This was one of the blogging topics suggested to me by WordPress, and I found it to be very thought-provoking.
If I had to name one force, concept, or school of thought that has had – and still has – the most destructive potential for all of us, I’d say it has to do with wanting to force your understanding of happiness on other people. It’s the self-righteous benefactors of humanity who have been this planet’s greatest scourge.
The people who decided they needed to bring the word of Jesus and the benefits of civilization to the indigenous peoples of the Americas and ended up wiping out entire cultures.
The people who wanted to eradicate poverty and exploitation once and for all and ended up creating the repressive monstrosity known as the Soviet Union.
The folks who keep invading other countries under the guise of liberating them from whatever and imposing “freedom” and democracy onto them.
The fanatics who bomb abortion clinics to force unwanted, unloved, rejected kids to be born.
Such people are impossible to reason with and to combat because they are driven by the belief in their inner goodness and altruism.
Ayn Rand gets criticized a lot for saying that
If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.
I’m sure, however, that she’s right. It’s these compassionate do-gooders who know for a fact what’s best for you that do the greatest damage to others. A person motivated by selfishness at least doesn’t humiliate you while s/he exploits you by telling you this is all for your own good. A selfish person motivated by simple, honest greed doesn’t demand your eternal and abject gratitude in return for robbing you.
What do you think? What is the most destructive force humanity has ever faced?
P.S. For those of you who missed my post on helping people, here it is. It was very popular when it was first published but Blogspot ate all the dozens of comments it generated.
Clarissa's Blog 
This guy seems to think it may be this. 😉
http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html
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I’d vote in favor of sending the pompous pseudo-scientist who wrote this article to live with Kalahari bushmen whose lives he so admires. That would at least prevent him from torturing us with his weird articles.
Who’s in favor?
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I don’t see what is weird about this article. What it says is pretty common knowledge among anthropologists. Why do you characterize him as a “pseudo-scientist”? It is true that agriculture can support more people, but at the expense of a reduced quality of life for most of us. We have made the choice as a population; it is almost certainly too late to go back, barring a catastrophe that decimates the human species.
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I have no patience with all these anti-progressivist ooohings and aahings over the wonderful lifestyles of the primitive tribes. I find them especially funny when typed up on a computer and disseminated through the Internet.
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Anti-progressivist is a curiously revealing choice of phrase, Clarissa. And to castigate an evolutionary anthropologist for living in the modern world is dangerously close to the logic employed by a pro-war bunch who told me if I didn’t like being treated as a potential terrorist at US airports, I should pack my bags and go “get raped” in the Middle East.
One need to sacrifice all rights to a particular space, age or time to earn the right to critique it, I should hope.
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*One need NOT sacrifice all rights…
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It isn’t my choice of phrase. I took it from the article that is being discussed.
I am, indeed, always annoyed my people whose life goal is to bemoan the loss of some prelapsarian happy place. I think their arguments could be of great interest to their psychoanalysts and nobody else.
When the article’s author gushes for pages about the fantastic lifestyle of the bushmen tribe he likes and how their lifestyle is so much better than ours, I hear in his words the exultation of the XVIth-century explorer who has found the perfect barbarians that can be used to serve as puppets in his fantasies.
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“I hear in his words the exultation of the XVIth-century explorer who has found the perfect barbarians that can be used to serve as puppets in his fantasies.”
Very well put 🙂 I was, of course, speaking of the much-reviled Diamond, whose research cannot be severely flawed. People may disagree with him about what is good and bad for humanity, but they are, naturally, doing so from their own 21st century point of view.
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However, as to what is the most destructive single force in human history, I argue that it is monotheism. It leads to the belief that there is only one correct way to do things, which causes all manner of harm in every aspect of life.
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Without monotheism, though, we wouldn’t have th Enlightenment and all the scientific advances we enjoy today.
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Given that a lot of those scientific advancements — or the basis of them — were transferred from polytheistic Eastern cultures, I’m dismissing that claim outright. I’m less than enthusiastic about its non-scientific writing too, especially since a great deal of it was directly responsible for the philosophy of European colonialism outside Europe.
Finally, how could we possibly assert these or competing or better theories/science would not have emerged from a polytheistic/atheistic culture (which, in fact, it did)?
Since you didn’t identify the monotheistic culture of the Enlightenment here, I will not speculate about which you meant, but surely you know there was very considerable study of magic and non-Christian faiths immediately preceding and during the Enlightenment, and that many of the most powerful and prominent figures of the Enlightenment at least dabbled, if not immersed themselves, in it?
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Europe lay in ruins, intellectually and culturally, until the Muslims came and restored its culture, philosophy and arts to it. The Muslims, the Jews and the Christians worked together in order to create the Western civilization as we know it for hundreds of years.
Monotheism is based on the idea of the unity of all forces in nature. It is hard for me to imagine how modern science could come about without this way of understanding the world. It isn’t important what the specific Enlightened thinkers dabbled at or practiced. What’s important is that they lived in the world that had already alighted at the idea of unity of all elements of nature.
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Without a doubt – ignorance combined with personal insecurity.
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This is the opinion I agree with the most.
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One thing that the article linked here got wrong, I think, is the statement about infanticide. Women who have lots of sex partners have far fewer pregnancies than monogamous ones. Human sperm are very good at killing off other men’s sperm. I first read about this in an article in American Scientist about 20 years ago; it is explained better and in much more detail in Sex at Dawn,a book which I mentioned here a year or so ago when I first read it.
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What did he get wrong, David? Are you implying that the women had lots of sex partners? I must have missed that.
