>> 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 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.
>
> I think they tend to be nice to their family/clan and nasty or indifferent
> to others. Hell, homo sapiens is basically a pack animal. We're "designed"
> for social groups of maybe 20-30 people.
Maybe that is a fair generalisation in some areas, but there is one big qualification in most cultures I have looked at. Family/clan usually means more than 20-30 people. It usually means pretty much everyone someone has contact with over a year. (And even if that is a small number, as was often the case in Australia, the mythic corpus allows people to draw inferrences of very far flung connections; I once saw a guy from the Northern Territory establish a connection to someone from the Canberra by working out shared myths.)
As for the broader point, I feel the machinery of civilization makes it easier to wage war, makes it more destructive and multiplies the reasons for it. But that isn't to say that there is no 'warfare' in indigenous societies. In Papua New Guinea tribal fighting was usually endemic. The reasons for fighting were a pretty mixed bunch: anything from very non-exotic disputes over land to the Marind Anim tradition of harvesting heads from distant neighbours in huge seasonal expeditions. The heads were required for naming the Marind Anim children, who received the decapitated person's name. That may be weird and gruesome, but it is not the war of all against all: it is highly codified and meaningful violence. The language of violence isn't simpler in ostensibly simpler societies anymore than actual language is. I suppose the striking irony is that if the standard is codification and rule-following, the Marind Anim were streets ahead of Bush and co.
Thiago
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