Generational Dynamics World View

[Bob Butler 54]

(05-26-2020, 12:12 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(05-26-2020, 10:21 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: In the case of
humans, this means that at regular intervals there have to be
genocidal wars to kill off enough people so that there will be enough
food and water for the survivors.

If the underlying cause of Crisis wars is population stress, shouldn't that mean that in times of declining population, the wars will be milder or nonexistent?

This question is why I'm interested in whether there were visible generational patterns in the Dark Ages, when population was decreasing due to the Black Plague.

If the cause of crisis wars were population stress, the earth’s fairly steady increase in population would lead to a corresponding number of crisis wars.  This is not observed.

I would contest that wars used to be cost effective.  It began to shift somewhere between the invention of the machine gun and the nuke.  A culture that did not have a fairly serious military capability would get stepped on by others that did.  As Smedley Butler’s book said, war was a racket.  It is not directly tied to population, but humans have a war drive that all other things being equal results in periodic warfare.  Some one or another would think he had the upper hand.  Sometimes he would get stepped on by other economic powers.  I would give Napoleon and Hitler as examples of the more warlike culture running into a defensive alliance of more economic cultures.

In more recent times, war is not so cost effective.  Cultures that try to acquire power using force get stepped on.  Elites stand a good chance of losing power if they back the wrong aggressive leader, so they don’t.  Then there is the fear of nukes.  This significantly changes how governments send messages to one another, and discourages conflicts among nuclear powers.

One difference is how governments keep a tighter rein these days.  I am sort of with Xenakis that they encouraged loose behavior by troops with a resultant set of incidents in the old days.  A lot of governments wanted an excuse to start the shooting.  Any excuse would do.  Even then it was more calculated than they let on.  Today, if your style of warfare includes xenophobia, if you keep score with a body count and don’t count foreign lives as important, you are apt to get redirected by the government that you are fighting for hearts and minds.  The objective is not to kill people, but to protect people.  If you won’t let the locals on the jury on war crimes, you are sent home.  If your cruiser shoots down a civilian airliner, you are apt to find yourself in front of a bunch of admirals and senators trying to make sure it doesn’t happen again.  After they decide that, you are on the beach, never to get another command.  People are a lot more carful about what messages they send to other governments and how they use force and don’t care for bloody minded and lose disciplined armed men.

All this doesn’t make evolution go away.  We are still bred to acquire resources and territory through violence.  There was a large gap between war becoming less cost effective and war actually slowing down.  It has still not stopped.  We are still learning.

Or at least some people are.