Quote:
Originally Posted by OccultHawk
Trollheart,
I think you might be being a little unfairly dismissive of his answer.
Organized warfare didn't take place until King Sargon in Mesopotamia just 12,000 years ago. Maybe someone will post another example but it's something like that. Then you have all the non-human life on earth that also doesn't have warfare in the contemporary human sense. So with that short a time on the evolutionary scale doesn't it make sense that involvement in warfare is more something that is "soft-wired" or learned instead of something that's deeply embedded in our DNA? It seems like that's a fair answer to your question...
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Lord.
I'm not saying someone specifically wired us up inside or anything like that. But whatever about organised warfare, we've been kicking the living **** out of each other since we learned to jam a nail through a club. So what I'm saying is that, all down Man's history, there have been wars. So maybe not organised wars, but raids on the territory of others and attempts to expand our own living space, steal the livestock/women/material goods of our neighbours and basically be *******s to each other.
So, with all that in our history, we are surely hardwired (mostly by our own experiences and the way we perceive ourselves and others, and our supposedly god-given right to everything we think we have a right to) to think in terms of war, for as long as we exist. We play wargames, videogames, paintball, quasar. Some of us join the military, some the police, some of us rebel against the establishment and some of us try to bring down the government, be it a fair and just one or not.
What I've been saying is (take the hardwiring idea out, as it seems to be confusing some of you and it's only semantics anyway) that Man is predisposed, by virtue of his experiences and his history, towards conflict with basically anyone he can be in conflict with. Take a period of peace, if we should get one, and wait just a little while. You can be sure someone somewhere will be fighting someone else. Sometimes even during ceasefires fights break out. That's what I'm saying; we're kind of slaves to our past and it really doesn't look as if we will ever evolve beyond that. I hope we do, but I would not bet on it.
Mr Charlie's answers are too evasive. Yes, we are hardwired (to use the term again) to do other things, like think, sleep, get laid, be creative etc, but among those other, better and more important and necessary qualities is I believe the need, the vital need and the imperative to fight our brothers. It's just who we are.
Maybe I'm wrong; that's why I asked the question. But the whole of human history seems to suggest that everything humans make is built upon the bones and the blood of other humans. Empires grow because others are conquered and enslaved. Politicians and despots rise to power over the bodies of their enemies. Nations are "secured" by force of arms, almost always. Everyone from we Irish to you Americans (don't know if you are American, just assuming so forgive me if not) owe our freedom, rather sadly, to conflict, war and conquest, or if not conquest, to a struggle to drive out the invader, which still equates to war, be it open or of a more guerilla sort.
An old joke, but it's true: put three Irishmen in a room together and sooner or later two will gang up against the third.