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Space/Science » in reply to It's A Very Old Human Trait

re: It's A Very Old Human Trait
louis — (archived)

Our ancestors spread from a small portion of Africa throughout most of the old world with not much more than 2/3 our brain size, crude stone tools, and possibly fire/crude language. Our own species colonized an entire planet excluding antarctica with not much mor ethan increased brain power. Exploration is not a western thing it is a human trait almost 2 million years old. PC views can be so ignorant.
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I agree, but that's not the point.

The point is, that there is a *qualitative* difference between ideologies of conquest (colonization, imperialism), and ideologies of self-preservation (which does not exclude economic and cultural exchange).

-Our ancestors never had the idea to conquer other people in order to subject them merely for the fun of subjecting them or because they thought they were superior.

-Ideologies of conquest on the other hand do.

1. You need a lot of logistics in order to become a successful culture of conquest: you need a sedentary economy (farming); a highly hierarchically organized social structure; a clear division of labor; and an explicit ideological (religious, mythical) manifesto.

And we see that this kind of cultures only emerges somewhere around 6 or 7000 BC (very late in terms of human evolution).

2. Evidence clearly comes from hunter gatherer societies and from nomadic cultures; they are not expansionist (of course they do explore, but that's something else).
However, they exchange a lot (women exchange, marriage, gift economies, ect...). They may even raid and destroy other groups, but they never "conquer" in a colonialist sense.

In short, I think you generalized a bit there.

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