We May Never Truly Fathom Other Cultures • Hacker News Board

Re: We May Never Truly Fathom Other Cultures

#21

Post by leereeves » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 2:01 PM UTC

ooqr wrote: post #14

leereeves wrote: post #5

> What was the reason for all this carnage? Perhaps there was no rational reason, and we are closer to understanding than we'd like to admit. A significant portion of modern Americans regularly enjoy blood and carnage in video games and movies. There's a cruelty, a bloodlust, deep in the human psyche that even now isn't socialized away, merely supressed, to be satisfied only in fantasy. Yet thousands are murdered eve…

Pardon, I do agree there is still an unresolved desire for violence in even our own culture that we are no closer to understanding. What I found distasteful was pinning that on religion. I think there are ancient forms of knowledge -- often passed on by a story which becomes abstract after many generations -- passed on as culture, with clear evidence that parents pass on their behaviors, attitudes and values. Culture…

The article we're discussing "pinned" the violence on religion.

> I don’t think any of us living today can comprehend the violence of worship in the Mexica culture (or Aztecs, as they are more popularly known), which I’ve written about for Archaeology. The Mexica waged war not principally to defeat rival states or gain territory, but to gather warm bodies for human sacrifice.

Re: We May Never Truly Fathom Other Cultures

#22

Post by qntty » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 2:02 PM UTC

namaemuta wrote: post #18

turc1656 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. Have you ever seen the movie The Imitation Game? There's a great quote from Turing's character when he is talking about being picked on and beaten up by bullies at school - "Do you know why people like violence? It is because it feels good. Humans find violence deeply satisfying" It's that simple, really. It is in our nature, just like sex. We like it. It feels good. The only reason we try to eschew an…

> "Do you know why people like violence? It is because it feels good. Humans find violence deeply satisfying" That's an incredibly simplification of what originates violence. People can become violent because of their frustration towards something and their lack of tools to manage their emotions, because of their past and what they have been taught, as an easy way to subjugate most of the people...

I remember reading something by John Searle about how the means that people have of expressing themselves will determine what they express. If you don't give people good alternative ways of expressing anger, what can you expect them to do really?

Re: We May Never Truly Fathom Other Cultures

#23

Post by cooper12 » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 2:04 PM UTC

flubert wrote: post #3

Interesting to see this along with: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12682052 ...on the front page at the same time.

Well the Nobel Prizes are awarded by Swedish and Norwegian institutions, so it doesn't really say anything about how Americans themselves view these immigrants. (While the rise of a presidential candidate like Trump certainly speaks for a portion of the American population)

Re: We May Never Truly Fathom Other Cultures

#24

Post by flubert » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 2:08 PM UTC

emodendroket wrote: post #17

humanrebar wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and a culture centered on humanism might group infanticide with medical procedures like appendectomies.

I don't follow.

Abortion.

Re: We May Never Truly Fathom Other Cultures

#25

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 2:09 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: We May Never Truly Fathom Other Cultures

#26

Post by kawa » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 2:09 PM UTC

leereeves wrote: post #5

> What was the reason for all this carnage? Perhaps there was no rational reason, and we are closer to understanding than we'd like to admit. A significant portion of modern Americans regularly enjoy blood and carnage in video games and movies. There's a cruelty, a bloodlust, deep in the human psyche that even now isn't socialized away, merely supressed, to be satisfied only in fantasy. Yet thousands are murdered eve…

If someone tries to explain stuff based on the "human psyche", it's important to understand that people aren't the same. If someone talks about "we" or "humanity" as a whole, he/she doesn't takes this into consideration - which makes the whole argument questionable.

An estimated 2-5% of all humans are so called "psychopaths", people without the ability to feel empathy for other peoples pain. Those people are at the same time overrepresented as inmates in jails as well as in holders of executive positions. It's totally possible that most violence in human history is a result of those kind of people while the remaining 95-98% are simply victims of those people.

Re: We May Never Truly Fathom Other Cultures

#27

Post by beat » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 2:13 PM UTC

Mostly, this reminded me of one of my favorite short stories - "Von Neumann's Second Catastrophe", by Robert Anton Wilson. This story changed my view of why we have wars.