Anyway, I think he is absolutely right. And Clarissa obviously didn’t read the article. He anticipated her objection; the question is, would you rather be a peasant farmer than a hunter gatherer? I would choose hunter gatherer. A more varied diet and more leisure time, sure, sounds good to me.
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@David
There are some links that point to breast feeding helping to prevent pregnancy. Now Im sure that one will put Clarissa’s knickers in a bunch. 🙂
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I have a cousin who was born as a result of this method of contraception being used. 🙂
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My first wife was a biology grad student for a couple of years. She told me about the breastfeeding contraceptive effect in the 1960’s.
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It’s all an old husbands’ tale. Just like the so-called withdrawal method (coitus interruptus). My extended family is quite big thanks to these 2 methods of contraception. 🙂 🙂
Oh, and the calendar method, too. 🙂
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There is a difference between things which statistically reduce the number of pregnancies on a population scale and things which are reliable means of preventing pregnancies for everyone. Breastfeeding is the former.
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I don’t think the knowledge of statistical tendencies will help a woman who discovers herself with an unwanted pregnancy as a result of relying upon this method.
In any case, the contraceptive methods are so varied and reliable nowadays that there is no need for anybody to rely on this one. 🙂
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I never suggested anyone rely on either multiple sex partners nor on breastfeeding as a contraceptive method. I only said that these likely explain the lower birth rate of hunter-gatherer cultures. Women therein did not need ot practice infanticide, contrary to the suggestion of the author. I was talking aoubt the past, not the present, and what I wrote has little or nothing to do with the present.
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Where did you get the impression that HG women have more sexual partners?
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All those methods are rubbish. Especially for the modern couple, who lead lives radically different from their predecessors a few hundred years back. Their labour pattern is different, they eat different food differently cooked, they live under different weather conditions, they moved about a great deal more, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum.
We had this exact conversation at work today, and this chap kept insisting these changing realities were nonsense, “because people are still people”. So much for taking variables into consideration.
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The most destructive force to mankind right now is the denial of Global Climate Change, and the refusal to actually do anything meaningful to combat it among politicians.
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If we are talking about right now, I’d say religious fanaticism of any kind is the scariest thing, with the global warming denial being the close second.
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Fanaticism and global warming denial are closely linked: see Rick Perry
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But neither would be a problem if we had stuck with hunting and gathering. 🙂
Also, why global warming? It’s not a destructive force, it’s just a result, a symptom. Isn’t the “force” the activities (from all our progress!) of too many humans overusing too many technological wonders?
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I find the people who treat climate change as if it were religious dogma to be just as dangerous.
The climate is a dynamic system – thus always changing. The onus is on our public body to determine how to mitigate the damaging aspects and to exploit the positive aspects. It’s part of our adaptive nature.
There is danger when you turn Al Gore into a god who can speak only truth.
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I’d say the unfortunate habit of numerous and powerful people of prioritizing and supporting ideology over facts and ideas is the most dangerous force in the world right now. That’s dangerous at any time though.
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The most destructive force of mankind has always been, and still is, religion. Religion is an attempt to frame, within the limits of reason, our impossibility of admitting that there are things that we, as humans, won’t be able to explain. Religion is as old as reason, and that’s why we have so many different types. The obsession (fanaticism as Clarissa says) to impose one, or none, has caused more problems in humanity that I can imagine with any other force. Even other large forces of destruction like politics or climate change, often hide a religious agenda behind them.
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I foster shelter puppies because I’m a compassionate do-gooder. Who knew I was such a force for evil?
BEWARE WORLD! I WILL DESTROY YOU BY FEEDING AND CARING FOR FOUR-WEEK OLD PUPPIES!!!
FEAR THE CUTENESS! FEAR THE PUPPY BREATH!! BWA HA HA!!!!
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I know what you are getting at with this post. But there are all kinds do-gooders.
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With all due respect for puppies, they are not people. Treating human beings as if they were puppies will probably not go over very well with those human beings.
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I don’t know…getting nutritious food and clean water, a safe, clean place to live, and being allowed to sleep and play at will is more than many people get.
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The folks who keep invading other countries under the guise of liberating them from whatever and imposing “freedom” and democracy onto them.
But they are do-gooders only to themselves. “Doing good” is a great excuse in most cases, the real motivation is old good selfishness and taking hold of resources. Nobody would bring democracy to a country without oil or “bring the word of Jesus and the benefits of civilization to the indigenous peoples of the Americas”, if there weren’t any resources there.
Mike linked to a great article on beginnings of preparations to climate change in some countries and some places in US, on a local level, which I think should get more exposure:
http://www.alternet.org/environment/152358/we%27re_locked_into_unavoidable_climate_disruption_–_so%2C_how_to_we_begin_to_adapt_?page=entire
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The soldiers who go into battle and die don’t think they do it for oil. They would never benefit from that oil anyways. The majority of them does believe they are doing it for a good cause. They wouldn’t be able to do it otherwise.
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The thing that will probably do us in eventually are all the people who can’t see anything other than their own point of view and think if they force that on another, they have somehow “won”.
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“The enemy is at the gate; and the enemy is the human mind, or lack of it, on this planet.” DEVO
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I feel very old and outdated when I see these acronyms. What does DEVO mean?
I just googled it and got nothing.
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LOL, I can’t believe you got nothing. It’s a band from the 70’s and 80’s who wrote a lot of songs about “de-evolution” of mankind.
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Oh, I did see a band! I just thought it was an acronym, not a band name.
I am very ignorant about music. The only sound I enjoy is that of my own voice. 🙂 🙂
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