- In the face of epidemics, the handshake has been recognized as one method of transmission.
- The elbow bump has been suggested as a substitute.
- The question at hand is how customs can change and how they begin in the first place.
- The handshake seems to have multiple origins.
- Another mystery is the origins of the military salute.
- What would seem most alien to Americans would be the formal bow practiced in northeast Asia.
- On the one hand, the Greek and Macedonian aversion to bowing contributed to an emergent stereotype about the authoritarianism of "oriental" societies.
- On the other hand, the custom of bowing was later adopted in the Roman Empire, and contributed to the European notion of the monarch as divinely sanctioned.
- The adoption of authoritarian Asian political culture by the West is also found in Russia.
- Perhaps at the micro-level of interaction between individuals, descriptive "ethnomethodology" is the best way to record how social customs originate.
- There might be a couple of ancient examples of how social conventions were inspired by the physical "defects" of Alexander the Great.
- Inspired by the example of Alexander, sculptures with a curved torsos became an artistic convention in the Greek world.
- Alexander re-branded the beardless look as macho.
- Anthropologists have noted that there is a tendency across cultures for hair length to represent freedom of emotion.
- Civilization involves emotional repression.
- A macro-level analysis in historical sociology of personal grooming styles and manners has been carried out in the 1930s.
- Religion channels the outward aggressive impulses back against the self.
- Secular courtly life also reinforced personal inhibitions.
- Another pacifying influence was the formation of stable dynastic states.
- A political anthropology of the evolution of war would complement a historical sociology of the rise of modern European civilization.
- Self-help. In small societies without governmental structures, revenge killings take the form of "self-help".
- Feuding. In a system of feuding, revenge is taken against men in the family of the offender.
- War. In societies with states, revenge is taken by entire countries.
- WMD. With the creation of weapons of mass destruction, war can result in the death of all humans or even all life on the planet.
- Historically, the world has gradually become more peaceful because the consequences of violence have risen by many orders of magnitude.
- Democracy and science have promoted peace by making war too terrible to pursue.
- Liberals and progressives might welcome the idea that war has become unthinkable.
- There is a political alliance between progressives and liberals in the Democratic Party of the USA predicated on the liberatory potential of scientific and technical progress.
- Yet one finds that the civilizing process is based not on liberation, but on increasing levels of inhibition and repression.
- Americans like to imagine that their country is a model for the world, but in terms of promoting peace, Singapore would be a better model.
In the face of epidemics, the handshake has been recognized as one method of transmission.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HandshakeHandshakes are known to spread a number of microbial pathogens. Certain diseases such as scabies are known to spread the most through direct skin-to-skin contact. A medical study has found that fist bumps and high fives spread fewer germs than handshakes.[1][2]
In light of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, the dean of medicine at the University of Calgary, Tomas Feasby, suggested that fist bumps may be a "nice replacement of the handshake" in an effort to prevent transmission of the virus.[3]
Following a 2010 study that showed that only about 40% of doctors and other health care providers complied with hand hygiene rules in hospitals, Mark Sklansky, a doctor at UCLA hospital, decided to test "a handshake-free zone" as a method for limiting the spread of germs and reducing the transmission of disease.[19] However, UCLA did not allow the ban of the handshakes outright, but they rather suggested other options like fist bumping, smiling, bowing, waving, and non-contact Namaste gestures.
The elbow bump has been suggested as a substitute.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbow_bumpThe elbow bump is an informal greeting where two people touch elbows. Interest in this greeting was renewed during the avian flu scare of 2006 and the 2009 swine flu outbreak, and the Ebola outbreak of 2014 when health officials supported its use to reduce the spread of germs.To a limited degree, in the late 1960s in Hawaii, the elbow bump emerged as a social convention that emerged in response to the fear of contagion.