The story is told from the point of view of a general in an insane asylum. He argues that war has been ruined by golems, creatures without souls. By golems, he means computers. The computers run scenarios for nuclear war, and always say don't do it because it can't be won - mutual assured destruction. But to him, the point of war is not about winning. That's a lie we tell. The point of war is the killing. We don't fight in order to kill enemy soldiers. We fight to kill innocent civilians. Because when you can deliberately kill a child, you become a superman, beyond morality. Nuclear weapons should be used just because we can, because it's amoral.

Re: We May Never Truly Fathom Other Cultures

#28

Post by ythl » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 2:16 PM UTC

namaemuta wrote: post #6

leereeves wrote: post #5

> What was the reason for all this carnage? Perhaps there was no rational reason, and we are closer to understanding than we'd like to admit. A significant portion of modern Americans regularly enjoy blood and carnage in video games and movies. There's a cruelty, a bloodlust, deep in the human psyche that even now isn't socialized away, merely supressed, to be satisfied only in fantasy. Yet thousands are murdered eve…

> A significant portion of modern Americans regularly enjoy blood and carnage in video games and movies Yeah. it's called fiction and a more significant portion of people in the world consume all that without committing mass murder. So please, stop associating video games or movies with whatever crazy people do.

His point was that you find something gratifying in the fantasy of murder and violence. If you don't find GTA to be abhorrent, then that means deep down some aspect of the anarchy and violence is appealing to you.

Re: We May Never Truly Fathom Other Cultures

#29

Post by kijin » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 2:17 PM UTC

I think there's something else going on here, other than the humility of researchers who claim to be unable to understand Mexica culture.

Failure to imagine what it's like to be someone else, from a different place, a different time, with different ways of thinking -- is perhaps the biggest reason why we have so much violence and hatred in this world, and modern scholars are just as guilty of it as warmongers and propagandists of the past have been.

It is a failure of imagination, a failure of empathy, that every culture encourages -- sometimes subtly, but often not so subtly -- in order to keep its members loyal. One of the defining characteristics of human cultures is that each wants to have a monopoly on a person's mind.

Most of us grow up believing that their way of thinking and living is the only natural way, and parents and teachers rarely try to give us a world view that goes beyond what's considered mainstream in our own cultures. Having lived in a cultural greenhouse all of our lives, the first thing we do when faced with a radically different way of life is how different this other person is. The differences so overwhelm us that we forget to appreciate our common humanity, with all its greatness and weaknesses, that should be the first step towards truly putting ourselves in the other person's shoes.

It would seem that anthropologists and archeologists are no exception.

Is it repugnant to kill innocent children at the altar of some imaginary being? Of course it is. Is it a necessary trait of civilized people that they cannot bear to imagine themselves growing up in a culture that practices human sacrifice as a matter of course and learning to participate in the bloody rituals? No, it isn't. It's just a failure of imagination that our own culture encourages. We have learned to be unable to imagine ourselves performing such terrible things, just like Victorian culture made it look normal for young women to faint at the slightest sight of anything disturbing. The inability to "fathom" another culture, no matter how seemingly barbaric, is not so much evidence of the moral depravity of the other culture as it is a testimony to our own narrow-mindedness.

Re: We May Never Truly Fathom Other Cultures

#30

Post by foolrush » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 2:27 PM UTC

turc1656 wrote: post #11

leereeves wrote: post #5

> What was the reason for all this carnage? Perhaps there was no rational reason, and we are closer to understanding than we'd like to admit. A significant portion of modern Americans regularly enjoy blood and carnage in video games and movies. There's a cruelty, a bloodlust, deep in the human psyche that even now isn't socialized away, merely supressed, to be satisfied only in fantasy. Yet thousands are murdered eve…

Totally agree. Have you ever seen the movie The Imitation Game? There's a great quote from Turing's character when he is talking about being picked on and beaten up by bullies at school - "Do you know why people like violence? It is because it feels good. Humans find violence deeply satisfying" It's that simple, really. It is in our nature, just like sex. We like it. It feels good. The only reason we try to eschew an…

> It's that simple, really. It is in our nature, just like sex. We like it. It feels good.

See antihumanism.

“For Althusser, Marx viewed the human individual as a product of society. His or her beliefs, desires, preferences, judgements are inculcated in him/her by society and its ideological, political and economic practices. A person's view of him-/herself as a subject whose actions can be explained by his or her beliefs and thought is not innate; rather the role of a subject is imposed upon him or her by society and its ideologies.”[1]

[1] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Antihumanism