Ian Morris "War! What Is It Good For?"
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- Опубліковано 30 кві 2014
- www.politics-prose.com/book/97...
Ian Morris discusses his book at Politics & Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C. This event was recorded on April 23, 2014.
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He makes an interesting thesis. The pattern is logical and he openly admits that at certain times other factors changed the dynamics of the pattern. Very interesting discussion. I never thought about it the way he presented it. Excellent
Dr Morris does make some very interesting points, in the way many people do. Most historians you listen to add their ideas to the complex layers of understanding already there. The problem is that in trying to make sense of history, Dr. Morris appears to choses simple answers that simply don't answer the complexity of history. Reductionalism doesn't work with people; there's no reason it should with history. I can see that there are powerful drivers of change, some of which sometimes transcend the chaos, but the picture of simple solutions to difficult problems doesn't seem to fit, well, history.
War is hell, live with it! When you make rules for war , you realize it's part of the game? it's what we are. That being said. Peace to All. ✌️🙏
Thank you for the upload!
Very very interesting!!!
Very interesting but amazing how just a few years have changed the global picture.
WE ARE NOT GOING TO HAVE TO LIVE WITH THE HORRORS OF WAR FOR GOOD.
The theory relies entirely upon the premise that violence accounted for 10-20% of all human deaths in the Paleolithic era versus a comparison of 2% in WWII. The problem is we don't know actual attrition rates during prehistory. We don't know what is actually attributed to bonafide war. And we especially don't know how to discern between violent death and subsequent death by infection. There are too many unknown variables to substantiate this theory. Are the violent deaths war or crime? Do all known prehistoric deaths by violence occur within the same period and locality so as to render an accurate attrition rate? Let us not be led by statistics alone.
Stats can be gathered and interpreted to suit many different interpretations. So there is a "grain of salt" situation going on with Ian's theories / books. But he articulates himself well, which helps hold people's attention and at the very least provokes thought.
Absolutely! He is basing his entire theory on a projection of causes of death which is far too tenuous. Furthermore his opening comment that Hunter gatherers only experienced small groups is nonsense. They frequently met in much larger groups and there are far greater variety of types of social organisation during prehistory than his simplified picture of only being Hunter gatherers moving into agriculture
Perhaps most disturbing than all is that he is describing older social formations as more violent and it’s these claims which are used to justify the genocide of older styles of social formations that we are seeing today
When he started using Pinker and Diamond as supporting texts it became obvious he is far too ignorant to be making a grand theory like this. Their work is notoriously poor and superficial and lacking in intellectual rigour
I don’t know if it’s the talk here and he does it in his book but here he just doesn’t present any real arguments. He claims we now work things out in less violent ways but this is a circular argument. He is arguing that organising for war enables greater organisational skills to create peace because governments have been able to organise wars and therefore know how to control their own populations by this experience. It doesn’t make any sense. Surely in early societies the same would apply. Any group running a war would learn to monopolise violence in their own communities, yet he is arguing they were less successful because their communities ran away from them.
So after a while we couldn’t run away and we had to learn from the best organisers of war how to make ourselves as peaceful as them, when what they are good at is war that makes us more peaceful? This is meaningless.
Then he claims his theory is possibly true because he doesn’t think there is a better explanation, what the hell does that mean. This was just a meaningless talk
He says peace arises from war like people as an unintended consequence. Basically what he is doing is denying all agency to people who don’t go to war and putting all agency in people who wages war. I mean is he going to argue that serial killers have the unintended consequence of improving police investigation techniques so serial killers advance the development of societies “in the long term”?
great speech
Wow! Good luck, Bud.
Vivian Maier book in the background
I love it
I would ask, are there other ways of accomplishing advances in social development that don't require industrialized suffering?
There is a mighty chasm between acknowledging that use of physical force is effective, and calling it, "Good".
Probably not, given that humans are at their core selfish.
For a counterpoint to this argument see Edward S. Herman's book, Reality Denial, which directly attempts to refute Steven Pinker's book.
This guy's good
Correlation is not causation, you can build great theories disregarding this point.
Good question at 50mins, but it goes on too long.
Could a corporation become the “leviathan,” as Hobbes describes?
What happens when war is carried out by means other than shooting like cyber war or humans cease fighting them, is there still the creative destruction?
Any ideas?
