African apes live in large stable social groups with an increased potential for conflict between individual agendas; a reasonable volume of evidence has suggested an instinctive and ethological basis for their intrasocial ethical behavior. Would there be some innate and ethological behavioral basis for ethics in human intersocietal relations, whether in war (providing the limits to the exercise of hard power), or in peace (establishing standards for preservation of intersocietal non-hostility)? As a hypothesis, we suggest that human exclusivity in the exercise of the ethics of warfare and peace is a product of the human transdominial cognition, capable of recombining and re-signifying innate behavioral algorithms through culture, applying them to absolutely innovative functions.
As a social phenomenon, is war subordinate to politics, as Carl von Clausewitz argued in the early nineteenth century, or, instead, is it the product of an instinctive ‘warrior culture’, common to all peoples and times and beyond politics, as John Keegan suggested in the late twentieth? Should we emphasize ‘essential historical elements in the search for a tem-poral continuum in warfare? In this article, we stress the relevance of the ‘perennity of war’ thesis, and the impropriety of a dichotomy between political rationality vs. instinct. The results of the clash between these two strands of thought about the origins of warfare face limitations due to the absence of a temporal ‘play of scales’, so that short-term approaches emerge as incompatible with macro-historical views. We suggest that a deep understanding of the phenomenon of warfare must consider the interaction and the feedback between processes at different time scales.
As a social phenomenon, is war subordinate to politics, as Carl von Clausewitz argued in the early nineteenth century, or, instead, is it the product of an instinctive 'warrior culture', common to all peoples and times and beyond politics, as John Keegan suggested in the late twentieth? Should we emphasize 'essential historical elements in the search for a temporal continuum in warfare? In this article, we stress the relevance of the 'perennity of war' thesis, and the impropriety of a dichotomy between political rationality vs. instinct. The results of the clash between these two strands of thought about the origins of warfare face limitations due to the absence of a temporal 'play of scales', so that short-term approaches emerge as incompatible with macro-historical views. We suggest that a deep understanding of the phenomenon of warfare must consider the interaction and the feedback between processes at different time scales.
African apes live in large stable social groups with an increased potential for conflict between individual agendas; a reasonable volume of evidence has suggested an instinctive and ethological basis for their intrasocial ethical behavior. Would there be some innate and ethological behavioral basis for ethics in human intersocietal relations, whether in war (providing the limits to the exercise of hard power), or in peace (establishing standards for preservation of intersocietal non-hostility)? As a hypothesis, we suggest that human exclusivity in the exercise of the ethics of warfare and peace is a product of the human transdominial cognition, capable of recombining and re-signifying innate behavioral algorithms through culture, applying them to absolutely innovative functions.
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