Thank you, Alexander, for an interesting and thought-provoking article. I suspect that you could easily win any formal debate with Mr. Fuentes simply by pointing to the 20th century. Yes, we cooperated with one another - in developing more and better ways to annihilate one another, from phosgene gas to flame throwers to saturation bombing to thermonuclear weapons. That there may well have been centuries when there was even more warfare and greater numbers of people suffering death by violent means hardly speaks well for his argument. The advent of capitalism and international markets has tamped this down a bit. The free exchange of goods and services encourages sometimes fierce competition among rivals but encourages cooperation between buyers and sellers - everyone walks away satisfied. If they weren't they wouldn't have made the deal. Even now we see how war roils global markets. The Russian invasion of Ukraine put incredible strain on European oil markets, disrupted global grain sales, and helped push a tottering Sri Lankan economy to the brink of disaster. So perhaps we've stumbled on the means to force ourselves to become more peaceful, but we have not fundamentally changed human nature, and to believe that we have evolved to be peaceful ignores 99% of human history, where war and violence were the rule rather than the exception. For myself, I've always believed that we rose to dominate every other species on the face of the earth because we were the meanest SOB's on the planet.
Seems like a more plausible (and far more interesting) theory of human development is that our capacities for cooperation and competition, as well as aggression and altruism, have evolved in relation to one another. It’s very reminiscent of Nietzsche’s idea of ressentiment; much of the positive possibilities of human nature are only realized first through hatred and fear-much the way the technologies that have characterized the modern world were largely developed in the Second World War or the Cold War. I hadn’t thought of it in such expressly biological terms before. Good article.
Thank you, Alexander, for an interesting and thought-provoking article. I suspect that you could easily win any formal debate with Mr. Fuentes simply by pointing to the 20th century. Yes, we cooperated with one another - in developing more and better ways to annihilate one another, from phosgene gas to flame throwers to saturation bombing to thermonuclear weapons. That there may well have been centuries when there was even more warfare and greater numbers of people suffering death by violent means hardly speaks well for his argument. The advent of capitalism and international markets has tamped this down a bit. The free exchange of goods and services encourages sometimes fierce competition among rivals but encourages cooperation between buyers and sellers - everyone walks away satisfied. If they weren't they wouldn't have made the deal. Even now we see how war roils global markets. The Russian invasion of Ukraine put incredible strain on European oil markets, disrupted global grain sales, and helped push a tottering Sri Lankan economy to the brink of disaster. So perhaps we've stumbled on the means to force ourselves to become more peaceful, but we have not fundamentally changed human nature, and to believe that we have evolved to be peaceful ignores 99% of human history, where war and violence were the rule rather than the exception. For myself, I've always believed that we rose to dominate every other species on the face of the earth because we were the meanest SOB's on the planet.
People who dream of a Utopia neither know what that word means, nor care. It is their dream, and they will kill us to achieve it.
Seems like a more plausible (and far more interesting) theory of human development is that our capacities for cooperation and competition, as well as aggression and altruism, have evolved in relation to one another. It’s very reminiscent of Nietzsche’s idea of ressentiment; much of the positive possibilities of human nature are only realized first through hatred and fear-much the way the technologies that have characterized the modern world were largely developed in the Second World War or the Cold War. I hadn’t thought of it in such expressly biological terms before. Good article.
I really enjoyed this piece. Very clear, balanced and no longer than it needed to be.