An early popularization of the elbow bump began outside the Kalaupapa Leprosy Settlement in 1969 with the lifting of the quarantine policy, which forced leprosy patients to live in an isolated peninsula on Molokai. Many of the settlement's residents were devout Christians; when they began attending church services outside of the settlement, the members of the church congregation were fearful of making physical contact with them. Priests, too, were wary of such contact with the former Kalaupapa Settlement residents, but as a sign of good faith they would touch elbows. This greeting became popular among churchgoers of Hawaii in the early 1970s. Because leprosy is transmitted primarily through mucus, there is some evidence that the elbow bump constrained infections.Unrelated to disease, the elbow bump became a greeting among urban African American youth, but at best only in a unenthusiastic manner.
The elbow bump as a greeting is also attributed to be a derivative of the more well known fist bump, beginning in the 1980s.
The earliest written record of the elbow bump by David Grimes[3] supports this hypothesis.
More recently, Shaquille O'Neal demonstrated the derivative nature of the elbow bump in relation to the fist bump in 2004, when he dismissed Kobe Bryant's greeting with a half-hearted elbow bump.Only half in jest has the elbow bump been recommended as a more hygienic replacement for the handshake.
But attitudes could be changing.
By 2009, the elbow bump was endorsed by university officials[9][10] and Nobel laureate Peter Agre. The American Association for the Advancement of Science joined the World Health Organization in endorsing the elbow bump. However, some of these endorsements were meant as much to elicit good humor as for purposes of good hygiene.[10][11]
The word "elbow bump" was considered for Word of the Year in 2009 by the New Oxford American Dictionary.[12]
At the open-air service of the Greenbelt festival of 2009, worshipers were encouraged to greet each other with the 'elbow bump of peace' instead of the more usual 'holy kiss' during the Christian rite of peace, because of concerns over swine flu.[13]
The question at hand is how customs can change and how they begin in the first place.
The handshake is found all over the world, but its origins might not be exclusively from Europe.The handshake seems to have multiple origins.
It is theorized that it is a way of displaying that one is not carrying weapons.Glancing over Greek artistic representation, handshakes seem to happen among the in-group -- within families, among soldiers, between friends and other Greeks.
It might not have yet become a formal greeting used to introduce strangers and foreigners.
Another mystery is the origins of the military salute.
This custom derives from the modern armies of the Western world.One theory is that knights would raise the visors of their helmets prior to combat, and this evolved into a sign of mutual recognition.
Another theory is that up until recently, gentlemen would greet each other by doffing their hats.
The efficiency of military life demanded that this be replaced by simply touching one's hat as a sign of respect.
The salute is not directly related to the handshake, whereas the elbow bump is the grandchild of the handshake via the fist bump.
For this reason, if the handshake were prohibited, it would probably not be replaced by the salute.
This is because the elbow bump intuitively derives from the handshake, despite the initial oddness and novelty of the elbow bump.
What would seem most alien to Americans would be the formal bow practiced in northeast Asia.
It is said that the single most difficult maneuver for Americans who practice northeast Asian martial arts is the bow.For Americans, the bow can feel like an act of abject self-abasement.
Historically, a resistance to bowing was an important source of controversy during Alexander the Great's conquest and rule of the Persian empire.
On the one hand, the Greek and Macedonian aversion to bowing contributed to an emergent stereotype about the authoritarianism of "oriental" societies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProskynesisTo the Greeks, giving proskynesis to a mortal seemed to be a barbaric and ludicrous practice.
This may have led some Greeks to believe that the Persians worshipped their king as a god, the only Persian that received proskynesis from everyone, and other misinterpretations caused cultural conflicts. Alexander the Great proposed this practice during his lifetime, in adapting to the customs of the Persian cities he conquered, but it failed to find acceptance amongst his Greek companions (an example can be found in the court historian, Callisthenes) - and in the end, he did not insist on the practice. Most of his men could cope with Alexander’s interest for having a Persian wardrobe, but honouring the king as if he was a god by performing proskynesis went a bit too far.[5]
According to Arrian, Callisthenes explains the existence of separated ways of honouring a god or a human and that prostration is a way to explicitly honour gods. It is seen as a threat to the Greeks, ‘who are men most devoted to freedom’. According to Callisthenes, prostration is a foreign and degrading fashion.
On the other hand, the custom of bowing was later adopted in the Roman Empire, and contributed to the European notion of the monarch as divine.