Please read “Friday” by Robert Heinlein
I like the arguments in this video of Ian Morris, and is 100% correct if you see all the history of the world in a british prespective.
I think there is a big factor thet he miss during the arguments, and i think it's the distribution of wealth inside a society. More equally the wealth is distributed and less gap between the waelth and the poor, the more powerful the society it is, and this thing should not be done by force like the comunist ideas or it is a failure. But it is a loop here, the equal distribution of wealth bring inovation and prosperity, but prosperity bring unequallity.
Examples:
1. Alexander Empire. Macedonians were very poor compared to their enemy, but their poor citizens were wealthier than the persians one.
2. Roman Empire. They had less wealth than Carthage, but carthage inhabitant were mostly slaves. Roman decline comence with the number of their slaves and outlanders booming the roman cities.
3. Chaliphate. The start for the caliphate in VII and VIII century was very hard because was a very poor nation, but the poorest of their citizens were richer than the persian slaves, and some of the lower class even know how to read (very uncomon for this time).
4. Frankish Empire. Was soo easy to become nobilty in Western Europe just needed to be a free man, and fight few battles. We see huge change during this period in the decentralization of Europe.
5. Italy. The renesance brought the ideas of the Roman Republic back, and all started in Italy. During this period was very easy to become wealthier, just you had to be talented. Artist were mostly from lower class.
6. Spanish-Portugese dominion. During the exploration of the new world you just had to have a ship and you could become reachier than most of the kings.
7. British Empire. First Richard the Lion Heart, later the first english civil war (war of the roses) made england a very poor country, but an equalier society, first with the Magna Carta and later with the power increase of parlament. The british midle class, in XIX centuty, were even wealthier the most of the higher class in other country.
8. USA. Not need to go in details. The american dream.
Social equality it's not the main factor of prosper, but history has shown that's an important one.
I’m thinking bout the middle way between liberalism and socialism
Good Gawd, Y'all
The comments about the UN and EU were interesting.
This presenter has his head in the clouds.
I suspect the deaths due to murder (which is what warfare is) may be higher. A tribe which is displaced by another more powerful tribe may find itself in a resource poor area, thus they starve and die of disease. When the bodies are dug up the anthropologist would conclude this was a case of disease, yet you could argue its the result of a lost conflict, thus war. I must admit if population density was low, conflict would be lower. In ancient Rome, mortality due to violence was not a pretty sight, and we have reasonable source material to get an accurate picture. What i find interesting is the female mortality due to child birth - that was almost as bad as male mortality due to warfare/murder. Its amazing humanity population ever grew.
Would Germany be there where it is now, without the 3. W.War? What’s your opinion?
I still believe that after the global cops UK and U.S. a global council could be a successor. We need of course get rid of the veto rights of the 5 members of the in the security council, which block any activity against these powers. And also an independent blue helmet army including independent funding would be helpful.
Couldn't that help to minimise global expenditures for military. If there is a global police which is respected, would that not mean that the demand for private investigators and bodyguards shrinks (= national military expenses could go down)?
I highly suggest you read Notes from the Underground. You're idea sounds logical, and perfectly so, but other's have thought the same way. Always remember, men are not piano keys.The further we try to obtain or enforce the perfect Utopia, the faster and harder man will rebel against it. Hitler's Germany was an attempt at Utopia through racial cleansing. The Soviet Union was an attempt at Utopia through ideology. Our world is not a completely rational one. Nietzsche said so, that no philosophy that is complete is fully rational because there is a danger in complete rationalism. I highly suggest you challenge this idea by reading Dostoyevski, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche. There is great danger in totality, because it is an unnatural state (a beast like Tiamat or Set) to be wary of.
We are being domesticated. We'll make great pets.
You are either an empire or under the thumb of an empire.
war i despise...edwin starr..RIP.
war is about countrys and politics and arms .it has nothing to do with PEOPLE.
and its no so dificult to understand what i m saying.
DARLING THERE IS NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN EVERYTHING IS HEWEL::: GREEK WISDOM IN THE OLD TESTAMENT KOHELET
As long as we continue to use economic indicators to assess quality of life, a fundamental dysfunction will reign.
Shiva, not Sheba.
These ideas would fit well inside a computer game, say Sid Meyer's Civilisation series. I would therefore be suspicious of them, even if they are entertaining. To put it another way, these ideas strike me as reductionist. History appears to be irreducibly complex; it stops matching the facts when made too simple.
