The Search for Society: A Quest for a Biosocial Science of Morality, by Robin Fox

Not much of a week for the Moore-Short blogoshere is it? I'm going to Prague tonight. Updates and such next week For now I stumbled across some old blog stuff I did more than a year ago. An abortive attempt to catalogue all the print and video I was consuming. There are a few interesting entries and I did like this thing:

It starts off with lots of discussion on about long dead European philosophers and the arguments between schools of thought in anthrop- and soci- ologies, but then it gets down to brass tacks with discussions of tribal ('pre-civilized') societies like:

There was never any question that violence was both necessary and useful, and in a very positive sense good - as good as eating, copulation, singing. Only obviously it created more difficulties, because, the possible outcome was the loss of an individual life - which is clearly a difficulty for the group. But when I say this was not a problem, I meant it was not an intellectual problem. I prefer simply to call it a difficulty. One tried to overcome practical difficulties; one did not try to solve intellectual problems.

Again I am not saying that early man never tried to solve intellectual problems. I am merely saying that, unquestionably, he did not create unnecessary intellectual problems where they did not exist. There was for him no intellectual problem of violence; there was for him no intellectual problem of sex. These are late inventions of human self-consciousness, not a necessary consequence of human self-consciousness.
Page 131.

What he's saying is that historically, the human propensity towards violence was a tangible benefit vis a vis our survival.

The problem for the species is not violence itself. The fascination of violence is as real and as profound as the fascination with sex, with food, with the supernatural, and with knowledge, exploration, and discovery. And its satisfactions are of much the same kind. The problem lies with the capacity of the human imagination to create its encompassing, consummatory systems with violence as their focus and purpose. We call these systems battles, wars, pogroms, feuds, conquests, revolutions, or whatever, and therefore what we must understand is that the problem is not violence, but war; the problem is not aggression, but genocide; the problem is not killing, but battle. And into the organization of war, of battle, of genocide, goes far more by way of imaginative energy than physical violence. Indeed, if one were to do an inventory of the energy expended in a war, the actual physical violence would probably amount to very little. And with modern war this is even more striking. Modern war is almost better understood as an aspect of complex bureaucracy on the one hand and artistic capacity on the other.
......
The problem here is not violence. The problem here is the use to which violence is put. The problem with Puritanism is not sex, but the uses to which sex is put in the control of people. The problem for Orthodox Jews is not eating, but the imaginative restructuring of the conditions of eating that the religion demands. The problem is not our violent nature, or even the nature of violence, but our violent imaginations, and our imaginative use of violence: an imaginative use that no longer bears any close relation to the evolved conditions of violence – the conditions in which violence is a contained, normal, explicable, and unproblematical aspect of our adaptational history as a species.
Pages 135-36.

Let's review, yes? Duels with swords and even flintlocks are logical and even desirable from an evolutionary perspective. Nuclear weapons and trench warfare with machine guns is most absolutely fuckin' bad. Maybe we should allow bloodsports? Just saying....

--I never finished the book. In retrospect, this guy was pretty far out there by his colleagues' standards, but seems pretty cool. I think he does, however, make the idea of violence in the modern world (i.e. Iraq, Burma, Darfur) a little to abstract. Of course, he was writing during the Cold War, he might be forgiven a lack of wider perspective.