The emperor Diocletian (AD 284-305) is usually thought to have introduced the practice to the Roman Empire, forming a break with the Republican institutions of the principate, which preserved the form, if not the intent, of republican government. However, there is some evidence that an informal form of proskynesis was already practiced at the court of Septimius Severus.[6] The political reason for this change was to elevate the role of the emperor from "first citizen" to an otherworldly ruler, remote from his subjects, thus reducing the likelihood of successful revolt, which had plagued the Empire during the preceding 50 years.
The adoption of authoritarian Asian political culture by the West is also found in Russia.
Russia finds its origins as a colony of the Vikings.The Scandinavians possibly imported the institution of the assembly, although it might have already existed in the Slavic world.
This was something between a parliament and a court of law presided over by the local elite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_(assembly)
A thing[a] was a governing assembly in early Germanic society, made up of the free people of the community presided over by lawspeakers.Consequentially, Russian political culture was somewhat democratic, and centered around the capital of Novgorad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novgorod_veche
According to the traditional scholarship, the veche (Russian: вече, IPA: [ˈvʲetɕə]) was the highest legislative and judicial authority in Veliky Novgorod until 1478, when the Novgorod Republic was brought under the direct control of the Grand Duke of Moscow, Ivan III.
The origin of the veche is obscure; it is thought to have originated in tribal assemblies in the region, thus predating the Rus' state. After the Novgorod Revolution of 1136 that ousted the ruling prince, the veche became the supreme state authority, although princely power was relatively limited in Novgorod from the start since no hereditary dynasty had been established there.
The traditional scholarship lists among the powers of the veche the election of the town officials such as the posadnik, tysyatsky, and even the archbishop (he was then sent to the metropolitan for consecration); it also invited in and dismissed the princes.The Mongols invaded and conquered the Russian lands in the 13th century, and ruled for two centuries.
The Mongol conquest of Russia was part of the Mongol invasion of Europe, where the Mongol Empire invaded and conquered Kievan Rus' in the 13th century, destroying numerous cities, including Ryazan, Kolomna, Moscow, Vladimir and Kiev.
The invasion, facilitated by the beginning of the breakup of Kievan Rus' in the 13th century, had incalculable ramifications for the history of Eastern Europe, including the division of the East Slavic people into three separate nations: modern-day Russia, Ukraine and Belarus,[6] and the rise of the Grand Duchy of Moscow.The Russians had typically been fragmented and factionalized prior to the Mongol conquest.
Subsequently, a centralized, authoritarian form of government centered on Moscow emerged to defeat the Mongols.
In a way, the Russian state became and inherited the Mongol state.
Historians argued that without the Mongol destruction of Kievan Rus', the Rus' would not have unified into the Tsardom of Russia and, subsequently, the Russian Empire would not have risen. Trade routes with the East went through Rus' territory, making them a center of trade between east and west. Mongol influence, while destructive to their enemies, had a significant long-term effect on the rise of modern Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.Being colonized by the Mongols led to a lasting sense of humiliation and grievance by the Russians.
Russians continue to nurse this sense of resentment and paranoia and project it toward the outside world.
Yet Russian political culture still maintains the traces and contours of Mongol rule.
