As is usual following an incident involving guns, people are bewailing the US' alleged "gun fetish." And as usual, these people are wrong. Yes, including you on my flist
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You haven't lost me. I've often said that any culture that glamorizes violence and makes it available to wee tots, while clutching its pearls and demonizing the honest expression of love between two consenting adults, is a culture that is deeply and perhaps incurably flawed.
Unfortunately, I've not found any culture that simultaneously supports self-defense *and* not glorifying violence. Cultures that shun the latter tend to view the former as anachronistic at best and atavism at worst.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the primitive "Stone Age" cultures tend to view violence as a necessary evil. They'll protect themselves with the same tools they use to feed themselves, but they generally don't go looking for trouble except in ritualized ways -- skirmishes with traditional enemies, defining boundaries with invaders, stealing wives or material goods, winning honor, that sort of thing. They don't generally go in for wholesale slaughter.
Maybe it has something to do with the low population -- there aren't enough people around to go randomly killing each other...
"Civilized" societies, on the other hand... overpopulated, no sense of honor, no rituals, no need to place food-shelter-clothing at the top of the This Is Important Shit list...
Well, I think you're description of non-state-level societies is somewhat sanitized. Generally, they don't go looking for trouble except when there's something serious to be gained by it. But some of the things to gain are driving other groups off land which you want to use, stealing their women, etc. Doing those in large scale requires (or is facilitated by) a lot of slaughter, sometimes reaching outright genocide, and there's plenty of evidence that such societies in both modern and ancient times did so when they had the ability and motive. (War before Civilization gives a summary of the evidence.)
The biggest difference is that pre-agricultural people don't have a high population density, so the sheer number of homicides is low. As someone noted, a band of 40 foragers that has one homicide in 20 years has a homicide rate of 125/100,000/year, well into the "Murder City USA" range, despite that the last homicide was, from their point of view, long, long ago.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the primitive "Stone Age" cultures tend to view violence as a necessary evil.
Neanderthalensis. Who were, to a man (pardon the phrase), wiped out by H sapiens.
Pterry has addressed this a few times. Example: Generic godhead: "I used to have followers. Thought it would nice if I told them to keep themselves to themselves, not go around killing people, that sort of thing." Human: "Used to? What happened?" Godhead: "They were all murdered by the followers of the god in the next valley over, who told them to wage war on everyone. Terribly unpleasant fellow, I'm afraid."
I've not found any culture that simultaneously supports self-defense *and* not glorifying violence.
It may be difficult to build such a culture. To do so requires that people (at the moment when temptation and/or threats appear) to be able to accurately distinguish between self-defense and aggression, and to be able to act on the distinction. And that every individual's sense of that distinction is well-aligned with the overall society's distinction.
I'm deeply ashamed of the fact that I'm descended from those twisted Puritans. They saddled us with a culture in which pleasure is "sinful", while suffering earns you brownie points with Big Daddy. And of all the sinful pleasures, sex, or anything even vaguely connected with sex, is the most heinously sinful. So it's perfectly fine to show a naked blade on prime-time TV, but we must protect our children from the merest glimpse of a naked human being. I have no pride at all in being a Mayflower descendant, damn their fanatical bigotry!
Fucking Pilgrims.
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Unfortunately, I've not found any culture that simultaneously supports self-defense *and* not glorifying violence. Cultures that shun the latter tend to view the former as anachronistic at best and atavism at worst.
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Maybe it has something to do with the low population -- there aren't enough people around to go randomly killing each other...
"Civilized" societies, on the other hand... overpopulated, no sense of honor, no rituals, no need to place food-shelter-clothing at the top of the This Is Important Shit list...
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The biggest difference is that pre-agricultural people don't have a high population density, so the sheer number of homicides is low. As someone noted, a band of 40 foragers that has one homicide in 20 years has a homicide rate of 125/100,000/year, well into the "Murder City USA" range, despite that the last homicide was, from their point of view, long, long ago.
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Neanderthalensis. Who were, to a man (pardon the phrase), wiped out by H sapiens.
Pterry has addressed this a few times. Example:
Generic godhead: "I used to have followers. Thought it would nice if I told them to keep themselves to themselves, not go around killing people, that sort of thing."
Human: "Used to? What happened?"
Godhead: "They were all murdered by the followers of the god in the next valley over, who told them to wage war on everyone. Terribly unpleasant fellow, I'm afraid."
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It may be difficult to build such a culture. To do so requires that people (at the moment when temptation and/or threats appear) to be able to accurately distinguish between self-defense and aggression, and to be able to act on the distinction. And that every individual's sense of that distinction is well-aligned with the overall society's distinction.
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Seems to me you've done okay. To hell with the Puritans, at least one descendant has her head screwed on right!
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