
>
Ethnocentrism? Think Rwanda or India.