This seems like a reasonable argument for some premodern fighting. I meant mainly the way of fighting developed in the Napoleonic wars, the American Civil War, and especially WWI. There’s a bit in Mein Kampf about how WWI was a major transition in character for Hitler because he switched from fearing danger to intending to move towards danger. Worth reading carefully. The sort of fatalistic stories where people with foreknowledge of their doom keep moving towards it in old warrior-culture texts like the Eddas also seem relevant here. These very much do not seem like human universals; for instance, by my reading it’s an attitude entirely foreign to the perspective of the Bible, both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.
I don’t understand your perspective. Many forms of warfighting required soldiers to move towards danger. Your basic Roman infantry charge is running towards people who want to stab you. Some video games can be seen as a safe super-stimulus for warfighting and require moving towards danger. If an innate preference for warfighting stopped being reproductively fit in the 1800s that won’t have a large genetic effect by the 2000s.
The bible is large and includes both pro-war and anti-war passages. I agree that a preference for warfighting is not universal, but innate preferences need not be universal. Some are attracted to men, some are attracted to women, some both, some neither; this does not mean that sexual attraction is not an innate preference. The naive evo-psych perspective implies that warfighting is more often an innate preference for young males, and not for women, very young children, and elders. Innate preferences can be deactivated or inverted by reality, as in the turn against warfighting in post-WW1 Europe, or post-Vietnam USA. Or they can be activated.
Many historical battles have a large component well modeled as a game of chicken, where whichever side’s morale breaks first loses. You can get a locally cheap boost to morale if your soldiers have internalized a cultural imperative to seek death in honorable combat, because they’ll be less deterrable. There’s plenty of credible literary evidence that many soldiers in cultures connected to ours were so acculturated. I am not claiming that it is a human universal, merely that it happens often enough to be an important example of preference inversion.
This cleared it up for me. So this isn’t really about a preference for “warfighting” or “danger”, this is about a preference for death in battle, as in Norse Vikings, Japanese Samurai, and Spartan and Aztec Warriors. This is more clearly analogous to a preference for chastity in terms of direct reproductive success. Preferences for death by martyrdom could be another example.
This seems like a reasonable argument for some premodern fighting. I meant mainly the way of fighting developed in the Napoleonic wars, the American Civil War, and especially WWI. There’s a bit in Mein Kampf about how WWI was a major transition in character for Hitler because he switched from fearing danger to intending to move towards danger. Worth reading carefully. The sort of fatalistic stories where people with foreknowledge of their doom keep moving towards it in old warrior-culture texts like the Eddas also seem relevant here. These very much do not seem like human universals; for instance, by my reading it’s an attitude entirely foreign to the perspective of the Bible, both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.
I don’t understand your perspective. Many forms of warfighting required soldiers to move towards danger. Your basic Roman infantry charge is running towards people who want to stab you. Some video games can be seen as a safe super-stimulus for warfighting and require moving towards danger. If an innate preference for warfighting stopped being reproductively fit in the 1800s that won’t have a large genetic effect by the 2000s.
The bible is large and includes both pro-war and anti-war passages. I agree that a preference for warfighting is not universal, but innate preferences need not be universal. Some are attracted to men, some are attracted to women, some both, some neither; this does not mean that sexual attraction is not an innate preference. The naive evo-psych perspective implies that warfighting is more often an innate preference for young males, and not for women, very young children, and elders. Innate preferences can be deactivated or inverted by reality, as in the turn against warfighting in post-WW1 Europe, or post-Vietnam USA. Or they can be activated.
Many historical battles have a large component well modeled as a game of chicken, where whichever side’s morale breaks first loses. You can get a locally cheap boost to morale if your soldiers have internalized a cultural imperative to seek death in honorable combat, because they’ll be less deterrable. There’s plenty of credible literary evidence that many soldiers in cultures connected to ours were so acculturated. I am not claiming that it is a human universal, merely that it happens often enough to be an important example of preference inversion.
This cleared it up for me. So this isn’t really about a preference for “warfighting” or “danger”, this is about a preference for death in battle, as in Norse Vikings, Japanese Samurai, and Spartan and Aztec Warriors. This is more clearly analogous to a preference for chastity in terms of direct reproductive success. Preferences for death by martyrdom could be another example.