Read The Goodness Paradox The Strange Relationship Between Peace and Violence in Human Evolution Audible Audio Edition Richard Wrangham Michael Page a division of Recorded Books HighBridge Books
Download As PDF : The Goodness Paradox The Strange Relationship Between Peace and Violence in Human Evolution Audible Audio Edition Richard Wrangham Michael Page a division of Recorded Books HighBridge Books
Throughout history, even as daily life has exhibited calm and tolerance, war has never been far away, and even within societies, violence can be a threat. The Goodness Paradox gives a new and powerful argument for how and why this uncanny combination of peacefulness and violence crystallized after our ancestors acquired language in Africa a quarter of a million years ago.Â
Words allowed the sharing of intentions that enabled men effectively to coordinate their actions. Verbal conspiracies paved the way for planned conflicts and, most importantly, for the uniquely human act of capital punishment. The victims of capital punishment tended to be aggressive men, and as their genes waned, our ancestors became tamer. This ancient form of systemic violence was critical not only encouraging cooperation in peace and war and in culture but also for making us who we are Homo sapiens.
Read The Goodness Paradox The Strange Relationship Between Peace and Violence in Human Evolution Audible Audio Edition Richard Wrangham Michael Page a division of Recorded Books HighBridge Books
"I gave this book 4 stars because I admire the author's ambitious efforts to use an evolutionary perspective to tackle fundamental questions about human behavior from the beginnings of our species to modern societies. The "Goodness Paradox" of the title refers to humans' inherent tendencies to behave in cooperative (and sometimes very altruistic) ways vs. participating in organized forms of violence toward others outside their communities. Recorded human history has seen almost incessant warfare in various forms, and even most hunter-gatherer communities seem to also have engaged in high levels of warfare. On the other hand, we have advanced our culture and knowledge while generally controlling criminal and anti-social activities. Professor Wrangham explains this paradox with an innovative "Self-Domestication" theory. As I understand this, humans first emerged 300,000 years ago in Africa as a separate species equipped with the ability, unlike chimpanzees, to co-exist and cooperate (with low levels of aggression) within tribal groups, while able to be effective hunters and killers of animals and competitors. Various means were used to control anti-social behavior, most notably killing the most aggressive offenders within the group or tribe. However, this theory leaves me unconvinced because some important questions remain unanswered:
1) Why did it take Homo sapiens 250,000 years to be able to travel out of Africa, and to colonize the world while successfully competing against other human species (Neanderthals), who were larger, stronger, and better adapted to colder climates? Evolution must have provided modern humans (perhaps at several points in time) with important improved intellectual abilities involving language and cognitive skills. Do we know with any certainty how these biological advances affected human behavior, including cooperation and violence?
2) If we are inherently less aggressive within our own communities because of 300,000 years of "self-domestication," then why do most modern societies need a heavily armed police force, plus extensive laws & criminal justice systems? Capital punishment has been used frequently in human history until the last century to punish violent criminals, but we still have violent crime today. As a thought experiment, imagine what would happen if our police force went on strike for a month.
3) Even if we accept the premise that humans are less aggressive within their own communities, does this really matter if we continue killing each other in wars without end? The author's visit to Auschwitz is described at the end of the book, as he contemplates the horrors of WW2. Are we really confident that this scale of killing will not happen again?
Despite my questions about his theory, I think that the author does offer an important message that we do have free will, and choices about our behavior, and that we need to make conscious efforts as a society to reduce organized violence. I hope that this book will help in this cause."
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The Goodness Paradox The Strange Relationship Between Peace and Violence in Human Evolution Audible Audio Edition Richard Wrangham Michael Page a division of Recorded Books HighBridge Books Reviews :
The Goodness Paradox The Strange Relationship Between Peace and Violence in Human Evolution Audible Audio Edition Richard Wrangham Michael Page a division of Recorded Books HighBridge Books Reviews
- Richard Wrangham is a soulful and feminist evolutionary anthropologist. This book puts together insights from a lifetime of studying chimpanzees, bonobos and humans, observing the normative aggression, especially of males toward females. His "Demonic Males" and "Sexual Coercion in Humans and Primates" made clear that men who beat women are following an agenda that goes far back into evolutionary history. Domestic violence is intended to maintain power rather than because of low self-esteem from being unloving. This is important because women often return to their abuser hoping that their love will change him.