Historians have debated the long-term influence of Mongol rule on Rus' society. The Mongols have been blamed for the destruction of Kievan Rus', the breakup of the ancient Rus' nationality into three components and the introduction of the concept of "oriental despotism" into Russia.[citation needed] Historians also credit the Mongol regime with an important role in the development of Muscovy as a state. Under Mongol occupation, for example, Muscovy developed its mestnichestvo hierarchy, postal road network (based on Mongolian ortoo system, known in Russian as "yam", hence the terms yamshchik, Yamskoy Prikaz, etc.), census, fiscal system and military organization.[17]
The period of Mongol rule over Russia included significant cultural and interpersonal contacts between the Russian and Mongolian ruling classes. By 1450, the Tatar language had become fashionable in the court of the Grand Prince of Moscow, Vasily II, who was accused of excessive love of the Tatars and their speech, and many Russian noblemen adopted Tatar surnames (for example, a member of the Veliamanov family adopted the Turkic name "Aksak" and his descendants were the Aksakovs)[18] Many Russian boyar (noble) families traced their descent from the Mongols or Tatars, including Veliaminov-Zernov, Godunov, Arseniev, Bakhmetev, Bulgakov (descendants of Bulgak) and Chaadaev (descendants of Genghis Khan's son Chagatai Khan). In a survey of Russian noble families of the 17th century, over 15% of the Russian noble families had Tatar or Oriental origins.[19]
The Mongols brought about changes in the economic power of states and overall trade. In the religious sphere, St. Paphnutius of Borovsk was the grandson of a Mongol baskak, or tax collector, while a nephew of Khan Bergai of the Golden Horde converted to Christianity and became known as the monk St. Peter Tsarevich of the Horde.[20] In the judicial sphere, under Mongol influence capital punishment, which during the times of Kievan Rus' had only been applied to slaves, became widespread, and the use of torture became a regular part of criminal procedure. Specific punishments introduced in Moscow included beheading for alleged traitors and branding of thieves (with execution for a third arrest).In Russian political culture, one therefore finds a dualism similar to that of the Germans between the private and public realms.
They join the greatest boldness of thought with the most obedient character.
In the private realm, they exhibit classic Western creativity and critical thought in the arts and sciences -- in fact, much beyond the scope of the English-speaking world.
In the public realm, they are limited to political autocracy.
In the Russian case, this autocracy is disorganized.
["Alexaner Nevsky", 1938, egalitarian Russians encounter their authoritarian Mongol overlords who demand bowing @4:25]
How can the origins of social conventions be identified?
Perhaps at the micro-level of interaction between individuals, descriptive "ethnomethodology" is the best method to record how social customs originate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnomethodology
Ethnomethodology is the study of how social order is produced in and through processes of social interaction.
Ethnomethodology provides methods which have been used in ethnographic studies to produce accounts of people's methods for negotiating everyday situations.[5] It is a fundamentally descriptive discipline which does not engage in the explanation or evaluation of the particular social order undertaken as a topic of study.
For the ethnomethodologist, participants produce the order of social settings through their shared sense making practices. Thus, there is an essential natural reflexivity between the activity of making sense of a social setting and the ongoing production of that setting; the two are in effect identical. Furthermore, these practices (or methods) are witnessably enacted, making them available for study.[3][9] This opens up a broad and multi-faceted area of inquiry. John Heritage writes, "In its open-ended reference to [the study of] any kind of sense-making procedure, the term represents a signpost to a domain of uncharted dimensions rather than a staking out of a clearly delineated territory."[12]IIRC, ethnomethodology is not strictly sociology.
Good, old fashioned sociology consists of the study of social structure, especially social roles.
In contrast, ethnomethodology studies how these forms emerge and evolve through the creation of meaning through the interaction of individuals.
There might be a couple of ancient examples of how social conventions were inspired by the physical "defects" of Alexander the Great.
Alexander the Great was supposedly afflicted by spinal curvature.When the greatest sculptor of the period, Lysippos, made a statue of Alexander, the curve was included and used to enhance the statue.
This became Alexander's favorite statue.
Inspired by the example of Alexander, sculptures with a curved torsos became an artistic convention in the Greek world.
Also, there is a theory that Alexander the Great could not grow facial hair.
Facial hair in the ancient Greek world was a big macho thing.
In order to save face (literally), Alexander ordered his troops to shave off their beards.
His excuse was that a smooth face made them less vulnerable to being grabbed by the beard during hand-to-hand combat.
Alexander re-branded the beardless look as macho.
The habit of shaving was later adopted by the Romans.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beard#Greece
Anthropologists have noted that there is a tendency across cultures for hair length to represent freedom of emotion.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/590695?seq=1One might therefore expect shaving to become a custom within a vast empire like Rome, and among troops who were professional soldiers rather than tribal warriors.
Hence the fixation in a professional military on short hair styles and making one's bed perfectly every single morning and other ways of enforcing orderliness.
Civilization involves emotional repression.
