From: Keith Henson (hkhenson@rogers.com)
Date: Fri 27 Jun 2003 - 15:01:04 GMT
More thoughts about LeBlanc's book, _Prehistoric Warfare in the American
Southwest_. Southwest history is different from other areas only in that
the low rainfall and stone construction makes it easier to read the
archeological record. LeBlanc goes into an amazing level of detail
supporting widespread debilitating conflict over a long time and a large
area. The combination of drought and the new "custom" (meme) of raiding
over long distances depopulate the Colorado Plateau (24 of 27 substantial
communities just died out). LeBlanc is as much mystified by the story he
pieces together as anything else. The book is well worth reading. A
review is here:
http://www.athenapub.com/8prewar.htm
The conflict, which continued into historical times, long after most of the
population had died, reduced the carrying capacity for corn farmers in that
area to a level far below what it had been before widespread conflict
became the norm. The immediate reason was that once raiding started to
happen, the survivors contracted into large densely populated fortified
towns, often in defensive locations like the edge of a mesa.
The towns were good for defense in that they had enough manpower to defeat
an attack but (as LeBlanc points out) towns were rotten for farming because
the contracted group could only farm a fraction of their former
fields--making privation worse. LeBlanc makes the case that most of them
died in place. (A fraction most likely migrated to the Rio Grande
area.) Assuming wars *are* induced by privation or looming privation what
happened about 1250 CE in the Southwest it looks like positive feedback to
me. The harvest could not be expanded on the limited amount of land they
could farm from a defensive site, so continued privation and the wars it
induces became the norm.
*Chimpanzees* make war against neighboring groups, almost certainly as a
result of resource limitations. There is a strong case rooted deep in
evolutionary psychology that the human line when facing resource
limitations has done the same for millions of years. If you think about
it, from a genes viewpoint going to war beats starvation even if you lose
and all the men in a tribe are killed. Reason is that in most cases the
women and sometimes the children who carry the same genes are incorporated
into the tribe that wins (and presumably has more resources per capita).
Since a group has to be synchronized into attacks, the mechanism where
privation leads to war is likely based on an evolved psychological trait
where xenophobic memes dehumanizing a nearby tribe propagate
well. Privation adjusts the gain setting on memetic propagation if you
will. Memes, being epidemic (exponential) in growth curves, respond in
very nonlinear ways to gain settings.
I think "memetic trapping" might describe such positive feedback
situations. Privation turns up the gain on xenophobic meme propagation,
which induces conflict, the conflict makes privation worse, keeping the
psychological mechanisms jammed on that strengthens the xenophobic memes
that in turn drive the war. There are lots of modern examples.
It is possible for groups to escape this feedback trap as may have happened
in Northern Ireland. As a guess, lower birth rate there eventually raised
the income per capita (in spite of the conflict) which in turn lowered the
xenophobic meme propagation/reenforcement gain factor below one.
The case gets made that wars are caused by governments, militaries, and
munitions makers. I don't the people who we see as being in control really
are. I suspect that blind effects shaped by evolution and economic
(resource) conditions are way more important. To put this in graphical
terms, Hitler would have stayed a painter if the economic conditions in
Germany had not been so bad.
Keith Henson
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