Lord of the flies was written shortly after world war 2, which also really happened... I don't take it seriously as a story of what would really happen if boys ended up on an island, but humans killing each other for dumb reasons is not the stuff of fantasy.

No, but the why is. It's worthwhile being very careful taking fiction books as a depiction of how peoples minds work, because they're just plainly not - they're a depiction of how a very small subset (authors who publish books) think peoples minds work.

Smaller than that - each author's mind is unique.

Any piece of fiction should be considered on its own for whether its characters are plausible and consistent.

>humans killing each other for dumb reasons is not the stuff of fantasy.

But it's the exception not the norm in human behaviour.

It depends on whether you have social constructs in place which take priority over human behaviour.

Remove all of this.. what happens.. humans will eventually go back to primal instincts

And one primal instinct is social bonding.

Which is also the primal instinct that allows for tribalism, which is really important when the other tribe is competing for a scarce resource.

Humans are social creatures, but not social with the entire world.

Tribalism is generally closed, but not automatically antagonistic with other tribes. In contexts where there is no forced competition, tribes rarely fight.

The modern view is that most likely hunter-gatherer societies, which didn't have fixed lands and had no general reason to be territorial, had little warfare. It is only with agricultural societies, where competition for land becomes a factor, that we start finding evidence of warfare, as far as I understand.

Hunter gatherer societies fought all the time for control of hunting grounds.

What's interesting it's that researchers that lived with the Yanomami and other Amazonian peoples noted that most inter tribal conflicts weren't about competition for food sources-that was rather plenty- but instead for women. In polygamous societies, high status males acquired many wives and young males frequently kidnapped neighboring tribe's women which sparked constant retaliatory raids.

Not social with the entire world yet. Give us time.

"Distasteful" and "dumb" are far from the same thing, and the second world war happened for the former and not the latter.

World War II happened largely because the Great War happened.

I'm comfortable describing the reasons for the Great War as "dumb". Your mileage may vary.

It's a distinction without a difference- one could argue a less primitive species wouldn't have found itself caught in world wars. The man-children starting world wars are paralleled by the children-children killing each other on the island.

Reducing the historical and contemporary reasons why humans engage in war to people being "man-children" is a level of sticking-my-head-in-the-sand that I hope to never attain. I've never understood the urge to think of people and things one morally/politically disagrees with as simply stupid, braindead or immature - but there seem to be way too many people who seem incapable of contending with the idea that humans can be intelligent and highly amoral/immoral.

I have had the privilege to visit concentration camp museums. I actually didn't have the feeling these were unintelligent savage places. It was actually trying to be orderly, efficient and exceedingly bureaucratic. These institutions were very much a part of civilization. Everything was thought through.

They weren't run by man children.

Exactly.

My parents lost members of their families to genocide. The people who planned it were not stupid. Ruthless yes, calculating and callous and cruel yes. But not stupid, and it's both amusing and highly frustrating to see people who've mostly never had to confront these things pretend that it's just the work of "man-children" (because gods forbid that we contend with the idea that the intellectualism and intelligence we place on pedestals might ever be morally bankrupt).

Your ”less primitive” species would have had what reason to split the atom?

I think it's fair to say that pacifists do in fact, sometimes invent things.

Pointless pendatry over words doesn't move discussion forwards. I wouldn't personally use either of those words to describe Nazis, which is largely what WWII "happened for".

I'm curious about what the pointless pedantry is in drawing a distinction between "stupid" and "morally abhorrent".

Those were not the words you used, and (continuing the pointless arguments about words), "morally abhorrent" does not mean the same as distasteful, at least to most english speakers.

The (very clear, to me at least) point was that calling war "dumb" because it is unpleasant is irrational. WW2 was very clearly not the product of stupidity.

It's interesting though that you are nitpicking about "distasteful" vs "morally abhorrent" (and will probably do the same about "unpleasant") while calling my point pedantry.

I haven't read Humankind yet, but a recent review I have read[0] gives a mix of positives and negatives to it. A lot of the cited studies are controversial in their own right: S.L.A. Marshall's claim that only 15% of soldiers in WW2 fired their weapons is based on subjective evidence, omits mention of whether they had any opportunity to fire, and has many other flaws that have since been picked apart, for example.

This is not to say that our negativity is justified! Only that Bregman seems to have as persistent a bias to positivity as other writers have to negativity.

[0] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-human...

I read both the book and this review, and while the review makes some valid points, it also holds the book to a pretty high bar.

Usually I'm all for doing exactly that, but this book is not about hard scientific proof for some fancy new theory. It's about an idea, the idea that humans are good by default. To be taken seriously as an idea, it only needs as much proof as the idea it's rejecting, which is that humans are a razor thin layer of civility over evil, savage animals.

It's about debunking that as much as it is about proposing an alternative. I think Bregman is perfectly happy to leave the hard science for the scientists. If readers agree that his idea is at least as plausible as the one he's up against, he's done pretty well. And to my reading, even this review agrees with that.

I second that book, it's great.

I have no idea where you are getting the idea that six boarding school boys had "dealt with hard gruelling hunter gatherer labour" or "studied the school of hard knocks first hand".

That is an amazing amount of assumption to draw out of the simple fact that they were Tongan.