Emotional repression makes people unhappy, but the alternative is violence and chaos.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_and_Its_Discontents
As societies grow and develop, one might therefore expect greater levels of personal restraint.
This would then be reflected in less shorter hair styles.
A macro-level analysis in historical sociology of personal grooming styles and manners has been carried out in the 1930s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Civilizing_ProcessThe Civilizing Process is a book by German sociologistNorbert Elias. It is an influential work in sociology and Elias' most important work. It was first published in Basel, Switzerland in two volumes in 1939 in German as Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation.In the first part of the study, Elias studied the development of manners, such as table manners.
Covering European history from roughly 800 AD to 1900 AD, it is the first formal analysis and theory of civilization. Elias proposes a double sociogenesis of the state: the social development of the state has two sides, a mental and political. The civilizing process that Elias describes results in a profound change in human behaviour. It leads to the construction of the modern state and transition of man from the warrior of the Middle Ages to the civil man of the end of the 19th c.
These outward personal manners developed in relation to the re-establishment of Christianity in Europe in the Middle Ages.
Religion channels the outward aggressive impulses back against the self.
In this way, violent tendencies become manifest in the form of feelings of guilt and the emergence of a conscience that abhors sin.Again, although religion thus cripples the self emotionally, this makes complex social life possible.
Taking this further, religion is itself therefore comprised of aggression that has been transmuted into passive-aggressive resentment.
The first volume, The History of Manners, traces the historical developments of the European habitus, or "second nature", the particular individual psychic structures molded by social attitudes. Elias traced how post-medieval European standards regarding violence, sexual behaviour, bodily functions, table manners and forms of speech were gradually transformed by increasing thresholds of shame and repugnance, working outward from a nucleus in court etiquette. The internalized "self-restraint" imposed by increasingly complex networks of social connections developed the "psychological" self-perceptions that Freud recognized as the "super-ego".One gets a glimpse of European life prior to Christianization in the form of illegal badger hunting in the UK.
Virtually all the hunters are working-class men in their twenties, never over thirty.
When their dogs catch animals such as deer, boar and badgers, in a frenzy, the young men kill the animals using shovels or knives.
If a dog is seriously injured, they kill the dog with a shovel; if the dog fails to hunt well, they shoot the dog.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-44160403
One does not have to go to England to find barbarians.
As any bouncer will tell you, just go to your local bar.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/25/magazine/how-to-be-a-bouncer-tip.html
The demographic most likely to get violent at bars are men between 21 and 28 years old. If you see such a group, go say hello. Ask open-ended questions, like: “Hi, what are we celebrating tonight?” Scan their faces for the levelheaded one. He will probably be older and less drunk. “When there’s a problem later, that’s your go-to guy,” Smith says. When violence erupts — which usually happens after midnight — pull the fighters apart, grab them around their chests in a big bear hug that keeps their arms down. Ask yourself if there is a victim. Should law enforcement be called? (You may face pressure not to call the police; such calls can be a factor during annual reviews of liquor licenses.)This is the kind of semi-anarchic condition that Europe found itself in during the early Middle Ages.
The Catholic church had only recently been re-established.
The Crusades were in part seen by the Church as a way of exporting violence out of Christendom.
But it is not just religion that tames the manners.
Secular courtly life also reinforced personal inhibitions.
Court life was obsessively status conscious.But this was not the explosively violent preoccupation with being respected that one still finds among young, urban gangsters.
Rather, the aspiration for status within the court was closer to the societally inconsequential jockeying for reputation that one finds in academia.
["The Taking of Power by Louis XIV", 1966, clip with discussion by Richard Brody]
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/dvd-of-the-week-the-taking-of-power-by-louis-xiv
Fortunately, at this time, Muslim Spain offered a model of courtly life -- refined, sophisticated, urbane, scholarly.
Ironically, this elegant, romantic Moorish influence from Spain lingers on in so much of what we associate with French culture -- but not in Spanish culture.
[When the Moors Ruled in Europe, Bettany Hughes]
https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/when-moors-ruled-europe/
This also has economic consequences.