Polemos Pater Panton
El da7ee7 hhhhh
There are so many fundamental contradictions in the claims Morris keeps repeating throughout the video "wars create a bigger society" and "democratic movements are always secondary", etc... First of all, it's not war that creates bigger societies but the collective (not always though) struggle to stop it and the fear to fall into it again. When you speak of war you don't imagine cooperation or collaboration, you imagine destruction, death, scattered human limbs, burnt human flesh, famine, homeless, parentless and hungry children, and so on. So war destroys life and anything good about it. Now that's a dialectical problem you got there. We can speak of fear now, or if anyone wants to stick to war I won't complain much.
Fear can and does create international communities of immense proportions, the most recent case in point is the Paris Climate Accord (PA). 184 parties as of 2018 (the US thanks to the Trump administration has pulled out). Even though the PA is formally under the framework of the UN it's the largest international cooperation project humanity has ever come up with and it certainly has nothing to do with war and everything to do with the fear of destroying organized human existence (which seems to be happening quite steadily and fast unfortunately).
Then comes economic integration. Take OPEC - at the roots of its foundation was the motivation to form a counterweight to the then so-called Seven Sisters, primarily US based oil oligopoly. To link it to WW2 is to have a very rich imagination, it just doesn't make much sense to me. Rather pure rational market strategy.
The Eurasian Economic Union, what does that have to do with war?
Then the European Union. Yes, it's the fear of another deadly war that urged the creation of a strong European union but if you look back into history, even as far as back in the 60s it still was nothing like the modern-day EU - only a few countries with much, much less integration than today. It started off a six-state coal and steel union (no freedom of movement up until 1992 for instance and so on). It became the EU only because it proved to be a benefiting politico-economical organization. True, the roots of the organizations that came before it can be traced back to WW2 but it wasn't the war that created the EU but the success millions of people who have discovered that economical, political and cultural integration can benefit everyone - to various degrees but still. That said, it's absolutely logical to insist that peace in Europe depends on the EU today more than on anything else. Too bad many British people didn't understand or want to take that into account. The EU is in deep crisis but we can and I believe will reform and preserve it.
Lastly, if war creates bigger societies than WWI didn't go much far; with all the institutions that cam out of it it took just another couple of decades to plunge into the worst nightmare humanity has ever faced. And there are many similar examples. What kind of 'bigger societies' have the US post-WW2 wars created around the globe? Or take Putin's wars in Ukraine - devastated a huge country, the only political outcome is the Minsk group which is incapable of doing anything there.
I simply don't buy the bold claim that war 'creates bigger societies', that 'people's movements are always secondary', and that humankind hasn't come up with better options to improve social development than through war.
p.s. If anybody believes wars create larger and richer societies why don't you actually go check it out?
China is replacing USA as a global super power. It is just matter of time when the country leading globally will be China, and not the USA.
We'll see, we'll see!
Ian is crediting war for all kinds of advances that could have been achieved in other ways.
I hope this 'war is beneficial' notion is buried along with this ill advised book.
"could have" but wasn't... Like it or not, war has been one of the great motivators in human history, and likely will continue to be so.
@Ismael Barrera Certainly we live in a time of peace, but for how long?
From 1945 till 1989 the world were in effect being controlled by two super states, the US and the USSR, in that time lots of the former colonies in Africa, Asia and the middleeast were having minor wars that although bloody, were on the small scale. After 1989 till around 2008 the USA was the dominant power in the world, with no real challenge.
Now we are seeing power like China, India amd Russia gaining in power and influence. All have shown readiness for flexing in capability, with military conflicts being seen as ways to show off national power and prestige.
Russia in Syria and Ukraine, but also in Central Asia.
India continues to show off in Kashmir, in the Indian Ocean and on the borders of China.
China with its show of force in Hong Kong and in the South China Sea is looking at Taiwan with not a little hunger.
All the while the US and NATO has stalled to a degree, it no longer has quit the same respect, so its deterance is no longer what it was... That is a road to violence and war.
Yes we live in a time of peace, but war has always been a part of humanity, and while social media and public knowledge has changed some things, it hasn't changed human nature. I wouldn't write off war just yet.
very unfinished statements in this book
why do you think so? explain please :)
PsedoIntellectual the guy is not impressive. Civilization made stored grain and wars began to steal the stores.