Reply #24: About "human nature"...

[thegreatwildebeest]

Your assumption seems to be that Western Europeans are somehow distinctly different from native indigenous groups at a species level, so my holding the entire species responsible for self-destruction is not a valid argument. And that is where we part company.


No there not different, other than, for whatever reason, western european civilizations were founded off and relied upon agriculture for their needs. I'm sure, as you mentioned, there are a number of theories why this is, and they probably mostly settle around the vnirons they found themselves in.


We are a very clever, but not very wise primate with a high potential for violence and short-sighted greed. Assigning the blame to one particular group of humans doesn't mean the rest of the species isn't inherently capable of making the exact same mistakes at some point in the future.

Of course there is the potential for the same mistakes to be made. But it is not fundamentally one way or the other really as far as humans being wasteful, or greedy, or overtly violent. In fact, evidence seems to show that for the most part humans AREN'T wasteful, overly violent, or particuarly greedy. Hunter gatherer tribes were pretty egalitarian, lived ecologically sustainable lives, and were also pretty damn smart (most of them in fact, CHOSE not to be "civilized", as indicated by the use of similar tools to "civilized" humans, but not abusing them for power or wreaking environmental destruction). To quote the san bush man "Why would I farm when there are so many mangogo nuts in the world?" Why indeed.

People who argue that humans "by nature" are anything often times seem to limit their world view to the highly bankrupt and ridiculous current output of humans. When Hobbes said life was "nasty, brutish, and short" he was ironically better describing the lives of the working class Londoners below him, than the life of any real hunter gatherer, or "primitive". For a good part of history, in a good part of the world, things were pretty good. Another small portion of people, in a different culture, wrecked it.