The French king Louis XIV proposed that France could become a fixture of European economic and cultural life if it developed its luxury goods market -- wine, perfume, art, cuisine, fashion.
Today, traditional luxury goods are the primary pillar of the French economy in a world of competition over high technology.
Another pacifying influence was the formation of stable dynastic states.
The first stage in this process is a vicious-virtuous circle of an increasingly large army being able to raise and keep taxes for its own continuing enlargement.The second volume, State Formation and Civilization, looks into the formation of the state and the theory of civilisation. First, Elias explains that throughout time, social unity increased its control over military and fiscal power until possessing the monopoly over it. The progressive monopolisation of the military and taxation were feeding another (the political power was using tax money to pay its army and using the army to collect the taxes).However, up until the Renaissance, the sociopolitical reality was local lords of the manor fighting each other for turf.
Elias describes several steps of the creation of the State:Power shifted during the Rennaissance from the local lord of the manor to princes who maintained courts where subordinate clients could be cultivated.
*From the 11th to the 13th c.: there was an open competition between different houses where everyone was fighting to maintain and extend its power. For instance, after the death of Charles IV of France (1328), France formed a powerful agglomeration of territories. However, one cannot speak of a coherent kingdom yet because regional consciousness was still predominant, the interests of each territory and seigneury were prevailing.
* From the 14th to the 16th c.: the courts were progressively established, and vassals gathered around important lords. The feudality was princely (it was seigneurial before) because only the most powerful houses had maintained their power and extended it by taking over the territory of smaller houses.Later, kings arose who could create and maintain centralized bureaucracies.
* After the 16th c.: the royal house is victorious and has a monopoly of power. It created a central administration and institutions. The competitions were now regulated: it takes place peacefully within the state to access a high position in the administration.In such states, violence essentially becomes a centrally regulated public utility.
At the end of the process, the State is created and possessed the monopoly of legitimate physical violence. Elias also describes that the "absolutist mechanism": the state became the supreme body that coordinates the different interdependent group of the society.Elias did not cover the topic of war between states.
A political anthropology of the evolution of war would complement a historical sociology of the rise of modern European civilization.
In the realm of international relations, there is a tendency toward more civilized behavior over time.War finds its origins in revenge killing.
- Self-help. In small societies without governmental structures, revenge killings take the form of "self-help". If someone kills your brother, you kill the killer. There is constant bloodletting in such societies. (One estimate is that up to 40% of males in the tribal areas of Papua New Guinea die from homicide).
- Feuding. In a system of feuding, revenge is taken against men in the family of the offender. If someone kills your brother, a man in your family kills a man in their family. This results in a cycle of tit-for-tat retributions until, as in the Hatfield-McCoy feud or the feud in "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", one of the families gets its act together and rubs out the other family. Because the stakes are so high in feuding compared to self-help, there is greater incentive to avoid violence, and so rates of violence decline.
- War. In societies with states, revenge is taken by entire countries. If one man is murdered by a citizen of a foreign state or by state actors such as soldiers, every citizen is sworn to war for revenge. In 1914, a Serbian terrorist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, plunging Europe into WW1, which killed 40 million men. Because the stakes are so high in war compared to feuding, there is greater incentive to avoid violence, and so rates of violence decline.
- WMD. With the creation of weapons of mass destruction, war can result in the death of all humans or even all life on the planet. Because the stakes are so high in war with weapons of mass destruction, there is greater incentive to avoid violence, and so rates of violence decline.
Historically, the world has gradually become more peaceful because the consequences of violence have risen by many orders of magnitude.
The pacificity of a society directed correlates with its size.https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/steven-pinker-this-is-historys-most-peaceful-time-new-study-not-so-fast/
Most scholars agree the percentage of people who die violent war-related deaths has plummeted through history; and that proportionally violent deaths decline as populations become increasingly large and organized, or move from “nonstate” status—such as hunter–gatherer societies—to fully fledged “states.”
A study in Current Anthropology published online October 13 acknowledges the percentage of a population suffering violent war-related deaths—fatalities due to intentional conflict between differing communities—does decrease as a population grows.
