“I would argue that they are at the core of what it is to live a fully human life.”
A fully human life, in the natural sense of the term, has an average span of sixteen years. That’s the environment we were designed to live in- nasty, brutal, and full of misery. By the standards of a typical human tribe, the Holocaust would have been notable for killing such a remarkably small percentage of the population. Why on Earth would we want to follow that example?
“It looks like this website has rejected the theistic understanding of faith and hope.”
Yes, for a very good reason- it does not work. If you stand in front of a truck, and you have faith that the truck will not run you over, and you hope that the truck will not run you over, your bones and vital organs will be sliced and diced and chopped and fried. The key factor in survival is not lack of hope, or lack of faith, but lack of doing stupid things such as standing in front of trucks.
“I don’t know how you can love something without it making you biased towards it.”
This is not what we mean by “biased”. By “bias”, we mean bugs in the human brain which lead us to give wrong answers to simple questions of fact, such as “What is the probability of X?”. See http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/tom/?p=30.
What the heck, Humans who lived past infancy lived far longer than 16 years in the Ancestral environment—just very poor infant mortality brought down the average life expectancy.
“The typical human tribe” would not have gone around murdering whole other tribes… there is no evidence for that and that is not what modern isolated hunter gatherers do either.
Agreed on infant mortality: ‘life expectancy’ is an incredibly misleading term, and leads to any number of people thinking that anyone over 40 was an old man in previous centuries, when a lot of the difference can be explained by infant mortality.
On human tribes, I don’t think slaughtering an entire other tribe is a particularly shocking thing for a tribe to do. I’ve read things suggesting that 20th century rates of personal homicide and deaths in war per person are both actually low by previous centuries’ standards, so the popular idea of the Holocaust and Communist purges as making the 20th century the century of war or atrocity is flawed. But agreed this doesn’t make Holocausts ‘typical’.
Isn’t the 20th century’s apparent low death toll from homicide and war just a matter of percentages? The absolute number of deaths from these things is much greater in the 20th century. I think the absolute number matters too.
. there is no evidence for that and that is not what modern isolated hunter gatherers do either.
I came across plenty of examples in my studies of anthropology. Of course it depends what you mean by “tribe”. Really large scale violence requires a certain amount of technology. As an example”Yanomamo: The Fierce People” by Chagnon details some such incidents and suggests they were not unusual. Well actually the men and children were killed, the nubile women were kept alive for .
See also the Torah / Old Testament for numerous genocides, though these were bronze/iron age people and also the historicity of the incidents is disputed.
This was not universal—the Kalahari Bushmen (now called the San people) did not do this, perhaps in part because their main weapon was a slow acting poison dart. An all-out war would kill everyone involved.
But rates of violent death among males were extremely high in hunter/gatherer societies often documented by early anthropologists (from reconstructing family trees) in the 30-50% range.
“I would argue that they are at the core of what it is to live a fully human life.”
A fully human life, in the natural sense of the term, has an average span of sixteen years. That’s the environment we were designed to live in- nasty, brutal, and full of misery. By the standards of a typical human tribe, the Holocaust would have been notable for killing such a remarkably small percentage of the population. Why on Earth would we want to follow that example?
“It looks like this website has rejected the theistic understanding of faith and hope.”
Yes, for a very good reason- it does not work. If you stand in front of a truck, and you have faith that the truck will not run you over, and you hope that the truck will not run you over, your bones and vital organs will be sliced and diced and chopped and fried. The key factor in survival is not lack of hope, or lack of faith, but lack of doing stupid things such as standing in front of trucks.
“I don’t know how you can love something without it making you biased towards it.”
This is not what we mean by “biased”. By “bias”, we mean bugs in the human brain which lead us to give wrong answers to simple questions of fact, such as “What is the probability of X?”. See http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/tom/?p=30.
What the heck, Humans who lived past infancy lived far longer than 16 years in the Ancestral environment—just very poor infant mortality brought down the average life expectancy.
“The typical human tribe” would not have gone around murdering whole other tribes… there is no evidence for that and that is not what modern isolated hunter gatherers do either.
Agreed on infant mortality: ‘life expectancy’ is an incredibly misleading term, and leads to any number of people thinking that anyone over 40 was an old man in previous centuries, when a lot of the difference can be explained by infant mortality.
On human tribes, I don’t think slaughtering an entire other tribe is a particularly shocking thing for a tribe to do. I’ve read things suggesting that 20th century rates of personal homicide and deaths in war per person are both actually low by previous centuries’ standards, so the popular idea of the Holocaust and Communist purges as making the 20th century the century of war or atrocity is flawed. But agreed this doesn’t make Holocausts ‘typical’.
Isn’t the 20th century’s apparent low death toll from homicide and war just a matter of percentages? The absolute number of deaths from these things is much greater in the 20th century. I think the absolute number matters too.
I came across plenty of examples in my studies of anthropology. Of course it depends what you mean by “tribe”. Really large scale violence requires a certain amount of technology. As an example”Yanomamo: The Fierce People” by Chagnon details some such incidents and suggests they were not unusual. Well actually the men and children were killed, the nubile women were kept alive for .
See also the Torah / Old Testament for numerous genocides, though these were bronze/iron age people and also the historicity of the incidents is disputed.
This was not universal—the Kalahari Bushmen (now called the San people) did not do this, perhaps in part because their main weapon was a slow acting poison dart. An all-out war would kill everyone involved.
But rates of violent death among males were extremely high in hunter/gatherer societies often documented by early anthropologists (from reconstructing family trees) in the 30-50% range.