In review and in prospect
Peace man!
That retro-classic catchphrase has rung hollow for decades and continues to ring hollow today. War is an inherent feature of human nature. Our brains are wired to motivate us to organise ourselves into tribes and defend these to the death. That's because humans are nothing as individuals. Our entire identities and very beings have meaning only within the context of the societies we are part of.
The instinct to annihilate our enemies was formed over millions of years of evolution. Just as there was only so much food and prey to sustain the odd tribes coexisting within a territory over those millions of years, today there are only so much viable deposits of energy-dense minerals and vital shipping lanes to share among us cohabitating the planet. We are destined to fight to the death for all that whenever necessary.
People will insist that differences in religion and ideologies are what fuel war and violence. Perhaps. But religious belief and ideologies are human intellectual constructs that too evolved memetically (just as our anatomies and brains evolved generically) to further reinforce our instincts to form collectives that are the essential foundations of civilisation. Without human collectives and their most sophisticated manifestations as civilisations, humans will be just another species of mammalian predators roaming the wilderness. Social constructs were a biological survival innovation.
The idea that “civilised" people “don't kill one another” is an irony lost in most. Civilisation is the end of a long evolution of biological innovations that aimed to progressively improve the ability of groups of humans to compete for resources and propagate their respective gene pools even if that meant eliminating the competition. All of us who are alive today are descendants of those that succeeded in that endeavour.
This is not to say that we should condone war and violence now that we have the intellect and the ethical framework that intellect created to guide our actions. It is, however, important to truly understand the profound reasons why humans continue to be violent despite our “civilisation”. Only when equipped with this understanding can we truly be able to build lasting peace in the midst to be of competition for resources.
Last week's blog posts
What the Islamic terrorist invasion of Israel means to Filipinos
October 10, 2023 by benign0
"Compounding all that will be the hordes of OFWs that will need to be repatriated from all the emerging war zones. This means more Filipino warm bodies will be competing for the same stocks of food in the islands."