The study ... cut across cultures and species and compared annual war deaths for 11 chimpanzee communities, 24 hunter–gatherer or other nonstate groups and 19 and 22 countries that fought in World Wars I and II, respectively. Overall, the authors’ analysis shows the larger the population of a group of chimps, the lower their rate of annual deaths due to conflict. This, according to the authors, was not the case in human populations. People, their data show, have evolved to be more violent than chimps. And, despite high rates of violent death in comparison with population size, nonstate groups are on average no more or less violent than those living in organized societies.Have humans indeed evolved to be more violent than chimpanzees as the authors assert?
It depends on what the authors mean by "evolved".
Are the authors referring to the period of five million years of biological evolution since humans and chimps diverged from a common ancestor?
There might be some validity to this argument.
Much of chimpanzee behavior consists of "reactive aggression", such as outbursts of anger.
On occasion, however, chimpanzees do engage in "instrumental aggression".
One example is when they carefully, quietly move into the territory of other bands of chimpanzees with the intent to kill as many of the enemy as possible.
With humans, aggressive behavior is skewed more toward this kind of deliberate and rational instrumental violence.
Even when humans do "reactively" lose their temper, most of the time their anger expresses itself verbally, not physically.
It could be that humans are just as aggressive as chimps, but it is a different kind of aggression.
A comparison might be made here between the rates of child abuse between men and women -- rates which are supposedly equal.
Men tend to engage in physical and sexual abuse, whereas women tend to engage in verbal and emotional abuse.
That is, it's just simply different kinds of violence, some of which are more visible than others.
That being said, wild animals, even the great apes, are much more dangerous than domestic animals.
Even the matriarchal bonobos, much less violent than chimpanzees, are much more prone to reactive violence than humans.
Perhaps the authors mean something else when they claim that "people have evolved to be more violent than chimps".
Perhaps they mean the evolution of human technology?
The literature on violence among humans goes back as far as hunter-gatherers, who seemed to have been much more violent than later humans.
Yet major human innovations go back as far as 3 million years ago.
For example, hunting and gathering is relatively recent, emerging around 20,000 years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesolithic
The type of culture associated with the Mesolithic varies between areas, but it is associated with a decline in the group hunting of large animals in favour of a broader hunter-gatherer way of life, and the development of more sophisticated and typically smaller lithic tools and weapons than the heavy chipped equivalents typical of the Paleolithic. Depending on the region, some use of pottery and textiles may be found in sites allocated to the Mesolithic, but generally indications of agriculture are taken as marking transition into the Neolithic. The more permanent settlements tend to be close to the sea or inland waters offering a good supply of food. Mesolithic societies are not seen as very complex, and burials are fairly simple; in contrast, grandiose burial mounds are a mark of the Neolithic.There period previous to the mesolithic, going back as far as 50,000 years ago, was also marked by technological and cultural innovation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Paleolithic
The Upper Paleolithic has the earliest known evidence of organized settlements, in the form of campsites, some with storage pits. Artistic work blossomed, with cave painting, petroglyphs, carvings and engravings on bone or ivory. The first evidence of human fishing is also found, from artefacts in places such as Blombos cave in South Africa. More complex social groupings emerged, supported by more varied and reliable food sources and specialized tool types. This probably contributed to increasing group identification or ethnicity.An even earlier period began 300,000 years ago, and involved cultural and technical achievements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Paleolithic
Middle Paleolithic burials at sites such as Krapina in Croatia (dated to c. 130,000 BP) and the Qafzeh and Es Skhul caves in Israel (c. 100,000 BP) have led some anthropologists and archeologists (such as Philip Lieberman) to believe that Middle Paleolithic cultures may have possessed a developing religious ideology which included concepts such as an afterlife; other scholars suggest the bodies were buried for secular reasons.
