New APPS

Two new books argue that pre-agricultural societies were far more Hobbesian than Rousseauean.

Read the Spectator review of Ian Morris’ War: What is it Good For? The Role of Conflict in Civilisation, from Primates to Robots here, which includes this:

If sometime around 7a.m. on 1 July 1916, as you waited to go over the top somewhere along the Somme, you had been tapped on the shoulder and told that you’d never had it so good, you might well have been mildly surprised at the news, but you would have been wrong to be. It would seem from the growing evidence of graves that Stone Age man had something like a 10–20 per cent chance of meeting a violent death, and if you factor in the anthropological evidence of surviving 20th-century Stone Age societies, then, as Morris puts it, Stone Age life was ‘10–20 times as violent as the tumultuous world of medieval  Europe and 300–600 times as bad as mid-20th-century Europe.’

If I understand right, Morris is building off of Stephen Pinker's earlier research. Napolean Chagnon has just released his book about the Yanomamo that provides some more contemporary evidence.

Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes—The Yanomamo and the Anthropologists is reviewed by City Journal here. Key bit against academic neo-Rousseaueans:

From his initial contacts with the Yanomamo, he’d noticed how prevalent violence was in their culture. He determined that as many as 30 percent of all Yanomamo men died in violent confrontations, often over women. Abductions and raids were common, and Chagnon estimated that as many as 20 percent of women in some villages had been captured in attacks. Nothing in his academic background prepared him for this, but Chagnon came to understand the importance of large extended families to the Yanomamo, and thus the connection between reproduction and political power. As Chagnon notes, biologists found his observations unsurprising and consistent with much they already knew; but to anthropologists, the notion that primitive societies fought extensively, and did so over women for the sake of reproductive rights, made Chagnon a heretic.

Undaunted, Chagnon plunged even further into the thicket of political incorrectness. In a 1988 Science article, he estimated that 45 percent of living Yanomamo adult males had participated in the killing of at least one person. He then compared the reproductive success of these Yanomamo men to others who had never killed. The unokais—those who had participated in killings—produced three times as many children, on average, as the others. Chagnon suggested that this was because unokais,who earned a certain prestige in their society, were more successful at acquiring wives in the polygamous Yanomamo culture. “Had I been discussing wild boars, yaks, ground squirrels, armadillos or bats, nobody . . . would have been surprised by my findings,” he writes. “But I was discussing Homo sapiens—who, according to many cultural anthropologists, stands apart from the laws of nature.”

I don't think this is that big a deal with respect to social contract theorists in philosophy. As far as I understand the debates, people have been hypothetical contractarians* ever since Kant anyhow.

But some other stuff might follow. For example, Hegel probably did have Kant's ticket with respect to the categorical imperative. And maybe we should all be a little less utopian in our thinking.

[Notes:

*Has anyone ever attempted something analogous with respect to empirically bogus views of language acquisition? For example, Quine's stage 5 (if I remember right, where young children learn the existential quantifier) might be analogous to the signing of the social contract that never actually happens either. Maybe universal grammarians could try something similar as well to justify the approach to syntax in light of acquisition data not really working out. Just a thought.]