What I try to show is: social evolution has been driven by a selective
process which doesn't depend on human nature, isn't the reflection of human
nature; but is just a function of the disorderedness of the inter-societal
system of human societies that was inevitable when we emerged out of the
biological order of the biosphere.
Rob Kall: Well, let me take one step back. You said that "about ten thousand years ago,
as we shifted from - something else - to..."
Andrew
Schmookler: Hunting and gathering.
Rob Kall: "From hunting and gathering?" OK. To farming and domestication /
Andrew
Schmookler: Now let me just say that, the
hunting and gathering, it was more or less in continuity with human evolution
from way before we were human. I mean,
living as hunters and gatherers was what we as primates were doing five million
[5,000,000] years ago when we parted ways with the chimpanzees. So we had not changed the structure of our
lives from the beginning until about ten thousand years ago.
Rob Kall: OK.
This change leads to there being a problem with different collections of
people butting up against each other. Is
that basically what you're saying?
Andrew
Schmookler: Yeah. Here is the parable of the tribes: let's say
a bunch of tribes are living within reach of each other. If all of them choose to live in peace, then
all may live in peace. But what if all
but one chooses the way of peace, and the other one is bent upon predation and
expansion at the expense of it's neighbors?
What are the alternatives available to those peaceful neighbors? There are three: One is to be destroyed, of
which there has been plenty in history; one is to be conquered and absorbed
into the empire of the conqueror; and the other is to do what you've got to do
to have the power to match this other, threatening society that has done
everything it can to gain the power to conquer.
So, in all three of those are different outcomes for the different,
say, tribes. But in all three, the ways
of power spread. If a society is
destroyed, then the annihilating culture moves in, and there's the ways of
power, there. If he conquers and then
subjugates the people, and transforms their culture however he needs to
maximize what he can get out of them, well, then, also the ways of power gets
spread. And if the people decide they
are going to defend themselves successfully, if they have to match the power of
the one threatening them, that requires them, often, to imitate, to do what the
other society has done, whether that be in the area of technology, like what
the Japanese did in the 19th Century - becoming a major power early
in the 20th, they saw what was necessary and they industrialized, or
[whatever ways].
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