The earliest undisputed evidence of artistic expression during the Paleolithic period comes from Middle Paleolithic/Middle Stone Age sites such as Blombos Cave in the form of bracelets,[7] beads,[8] art rock,[9]ochre used as body paint and perhaps in ritual,[1][9] though earlier examples of artistic expression such as the Venus of Tan-Tan and the patterns found on elephant bones from Bilzingsleben in Thuringia may have been produced by Acheulean tool-users such as Homo erectus prior to the start of the Middle Paleolithic period.[10] Activities such as catching large fish and hunting large game animals with specialized tools connote increased group-wide cooperation and more elaborate social organization.[1]An even earlier period that predated humans began 3 million years ago, with the adoption of stone tools.
This period might have seen the emergence of the cognitive foundations of language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_Paleolithic
The Lower Paleolithic (or Lower Palaeolithic) is the earliest subdivision of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age. It spans the time from around 3 million years ago when the first evidence for stone tool production and use by hominins appears in the current archaeological record,[1] until around 300,000 years ago.
The move from the mostly frugivorous or omnivorous diet of hominin Australopithecus to the carnivorous scavenging lifestyle of early Homo has been explained by the climate changes in East Africa associated with the Quaternary glaciation. Decreasing oceanic evaporation produced a drier climate and the expansion of the savannah at the expense of forests. Reduced availability of fruits stimulated some proto-australopithecines to search out new food sources found in the drier savannah ecology. Derek Bickerton (2009) has designated to this period the move from simple animal communication systems found in all great apes to the earliest form of symbolic communication systems capable of displacement (referring to items not currently within sensory perception) and motivated by the need to "recruit" group members for scavenging large carcasses.There was a long development of human technological, cognitive and sociocultural abilities.
The increased mental, cultural and technical sophistication also makes possible greater human pacificity.
However, this sophistication also laid the foundations for an enormous human capacity for instrumental aggression.
Together, the increased capacity for both instrumental aggression and pacificity makes pacificity not just possible, but necessary.
In summary, the tendency toward less war in the modern world is based on three pillars:
- the greater human capacity for self-control compared to other primates,
- greater psychological and social repression within developed societies, and
- greater reluctance to engage in war between societies based on a horrendous cost-benefit analysis.
- Volatility is the liability to change rapidly and unpredictably, in this context resulting from reactive aggression.
- Peace is the absence of war.
- Safety represents the low possibility of future war.
Likewise, large, complex, modern societies are less volatile than more archaic small groups of humans.
For this reason, there might be a general tendency for modernization of society to enjoy greater levels of peace.
But this does not necessarily mean that the world is safer.
Because of the capacity for mass destruction, the world is much less safe although there is greater peace.
Again, it is in part the lack of safety that makes things so peaceful.
Liberals and progressives like to imagine that levels of violence have historically fallen thanks to the liberatory rise of democracy and the advancement of science.
This is true, but only ironically so.
Democracy and science have promoted peace by making war too terrible to pursue.
Democracy, nationalism and populism in the modern world can inflame entire populations.Modern science arms men with weapons beyond imagining.
In the words of Winston Churchill:
"War, which used to be cruel and magnificent, has now become cruel and squalid. In fact it has been completely spoilt. It is all the fault of Democracy and Science.”https://winstonchurchill.org/the-life-of-churchill/young-soldier/1893-1895/
Liberals and progressives might welcome the idea that war has become unthinkable.
But there is a continuum of what "unthinkable" means.- "Unthinkable" might refer to the sense of horror of what modern war can do, and this serves as a deterrent. Robert McNamara claims that not only was nuclear war possible during the Cold War, but that it was inevitable, and that it was merely a fluke that it did not happen. But it did not happen largely because guys like McNamara knew that it was going to happen and they dreaded it.
- "Unthinkable" might refer to a sense that other countries are not going to gamble with retribution to an attack, and this means that one can launch one's own attacks. This calculus was at work in the 2019 Iranian attack on Saudi oil fields, and in the American assassination of an Iranian general in 2020.
- "Unthinkable" might refer to a complacent overconfidence that war is just not going to happen. This cavalier attitude would almost certainly guarantee that war will happen, as it did in the prelude to World War One. Optimists who theorize that war is on a downward trend might be unintentionally reinforcing this assumption.
The optimistic rhetoric of progressives and liberals might push it into the dangerous third assumption.
