Oh, come on, Miles! We're just doing what native Americans did to southern forests so that they could shoot game better -- only we're clearing out people instead of underbrush.
BW
--- Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> wrote:
> ravi wrote:
> > First the quote:
> >
> > To say that all past historic social progress
> has been the
> > result of co-operation and not of conflict
> would be ... an
> > exaggeration. But exaggeration against
> exaggeration, it is
> > the more reasonable of the two. And it is no
> exaggeration
> > to say that the measure of civilisation is
> the degree in
> > which the method of co-operative intelligence
> replaces the
> > method of brute conflict.
> >
> > Most who consider themselves leftists will
> probably neither disagree
> > not find anything particularly novel in the above.
>
> I disagree wholeheartedly. The assumption that
> civilisation is
> characterized by "co-operative intelligence" in
> contradistinction to the
> brutal conflict in "noncivilized" societies is
> ethnocentric through and
> through. Comparing social relations in hunting and
> gathering societies
> and our "civilized" society, I'd flip the binary
> above: brutal conflict
> is more prevalent in our "civilized" society and
> "cooperative
> intelligence" is more prevalent in the hunting and
> gathering society.
> Just to shoot fish in a barrel, no hunting and
> gathering society in the
> history of the planet has accomplished as much
> carnage, destruction, and
> human suffering as the U. S. military has in Iraq.
>
> Miles
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