War and Human Passion ( Consider the cause of the Trojan War you read in The Ili
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War and Human Passion (Consider the cause of the Trojan War you read in The Iliad. It is often phrased as "the face that lauched a thousand ships. In additon, Achilles refused to enter the fight until later when he was sent into a rage, a type of passion, after learning that his best friend and cousin had been killed by Hector. All these and many other instances in The Iliad refer to PASSION (you must consider the range of passions that include love, jealousy, religious beliefs and so many more). It is easy to think of modern examples of war caused by such passions. One is the recent Charlie Hebdo incident. You cannot use this as your example now that I have mentioned it. So go think of your own now.
Question: What modern examples can you cite that show similar destruction as a result of unguided and unbridled passion? Examples should be on national or international scale.
Explanation / Answer
On War should not, however, be treated as though its classic nature has rendered it virtually immune to criticism. Like all works of such stature, it will always be a source of many eternally relevant, original thoughts on warfare—but at the same time, it includes some ideas that were debatable from the beginning, and still others that became obsolete as a result of subsequent technological and political developments.
Apparent contradictions in the text should not cause the reader undue concern. In the first place, war's intrinsically human underpinnings mean that it is indeed fraught with unavoidable, genuine contradictions such as that between the principle of continuity and the concept of the culminating point of victory (or the attack). The former principle suggests the need to exploit a victory to the utmost by continuing the offensive advance without interruption, while the latter states that continuing beyond a certain point in the offensive is counterproductive and brings defeat.
Since war is not an exact science, Clausewitz is also careful to note exceptions when he makes an observation or recommendation. Therefore, the identification of such so-called flaws in On War actually enhances one's understanding of war as a human and social phenomenon. Furthermore, any theoretical work of this type that is devoid of apparent or real contradictions could never represent a realistic analysis of the real world of war.
A study of tribal societies that live by hunting and foraging has found that war is an alien concept and not, as some academics have suggested, an innate feature of so-called “primitive people”.
The findings have re-opened a bitter academic dispute over whether war is a relatively recent phenomenon invented by “civilised” societies over the past few thousand years, or a much older part of human nature. In other words, is war an ancient and chronic condition that helped to shape humanity over many hundreds of thousands of years?
The idea is that war is the result of an evolutionary ancient predisposition that humans may have inherited in their genetic makeup as long ago as about 7 million years, when we last shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees – who also wage a kind of war between themselves.
They found that only a tiny minority of violent deaths come close to being defined as acts of war. Most the violence was perpetrated by one individual against another and usually involved personal grudges involving women or stealing.
About 85 per cent of the deaths involved killers and victims who belonged to the same social group, and about two thirds of all the violent deaths could be attributed to family feuds, disputes over wives, accidents or “legal” executions, the researchers found.
“When we looked at all the violent events about 55 per cent of them involved one person killing another. That’s not war. When we looked at group conflicts, the typical pattern was feuds between families and revenge killings, which is not war either,” said Dr Fry.
“It has been tempting to use these mobile foraging societies as rough analogies of the past and to ask how old warfare is and whether it is part of human nature. Our study shows that war is
obviously not very common,” he said.
Only a tiny minority of cases involved more organised killing between rival bands of people, which could fall into the definition of war-like behaviour. Most of these involved only one of the 21 groups included in the study – the Tiwi people of Australia who seemed to be particularly prone to violent incidents, Dr Fry said.
Rather than finding war ubiquitous, the two researchers found little evidence that hunter-gatherer societies were in a constant state of violent conflict with rival groups. In short they found that some of the most “primitive” peoples on Earth were actually quite peaceful compared to modern, developed nations.
“These findings imply that warfare was probably not very common before the advent of agriculture, when most if not all humans lived as nomadic foragers,” Kirk Endicott, an anthropologist at Dartmouth College told the journal Science, where the study is published.
He cites the case of the Dani people living in the Baliem Valley of the New Guinea Highlands who in 1961 engaged in a series of violent conflicts that led to many deaths. Although the Dani are agriculturalists, Diamond uses them as examples of how early humans societies may have interacted with one another.
Meanwhile, Pinker in his book “The Better Angels of Our Nature” argues that humans are innately violent and have only become less so in recent years because of cultural influences that have kept this aggressive nature in check.
Both Pinker and Diamond have been criticised by some anthropologists for simplifying and exaggerating the research they use to support their conclusions. Even worse, some argue that they used discredited work of anthropologists such as Napoleon Chagnon who has claimed that the Yanomami people of the Amazon are in a state of chronic warfare with one another.
“Chagnon’s work is frequently used by writers such as Jared Diamond and Stephen Pinker who want to portray tribal peoples as ‘brutal savages’, far more violent than ‘us’. But none of them acknowledge that his central findings about Yanomami violence have long been discredited,” said Stephen Corry, director of Survival International.
“This latest research is the latest nail in the coffin for Pinker's 'Brutal Savage' thesis. Pinker selects highly questionable data, and leaves out anything which contradicts his argument,” Mr Corry said.
“Although he and his supporters, such as Jared Diamond, present those of us who question them as 'anti-science',
THIS IS THE MODERN EXAMPLE FOR WAR AND HUMAN PASSION.
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