Name: 戦争と人間の本質。クラッシュコース 世界史204 (War & Human Nature: Crash Course World History 204)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T05:19:27.000Z
Duration: 10 min 37 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

Hi, I'm John Green, this is Crash Course World History,

and today we're going to respond to your many requests and talk about a controversial subject:

So here at Crash Course we're really not that into the history of war,

partly because we feel it's been discussed well elsewhere

and partly because we haven't really figured out a way to tackle it.

Mr. Green! Mr. Green! Nonononono, that's all history is:

Well, me-from-the-past, I can certainly see why you would think that,

because that's how many history classes are organized.

But, in fact, I don't think that history is primarily about war.

But, I mean, humans find all kinds of ways to die,

like, you could teach a whole Crash Course World History on smallpox.

Ultimately, I find cooperation and trade more interesting

than the violent and destructive aspects of world history

because I think they probably, ultimately, matter more.

But I do have to admit that war is a pretty big deal in world history.

So we better spend some time talking about it, at least in the abstract.

So today we're gonna focus on the question of why people fight.

And, more specifically, why human beings go to war.

Like, to put it in another way, we're going to look at

whether making war is part of "human nature".

This gets into some nit-picky "How many angels can you fit on the head of a pin?" questions about nature,

but we're just gonna put those aside for now.

So are human being hard-wired to fight and kill each other?

Well that's a question that philosophers have been asking for a long time.

"I am by nature war-like. To attack is among my instincts."

But he was Nietzsche.  He had a number of instincts that I'm pretty sure were not universal.

Anyway, that attitude might explain why Nietzsche is

so popular among the group most likely to go to war: Young men.

Now among slightly less scary philosophers,

the question of humans' war-like nature is often described as

a debate between Hobbes, who saw humans as war-like and violent,

and Rousseau, who thought that humanity was naturally peaceful until civilization came along.

And we've heard echoes of this debate throughout our study of world history.

Like, were we better off as foragers, when we had way more time for scoodlypooping?

Stupid civilization, always ruining everything. Let's go to the thought bubble.

So was Hobbes right that life in the so-called "state of nature" was nasty, brutish and short,

or was Rousseau right that it was amazing?

Well, without a time machine which would settle a lot of vexing historical questions

and would also allow me to go back and fix my terrible, terrible mistakes at the eighth grade cotillion,

our best guide to what people were like in the "state of nature" comes from anthropology.

Making guesses about the very distant past based on observations of modern hunter-gatherers

is extremely problematic, but it's the best we have to go on.

Well, it doesn't look so good for Rousseau.

Many anthropologists suggest that in pre-civilization social orders, things were pretty violent.

In Australia, for example, killing and fighting was among the main causes of mortality,

and archaeology has revealed evidence of warfare going back thousands of years.

Now, some of these anthropological conclusions are controversial,

but when combined with cave paintings and fossils of humans

who pretty obviously were killed by other humans,

it seems clear that we've been killing each other for what historians like to call "a long-ass-time".

So Hobbes seems to be right that life in the "state of nature" was probably violent and brief.

Again, anthropologists can give us some guidance here.

Some studies have reported relatively large-scale group confrontations similar to battles,

but these tend to be largely symbolic, and they often don't result in much killing.

Most of the actual violence that hunter-gatherers commit against each other takes place during raids,

in which one group sneaks up upon another and attacks.

So in the end there may be like a very violent middle path

between the individual killings and like, Cain v. Abel,

But why are we seemingly so hard-wired toward violence?

So, I wanna be really clear about something.

We may have aggression "in our genes", but you can't kill people!

Many of us - most of us, in fact - make it all the way through life without killing a single person.

So I think it's going too far to say that our genes have, like, made us into stone-cold killers,

but it is possible that aggression is an innate trait in humans.

And under the right conditions, maybe it finds its expression in violence and war.

Now, we should all be very skeptical about

applying evolutionary biology to cultural characteristics like warlike behavior,

because Darwin's ideas have been misused to explain all sorts of unpleasant things.

Especially in nineteenth-century concepts about race.

You know, if you're in a structurally privileged position in the social order, it's easy enough to be like,

When in fact, you know, slavery was not a function of biology;

is that we often refer to cultures "evolving" very quickly

but biological evolution takes a lot longer.

That said, there are a few ways that evolutionary imperatives could contribute to a warlike human nature.

We'll start with the idea that it is a biological imperative to pass on genetic traits to successive generations.

Because our close relatives and kin contain the most genetic material in common,

we naturally want to protect them and ensure the continued survival of our genes.

So we might be expected to fight in order to protect members of our kin group.

But then again, trying to protect your family from harm is somewhat different from killing other people's families.

Well, here's where it's helpful to remember that for the vast majority of human history,

It was about taking stuff from other people's kin group so that your kin group could have that stuff.

For 99% of human history, that's how we fought.

字幕リスト動画再生

戦争と人間の本質。クラッシュコース世界史204 (War & Human Nature: Crash Course World History 204)

world

human

evolutionary

fight

戦争と人間の本質。クラッシュコース 世界史204 (War & Human Nature: Crash Course World History 204)

world

human

evolutionary

fight

戦争と人間の本質。クラッシュコース世界史204 (War & Human Nature: Crash Course World History 204)