Entitled to an Opinion

I picked up Steven LeBlanc’s “Constant Battles” because I’d been on an anthropological kick and Robert Edgerton’s “Sick Societies”. Based on the title, I had been expecting it to be similar to fellow-archaeologist Lawrence Keeley’s “War Before Civilization” (which LeBlanc cites, along with Edgerton, and which I blogged about here and here) as well as historian Azar Gat’s “War in Human Civilization” (which I blogged here, here and here). It turned out to be surprisingly in sync with Jared Diamond’s “The Third Chimpanzee” in its focus on humans degrading the environment. LeBlanc’s main thesis is that basically no humans until recently have even attempted to live in equilibrium with our environment, so populations have always expanded up to Malthusian limits, ultimately being checked by group conflict over limited resources. I was skeptical of Jared Diamond’s claim that human agriculture had denuded not only the Middle East, but also the Mediterranean, since Italy seems like a normal place despite being heavily settled and even urbanized going all the way back to Roman times. LeBlanc however brings up as examples small Greek islands that once supported agriculture and are now completely barren, so perhaps there are parts of the Mediterranean where that thesis is correct.

Razib discussed this recently (partially at my prompting). Consider this material from Azar Gat’s “War in Human Civilization” supplementary.
“[…] nor was investment in colonial markets sought by investors in preference to diminishing returns on investment in the developed economies. The more developed the country of investment the higher were the returns, with the new African acquisitions bringing the lowest returns. […] This is demonstrated by the fact that the fastest growing new economic giants of the late nineteenth century were the USA and Germany, which, despite their new colonial ambitions and minor acquisitions, were the least of the colonial empires […] the largest and fastest growing colonial empires, Britain and France, suffered the greatest relative decline in economic status among the great powers during the era of the new imperialism. Indeed, with the close correlation of economic and military power, the empire’s poor military contribution mirrored the economic one. Metropolitan Britain incurred 80 percent of the casualties and 88 percent of the costs of the First Wrold War, with the remainder, the imperial share, taken mostly by the self-governing dominions [Canada, Australia, and New Zealand]”
Gat explains the “scramble for Africa” by virtue of the strategic threats (rather than economic incentives) Britain felt as a result of Russian ambitions in the eastern Meditteranean and central asia (and later a threatened alliance between Transvaal Boers and new German possessions in south/east Africa). Britain’s seizure of Egypt to secure the Suez frightened France into seizing territory, setting of a chain-reaction of land-grabs.

More from “War in Human Civilization”, which I’m not appending to the older post since few would notice. Jane Jacobs thought cities preceded agriculture. Azar Gat strongly disagrees. Oddly enough, he acknowledges that some hunter-gatherers were sedentary, including his (oddly, since we’ve got Australia) exemplary Pacific northwesterners, whose salmon fishing also gave rise to a quasi-agricultural exploitable surplus. He doesn’t mention my intuitive argument against Jacobs, about the relative attraction of non-sedentary agriculture (slash-and-burn or “swiddening”, often discussed in James Scott’s “The Art of Not Being Governed) when there is a higher ratio of land to population (as would have been the case before the neolithic revolution) and it can be combined with hunting still fairly prevalent game animals. In Gat’s view cities were not useful economically, but provided a defense (even when unwalled) against the common primitive tactic of raiding. There is an oddly circular aspect to his argument since he says city-states arise to protect against other nearby city-states. I earlier argued against his certainty that the early city of Jericho was unique, a claim that undercuts his later argument. One plausible argument from his book I hadn’t considered before is that today’s categories of urban industrialist/artisan vs rural farmer doesn’t apply well to many ancient city-states where most of the population consisted of farmers who simply walked to their nearby fields from their home in the city daily. A quote from him below the fold. (more…)

At Razib’s recommendation, I am reading Azar Gat’s “War in Human Civilization”. So far it’s pretty good, but one bit stopped me in my tracks to write this post. After deftly explaining that aggression is a useful option evolution has crafted into our genes but not a consuming drive like hunger or lust, we get this unscholarly echoing of the conventional wisdom: “[I]ndividuals, groups and societies […] are conditioned to become more or less violent by the sort of environment to which they have been exposed. We intuitively know this to be true from dialy life experience: young people growing in violent social circumstances becoming violent; beaten children becoming beating parents; and so on”
It’s preceded by some stuff about developing brain plasticity which doesn’t suffice to show anything about behavioral development (fortunately there are no brain images). Just for completeness sake I’ll summarize Harris’ point: we can’t conclude on the basis of parent behavior to child behavior correlations that environment is the cause rather than shared genes, twin-adoption studies generally show the latter to be more important than the household environment (though peers are also an important influence). Gat does later mention the Swiss and Swedes becoming peaceful after a prior history of belligerence, which does support the argument.

UPDATE: The fighting among highland New Guineans is perhaps less famous than only the Yanomamo. New Guineans from the lowland are rarely mentioned. But apparently “[T]he Gebusi of lowland New Guinea had the highest homicide rate recorded anywhere”. The closest thing to a cite for that is to Bruce Knauft’s “Violence and sociality in human evolution”, but the footnote is attached to a block-quote on the causes of their violence rather than how it compares to other societies. On an unrelated note, a few pages later Gat seems to contradict himself on whether elephants are weak prey. “[P]reying on other predators, or even on very strong herbivores such as elephants, rhinos, and hippopotami, which are also dangerously equipped, is highly irregular. Normal preying is regularly done on species that are overall weaker and less dangerous than one’s own. (Contrary to appearance, this applies even to humans hunting elephants, not only to leopards hunting gazelles.)”.

UPDATE 2: I found myself with plenty of free time to read further and no access to the internet recently, so here are more notes. (more…)