In his new book Wrangham grapples with a fundamental questions about human nature; are we basically good or evil? He concludes that we both one of the most altruistic and the most evil species because of different selection pressures on aggression within one's group and between groups. Wrangham is an evocative story teller and this book is a page turner. This is a radical and well-supported view, that should change how we see ourselves and our societies. - I gave this book 4 stars because I admire the author's ambitious efforts to use an evolutionary perspective to tackle fundamental questions about human behavior from the beginnings of our species to modern societies. The "Goodness Paradox" of the title refers to humans' inherent tendencies to behave in cooperative (and sometimes very altruistic) ways vs. participating in organized forms of violence toward others outside their communities. Recorded human history has seen almost incessant warfare in various forms, and even most hunter-gatherer communities seem to also have engaged in high levels of warfare. On the other hand, we have advanced our culture and knowledge while generally controlling criminal and anti-social activities. Professor Wrangham explains this paradox with an innovative "Self-Domestication" theory. As I understand this, humans first emerged 300,000 years ago in Africa as a separate species equipped with the ability, unlike chimpanzees, to co-exist and cooperate (with low levels of aggression) within tribal groups, while able to be effective hunters and killers of animals and competitors. Various means were used to control anti-social behavior, most notably killing the most aggressive offenders within the group or tribe. However, this theory leaves me unconvinced because some important questions remain unanswered
1) Why did it take Homo sapiens 250,000 years to be able to travel out of Africa, and to colonize the world while successfully competing against other human species (Neanderthals), who were larger, stronger, and better adapted to colder climates? Evolution must have provided modern humans (perhaps at several points in time) with important improved intellectual abilities involving language and cognitive skills. Do we know with any certainty how these biological advances affected human behavior, including cooperation and violence?
2) If we are inherently less aggressive within our own communities because of 300,000 years of "self-domestication," then why do most modern societies need a heavily armed police force, plus extensive laws & criminal justice systems? Capital punishment has been used frequently in human history until the last century to punish violent criminals, but we still have violent crime today. As a thought experiment, imagine what would happen if our police force went on strike for a month.
3) Even if we accept the premise that humans are less aggressive within their own communities, does this really matter if we continue killing each other in wars without end? The author's visit to Auschwitz is described at the end of the book, as he contemplates the horrors of WW2. Are we really confident that this scale of killing will not happen again?
Despite my questions about his theory, I think that the author does offer an important message that we do have free will, and choices about our behavior, and that we need to make conscious efforts as a society to reduce organized violence. I hope that this book will help in this cause. - The paradox is that people can be incredibly peaceful and incredibly violent--sometimes the same people at different times. Wrangham notes the case of Scandinavia--from medieval Vikings to modern super-peaceful and orderly societies--and Rwanda--from peace to killing 10% of the population in 100 days, and then back to peace. Wrangham's explanation is that good and evil come, in part, from the same thing the human ability to form coalitions to use violence to stop violence. He is an expert on chimpanzee aggression. Chimps are far more aggressive against their own kind than humans (or almost any other animal, for that matter). Why are humans different? Wrangham draws on a vast amount of ethnography to show that human societies routinely execute extremely bad actors--though he argues, strongly, that the death penalty has served its purpose and should be abandoned now. I am familiar with the ethnographic sources, and can confirm that most societies handle psychopaths and similar bad actors in a pretty final way, though often only when they have done a lot of damage. Common is a story in which four men go out hunting, three come back, and no one asks any questions. The problems with this as an explanation for human nonviolence are that 1) killing the violent is also violent, so just keeps the ball rolling, 2) the violent people often leave a lot of children before being rubbed out, and 3) Wrangham carefully and correctly notes that nonconformists are at least as likely to be executed as violent persons, leading to conformity rather than peace; often it's the evilly violent that kill the meek, mild nonconformists (as in the Salem witch trials--which he mentions). Thus, as a full explanation of human cooperation and nonviolence, execution does not make the grade. However, combined with other selective forces that made us more and more social and cooperative over time, it seems a valuable thing to emphasize.
Wrangham sees us as "self-domesticated." To me, as a specialist in ethnobiology (including domestication and the origins of agriculture), domestication refers to deliberate selection by humans, changing the genetics of the species in question from anything natural. By this standard, humans are somewhat domesticated, but not up there with dogs. Wrangham (in a particularly good discussion of domestication) notes that domestication routinely produces floppy ears, white spots, and other characteristic features we do not have; we do, however, have rather tame behavior, short jaws and crowded teeth, round smooth skulls, and other standard physical sequelae of domestication. And our behavior is more tranquil than a chimp's, but far less tranquil than a dog's or sheep's. So, we are a bit domestic, but not fully domesticated.
As someone with fair knowledge of such matters, I find this book both underestimates and overestimates human violence. Wrangham has not dealt with the full level of horror that hatred can bring about, in genocide and war, or with the constant low-level nastiness, spitefulness, and malignancy that feed into individual violence and murder. On the other hand, he has not dealt adequately with the levels of civility and peace that some societies maintain. The result of this is that he thinks in terms of average societies--especially the traditional ones, in which murder and local war are more common than in most modern states. This allows him to reduce the problem to one of violence handled by violent coalitions, and thus to a genetically guided, highly biological process. The reality is that humans swing dramatically from insane outbreaks of murder to total peace (my wife and I have studied this in Rwanda and Cambodia). Simple biology cannot explain this; we have to look at other factors, both innate and learned. In particular, we need to look much more at the cultural construction of the fight-flight-freeze response innate in all higher animals. Wrangham has made a good start, but psychology and cultural anthropology will have to weigh in to bring this start to fruition.
