Reply #32: Good question [View All]

[Squeech]

Barbara Ehrenreich, of Nickled and Dimed fame, had written another book called Blood Rites, which I read last year. The premise is that the human race keeps making war out of a weird allegiance to our collective memory of what happened to us in our evolution. When we first came down out of the trees we were especially vulnerable to predation from larger and/or tougher animals-- sabertoothed tigers would kill and eat us, woolly mammoths would trample us, etc. But as we evolved brains and social skills, learned to use tools and to talk about hunting tactics, we got the upper hand over the other animals and established ourselves as the top predators in the food chain. War is our way of re-enacting our manifest destiny of species dominance, she says, as evidenced by certain myths that pop up in widely diverse cultures. Ehrenreich's argument is complicated, and I should add that my friend with the Ph.D. in anthropology thinks it's specious, but I think it's a really interesting discussion.