No doubt, the growth of gated communities in the USA serves the same purpose on a smaller scale, mostly to keep the local petty criminal element and homeless out.
I agree on the silliness of their editorial policy. But Peter, you should consider that the best is the enemy of the good. By trying to achieve something that is impossible, you can end up undermining efforts to achieve the least bad option that is actually available in practice. One can debate over whether war has macabre positives to it. But there should be no debate over whether it is inevitable. All of history, not only human history but animal history too as you well know, gives us a very clear answer to that. The only consequence of deluding ourselves that war is over if we want it is that we will render ourselves incapable of defending ourselves in the next inevitable war.
Since few decades we live in times where chances of regular wars spiraling into worldwide disasters are extremely high. So how common war might be, we better try to find a way to stop it cause one day it'll end up quite badly for us no matter where we live. Obviously it seems impossible to do or close to it. But it's something worth trying.
No, it's not. You have not grokked that the best is the enemy of the good. We would be better off accepting that war is inevitable and then finding ways to minimise its frequency and devastation, rather than wasting our efforts on a quixotic quest to end it forever that does nothing of the kind and only makes wars worse when they do happen.
Hi Peter, very interesting your war on wars. Perhaps I might add some observations from Switzerland: During many centuries we had a tradition of being armed, being good shots and prepared to defend our alpine country. Most men did military service. Those who did not had difficulty to find a wife. All this seemed almost programmed into our DNA and I was such a specimen. In 1960 young men started military service with conviction.
From 1968 - despite the world not becoming better (Prague 1969) - there was more and more resistance to military service. Men and feminists pretended that this was a patriarchal and useless relic. In 1981 a third of Swiss electorate voted for abolishing the army and in fact it is now mostly abolished, existing mostly on paper.
The ideological framework for this attitude was that human beings were "good" (see the works of Steven Pinker or Rutger Bregman's "Humankind: A Hopeful History"). In fact this is a quasireligious belief and any editor adhering to it will reject other viewpoints. As a physician and behavioral anthropologist I was at a loss to explain this until I discovered the decline of male testosterone which started in 1950 and has now reached half. Toward the end of the century there will only be castrates left.
Of course such a feminised society is reluctant to sustain an army and perhaps it is even less violent. I tried to elaborate on this topic on my substack here https://lukasfierz.substack.com/p/63-the-new-script and in the following chapters.
Such a society may be less violent in the short run; in the long run, it is soon overtaken by violent outsiders. In the Maghreb, this famously happened quickly because they had the Sahara on their doorstep. Now, thanks to modern technology, we all have the Sahara on our doorstep, and as such, collapse is happening quickly everywhere. The only result—the ONLY result—of the naive belief that we can end war is to render the society that falls for such a monstrous lie incapable of defending itself against those who are not so stupid. I wish we would stop being stupid and start taking the necessary measures to defend ourselves.
I faced exactly the same situation when I tried to find a publisher for a book about Late Pleistocene extinctions. The only scientifically sound explanation for them is that virtually all of them were caused by humans. Yet there is an army of academics denying it, and their motivation is a schizophrenic mix of "those primitive savages couldn't bring down a mammoth" and "our noble ancestors lived in blissful harmony with Mother Nature" mythologies, sometimes within the same brain.
Christophe Darmangeat has written several books about war in primitive societies, in particular hunters and gatherers without any accumulation. See in particular "Justice and Warfare in Aboriginal Australia", that could be of interest.
In Europe we have many similar examples. Across the Mediterranean, many towns and cities were walled to protect themselves from Arab raids between the 14th and 17th centuries.
and fr fr 9 out of 7 planetary boundaries breaching ecological tipping points aint the problem? i get that on clidynamical thesis the focus is on the states stability. and ecological impacts r secondary. wealth pump, popular immisearation, elite overproduction r the key. but ecological economics perspective in the full world, No doubt the biggest growth failure is the continuing arms race,
where growth has led to less security rather than more and has
raised the stakes from loss of individual lives to loss of life itself in
wholesale ecocide. i want no war, yeah no political violence, but i want 365days clean and blue air, biodiversity, musical spring not silent spring too. and military spending, gowthmania is threatening our security(eclogical, food, etc. crisis) too. bc of war and arms race, or even AI arms race, we cant stop growthmania? dont we need qualitative development. steady-state economy. i wonder how and where can cliodynamics and ecological economics met in some point. about war, arms race. quantitative gowth. the ecological balance.
is anything cliodynamics studied or studying about Sudan? after the A Trap At The Escape From The Trap? Demographic-Structural Factors of Political Instability in Modern Africa and West Asia
2011
Korotayev, Andrey work done. bc the genocide and civil war. dead, refugees, famine amd humanitarian diasters scale is bigger than israel-plaestine, ukraine-russia rn ig.
I read parts of your book End Times yesterday. It's talking about "popular immiseration, elite overproduction, and the intraelite conflicts" leading to social cataclysms. That's the main idea, right?
