Thank you, Jack, for your thoughtful contribution. Much of it needs nothing added by me. But there are a few points I should address, particularly where there's an opportunity to clarify further the P of T.
You raise the example of the chronic warfare among the societies of New Guinea. (I discuss this example on p. 79 of the book, The Parable of the Tribes.) And you cite Jared Diamond calling these societies "un-civilized." By the usual nomenclature, that's valid: they don't have cities or empires, etc. But as I indicated in my response to Forest Jones, above, I use the word "civilized" to mean all those forms of society that come after the crucial breakthrough into food production and thus out of the niche in which humankind evolved biologically. The New Guinea societies are "horticultural," which puts them on the "civilized" side of the line for my purposes.
They likely could expand their areas of cultivation, could grow as societies, except that they are smack up against one another. So it is no surprise, in terms of the p of t, that chronic warfare would plague that system of interacting societies.
That also raises a second point, which I'll just touch upon briefly: the New Guinea people have nowhere to go, but are confined with their neighbors on this finite island.
In the book, I have a whole section that is about how virtually the entire earth seems to have been settled by hunting-gathering societies. And only when there ceased to be anywhere to spread out into did the pressures develop to motivate the breakthrough into food production. It seems that the knowledge of how to grow crops existed well before anyone chose to use it. And I used Mark Cohen's 1977 book, The Food Crisis in Prehistory: Overpopulation and the Crisis of Agriculture, to argue (pp.66-67) that for humankind in the development of food production, necessity was the mother of invention.
So the New Guinea situation seems potentially a good snap shot of how the p of t got started, and what were the pressures that made an ongoing struggle for power develop with all of its eventual social evolutionary implications.
The second point you make, when you bring up the "Westphalian System," is your comment that when I say, "compelled to interact with each other with no order to regulate those interactions," " no order," you say, "strikes me as an overstatement."
My "no order to regulate" referred to the circumstances at the beginning, when civilization first emerged: no longer constrained by the biologically evolved niche in a natural order, and no order above them created by humankind.
Since then, people have striven to overcome that disorder. With treaties, as in your example. And in modern times with ideas about systems of "collective security." In responding to Fred Andrle, above, I only gestured in the direction that humankind needs to go--saying simply that the solutions must eliminate the intersocietal anarchy. But there's a whole history of efforts -- many of them quite worthwhile -- to move in that direction.
Following World War I, there was the creation of the League of Nations. Following World War II, there was the creation of the United Nations. Obviously, these early efforts to introduce a global system to maintain the peace have been quite inadequate. But they are efforts that make a beginning--as are the global treaties on things like "Law of the Sea," and like the "Paris accords" on climate change, and indeed the whole system of "international law."
It is no longer true that there is "no order" in the entire system of human civilization. But it does remain true that there is nothing to stop China from conquering and transforming Tibet, nothing to stop Russia from brutalizing Chechnya. Nothing to stop the United States from invading Iraq on a pretext.
There is -- as of yet -- no "order" that can compel international actors so powerful to act in ways that serve the well-being of the whole of the human world.
A third point, where you say, "The instinct to seek more ad infinitum may now be ineradicable." This could be a long discussion, but in the interests of brevity, I see no reason to believe that there is any such "instinct." Certainly, civilizations can develop cultural patterns that drive people toward greed and acquisitiveness. But for the eons during which our nature was formed, I would doubt that the attitude of "there's no such thing as enough" would have served people well. And I doubt, therefore, that any such "instinct" was inscribed upon our inborn nature.
Finally, regarding your final point expressing your being "more than eager" to see humankind move forward into a brighter vision of ourselves, and a more whole world. I do not claim that the "integrative" vision will fulfill the yearnings you mention. But I do see how it offers an understanding that can fortify and facilitate our quest for such a world.
This way of understanding has served as a "revelation" of sorts -- for me. How much it can so anything of the sort for others is something that each reader will have to evaluate as the additional pieces of this integrative understanding get brought together.
Indeed, this is the issue that will be at the heart of the next couple of installments. Please stay tuned.
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