Seeing in wikipedia that you were educated (in part) in Moscow in the 1960s and 70s, I was surprised that Lenin's concept of "revolutionary situation" isn't mentioned anywhere in the book. I mean the Lenin's concept specifically, because phrase "revolutionary situation" is repeated there multiple times. Do you find it uninteresting, not worth mentioning? Or did I miss something in the text?
I find the West African case compelling, though perhaps for a slightly broader reason than the analogy with the steppe frontier.
Fortification is not only a response to violence. It can reorganise the spatial structure of political order itself.
The pattern described by Walther and Radil is striking: population and state presence become more concentrated in defended towns, while the spaces between them become harder for the state to secure. Mobility is channelled through gates and checkpoints, civilians concentrate inside protected nodes, and fortification can also tie state forces more closely to fixed positions. The wall protects, but it can also reveal the limits of effective control.
This suggests an interesting qualification to the idea that external pressure simply drives up social scale. Organisational scale may increase within defended nodes even as effective state reach becomes more discontinuous. A formally unified state can begin to resemble an archipelago of strongly governed nodes separated by spaces in which authority, security and mobility are much less certain.
Fortification may therefore be both a sign of organisational adaptation and a material indicator of increasingly uneven effective state reach.
I would also hesitate to call the West African case a “natural experiment” confirming a particular interpretation of Trypillia. It strengthens the plausibility of a mechanism — mobile raiding pressure can induce concentration and defensive construction — but the archaeological question of what particular prehistoric earthworks were actually for still seems to require independent evidence.
In that sense, the return of walls may tell us something broader than whether violence produces fortification: it may show how insecurity makes effective territorial control increasingly segmented.
Regarding the comment by JS on gated communities, I think that is one of several tactics in the USA, though perhaps only a recent one. An older tactic still in use is routing mass transit away from richer neighborhoods: a virtual Motte & Bailey world.
On the subject of trenches and walls, a reader of Scott might wonder about the evolution of walls to keep them outside to walls to keep taxpayers inside.
In any event, seeing the effect of weak national institutions in Africa was quite sobering.
No doubt, the growth of gated communities in the USA serves the same purpose on a smaller scale, mostly to keep the local petty criminal element and homeless out.
I agree on the silliness of their editorial policy. But Peter, you should consider that the best is the enemy of the good. By trying to achieve something that is impossible, you can end up undermining efforts to achieve the least bad option that is actually available in practice. One can debate over whether war has macabre positives to it. But there should be no debate over whether it is inevitable. All of history, not only human history but animal history too as you well know, gives us a very clear answer to that. The only consequence of deluding ourselves that war is over if we want it is that we will render ourselves incapable of defending ourselves in the next inevitable war.
Since few decades we live in times where chances of regular wars spiraling into worldwide disasters are extremely high. So how common war might be, we better try to find a way to stop it cause one day it'll end up quite badly for us no matter where we live. Obviously it seems impossible to do or close to it. But it's something worth trying.
No, it's not. You have not grokked that the best is the enemy of the good. We would be better off accepting that war is inevitable and then finding ways to minimise its frequency and devastation, rather than wasting our efforts on a quixotic quest to end it forever that does nothing of the kind and only makes wars worse when they do happen.
Hi Peter, very interesting your war on wars. Perhaps I might add some observations from Switzerland: During many centuries we had a tradition of being armed, being good shots and prepared to defend our alpine country. Most men did military service. Those who did not had difficulty to find a wife. All this seemed almost programmed into our DNA and I was such a specimen. In 1960 young men started military service with conviction.
From 1968 - despite the world not becoming better (Prague 1969) - there was more and more resistance to military service. Men and feminists pretended that this was a patriarchal and useless relic. In 1981 a third of Swiss electorate voted for abolishing the army and in fact it is now mostly abolished, existing mostly on paper.
The ideological framework for this attitude was that human beings were "good" (see the works of Steven Pinker or Rutger Bregman's "Humankind: A Hopeful History"). In fact this is a quasireligious belief and any editor adhering to it will reject other viewpoints. As a physician and behavioral anthropologist I was at a loss to explain this until I discovered the decline of male testosterone which started in 1950 and has now reached half. Toward the end of the century there will only be castrates left.
Of course such a feminised society is reluctant to sustain an army and perhaps it is even less violent. I tried to elaborate on this topic on my substack here https://lukasfierz.substack.com/p/63-the-new-script and in the following chapters.
Such a society may be less violent in the short run; in the long run, it is soon overtaken by violent outsiders. In the Maghreb, this famously happened quickly because they had the Sahara on their doorstep. Now, thanks to modern technology, we all have the Sahara on our doorstep, and as such, collapse is happening quickly everywhere. The only result—the ONLY result—of the naive belief that we can end war is to render the society that falls for such a monstrous lie incapable of defending itself against those who are not so stupid. I wish we would stop being stupid and start taking the necessary measures to defend ourselves.
The decline of sperm and testosterone (and fertility) is found worldwide (https://lukasfierz.substack.com/p/testosterone-going-down-the-drain). However the original testosterone levels were higher in central Asia and Africa, probably also in the Middle East and there the decline might also be less (https://lukasfierz.substack.com/p/101-demographics-and-migration). What is a fact - as you point out - is that testosterone-driven territorial control has collapsed in parts of Europe (https://lukasfierz.substack.com/p/75-territorial-control-failing-in) which are taken over by high testosterone immigrants.
I faced exactly the same situation when I tried to find a publisher for a book about Late Pleistocene extinctions. The only scientifically sound explanation for them is that virtually all of them were caused by humans. Yet there is an army of academics denying it, and their motivation is a schizophrenic mix of "those primitive savages couldn't bring down a mammoth" and "our noble ancestors lived in blissful harmony with Mother Nature" mythologies, sometimes within the same brain.
Christophe Darmangeat has written several books about war in primitive societies, in particular hunters and gatherers without any accumulation. See in particular "Justice and Warfare in Aboriginal Australia", that could be of interest.
"War is the father of all and the king of all.
Some he shows as gods, others as men;
some he makes slaves, and others free."
Heraclitus, fragment 53
In Europe we have many similar examples. Across the Mediterranean, many towns and cities were walled to protect themselves from Arab raids between the 14th and 17th centuries.
ਅਵਰ ਬਾਸਨਾ ਨਾਹਿ ਪ੍ਭ
ਧਰਨ ਜੁੱਧ ਕੇ ਚਾਇ
I have no other desire, O Beloved,
except for the longing of war upon the earth!
Gurů Gobind Singh
|Dasam Guru Granth Sahibl
and fr fr 9 out of 7 planetary boundaries breaching ecological tipping points aint the problem? i get that on clidynamical thesis the focus is on the states stability. and ecological impacts r secondary. wealth pump, popular immisearation, elite overproduction r the key. but ecological economics perspective in the full world, No doubt the biggest growth failure is the continuing arms race,
where growth has led to less security rather than more and has
raised the stakes from loss of individual lives to loss of life itself in
wholesale ecocide. i want no war, yeah no political violence, but i want 365days clean and blue air, biodiversity, musical spring not silent spring too. and military spending, gowthmania is threatening our security(eclogical, food, etc. crisis) too. bc of war and arms race, or even AI arms race, we cant stop growthmania? dont we need qualitative development. steady-state economy. i wonder how and where can cliodynamics and ecological economics met in some point. about war, arms race. quantitative gowth. the ecological balance.
is anything cliodynamics studied or studying about Sudan? after the A Trap At The Escape From The Trap? Demographic-Structural Factors of Political Instability in Modern Africa and West Asia
2011
Korotayev, Andrey work done. bc the genocide and civil war. dead, refugees, famine amd humanitarian diasters scale is bigger than israel-plaestine, ukraine-russia rn ig.
I read parts of your book End Times yesterday. It's talking about "popular immiseration, elite overproduction, and the intraelite conflicts" leading to social cataclysms. That's the main idea, right?
Seeing in wikipedia that you were educated (in part) in Moscow in the 1960s and 70s, I was surprised that Lenin's concept of "revolutionary situation" isn't mentioned anywhere in the book. I mean the Lenin's concept specifically, because phrase "revolutionary situation" is repeated there multiple times. Do you find it uninteresting, not worth mentioning? Or did I miss something in the text?
Thanks.
I find the West African case compelling, though perhaps for a slightly broader reason than the analogy with the steppe frontier.
Fortification is not only a response to violence. It can reorganise the spatial structure of political order itself.
The pattern described by Walther and Radil is striking: population and state presence become more concentrated in defended towns, while the spaces between them become harder for the state to secure. Mobility is channelled through gates and checkpoints, civilians concentrate inside protected nodes, and fortification can also tie state forces more closely to fixed positions. The wall protects, but it can also reveal the limits of effective control.
This suggests an interesting qualification to the idea that external pressure simply drives up social scale. Organisational scale may increase within defended nodes even as effective state reach becomes more discontinuous. A formally unified state can begin to resemble an archipelago of strongly governed nodes separated by spaces in which authority, security and mobility are much less certain.
Fortification may therefore be both a sign of organisational adaptation and a material indicator of increasingly uneven effective state reach.
I would also hesitate to call the West African case a “natural experiment” confirming a particular interpretation of Trypillia. It strengthens the plausibility of a mechanism — mobile raiding pressure can induce concentration and defensive construction — but the archaeological question of what particular prehistoric earthworks were actually for still seems to require independent evidence.
In that sense, the return of walls may tell us something broader than whether violence produces fortification: it may show how insecurity makes effective territorial control increasingly segmented.
Regarding the comment by JS on gated communities, I think that is one of several tactics in the USA, though perhaps only a recent one. An older tactic still in use is routing mass transit away from richer neighborhoods: a virtual Motte & Bailey world.
On the subject of trenches and walls, a reader of Scott might wonder about the evolution of walls to keep them outside to walls to keep taxpayers inside.
In any event, seeing the effect of weak national institutions in Africa was quite sobering.
Excellent. Thank you. I'm not surprised that ideology should condemn the study of war...
If we want to avoid it, we must study it. The old Roman adage comes to mind:
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
If you want peace, prepare (study?) war...
🙏🏻