They join the military for a variety of reasons, which may or may not have involved any feelings about any conflict at hand much less the media. The reason they go to war, however, is because of old men.
>is because of old men. This is a typical modernist redaction of the will to violence that is common to young men. Past societies found ways to incorporate, normalize, redirect, celebrate that will - now we pathologize it. This is because we think we can mutate the human condition into something better.
I don't think that's accurate, if we're discussing what actually motivates military deployments. There are exceptions, but in most wars the enlisted men themselves have not been the ones chomping at the bit to be sent to war. Rather, they were sent by older men serving in government, who did not themselves participate in the fighting, often over considerable dissent from the rank and file. In some cases, such as the U.S.'s participation in Vietnam, the wars were exceedingly unpopular among the young people actually sent to fight them.
I went in the army because at the time, I had big dreams and no clear path to them. I thought joining the army and doing a hard training would teach me something about achieving goals. I went to war because I was in the army and wondered what was the point of being in the army if you don't go to war. After doing my training, deploying in Afghanistan was the logical follow up. Why train so hard just to stay home. Afte…
Your second paragraph seems callous to me. Going to war for the sake of not wasting one's hard training, so to speak, is not moral. At least as I look at it.
War is horrible and should be avoided at all costs. Sometimes it is justifiable and necessary. War should be a last resort. I wish society had alternate means of accomplishing your first paragraph without resort to the second.
I went in the army because at the time, I had big dreams and no clear path to them. I thought joining the army and doing a hard training would teach me something about achieving goals. I went to war because I was in the army and wondered what was the point of being in the army if you don't go to war. After doing my training, deploying in Afghanistan was the logical follow up. Why train so hard just to stay home. Afte…
> Why train so hard just to stay home.
Yeah, better use those muscles and brains to kill people across borders. That's the spirit!
> "The male response to war is an evolutionary adaptation that clearly works for our species." > "It's a left-wing version of the Christian right rejecting the theory of evolution," he says. "I mean the far left is also now rejecting the theory of evolution, which is just insane." The left wing, whatever it's worth, is certainly not rejecting the theory of evolution. Just because men are evolutionarily predisposed to…
The rejection is not in not wanting men to go to war, or in favouring any particular social order, but in denying innate sex differences. According to Junger, these theories are strongly rooted in academia, and particularly the social sciences. “I have friends who are anthropologists and primatologists and evolutionary psychologists … [who are under] an enormous amount of pressure to generate data that shows that all…
The very definition of "cultural" is in dispute between the right and left wings. The right wing typically operates on a narrower definition of "cultural", which goes hand-in-hand with their emphasis on individual responsibility. The left wing operates on a much broader definition, which goes hand-in-hand with their emphasis on collective responsibility.
The social sciences tend to gravitate towards the latter because who doesn't like scope creep? (The right wing, on the other hand, seems to restrict the scope of the social sciences by slicing off a large chunk of it to the biology department.)
I personally prefer the idea that something can be both biological and cultural. Pretty much any change that happened to us in the last few tens of thousands of years is both biological and cultural. Unfortunately this idea doesn't seem to be popular among those with stronger ideological commitments one way or another.
> "The male response to war is an evolutionary adaptation that clearly works for our species." > "It's a left-wing version of the Christian right rejecting the theory of evolution," he says. "I mean the far left is also now rejecting the theory of evolution, which is just insane." The left wing, whatever it's worth, is certainly not rejecting the theory of evolution. Just because men are evolutionarily predisposed to…
> it is certainly not rejecting the theory of evolution. [...] Evolution only shows us what is. [...] Meanwhile, it's our job to figure out what ought to be
I'd take this a step farther, and argue that the author's "doing otherwise is rejecting evolution" framing is actually a rather common "Christian right" paradigm.
There's a biblical mindset which constantly intermingles "The revelation is truthful" with "The revelation indicates the proper path". The author is assuming the inverse relationship: "If you don't like it, you must not believe in it."
It's a type of normative fallacy, because you can't naively search-replace "bible text" with "science paper". They are qualitatively different kinds of claims about the world.
I went in the army because at the time, I had big dreams and no clear path to them. I thought joining the army and doing a hard training would teach me something about achieving goals. I went to war because I was in the army and wondered what was the point of being in the army if you don't go to war. After doing my training, deploying in Afghanistan was the logical follow up. Why train so hard just to stay home. Afte…
> Why train so hard just to stay home. Yeah, better use those muscles and brains to kill people across borders. That's the spirit!
> Why train so hard just to stay home. Yeah, better use those muscles and brains to kill people across borders. That's the spirit!
[deleted]
No. Somebody doesn't have to go, for most wars, and certainly not for the wars the US has started recently. Existential threats may require war, but the US doesn't face any right now.
>is because of old men. This is a typical modernist redaction of the will to violence that is common to young men. Past societies found ways to incorporate, normalize, redirect, celebrate that will - now we pathologize it. This is because we think we can mutate the human condition into something better.
I don't think that's accurate, if we're discussing what actually motivates military deployments. There are exceptions, but in most wars the enlisted men themselves have not been the ones chomping at the bit to be sent to war. Rather, they were sent by older men serving in government, who did not themselves participate in the fighting, often over considerable dissent from the rank and file. In some cases, such as the…
>if we're discussing what actually motivates military deployments
Sure, but don't try to weave a narrative around the idea that old men are the only ones eager for war.
>Vietnam
Poor timing, poorly managed, generally a waste of time, and therefore unpopular, yes.
> "The male response to war is an evolutionary adaptation that clearly works for our species." > "It's a left-wing version of the Christian right rejecting the theory of evolution," he says. "I mean the far left is also now rejecting the theory of evolution, which is just insane." The left wing, whatever it's worth, is certainly not rejecting the theory of evolution. Just because men are evolutionarily predisposed to…
I agree we should be able to give evolution the middle finger. But I disagree we can do so in any effective way in the timespan of 5 years, unless we somehow hit the Singularity by then. You overestimate man's intelligence and strength of will. I mean in general, let alone people with IQs in the 80s. Until we actually have either the knowledge and technology to do genetic engineering or mind uploading so that we can make modifications against living human mind architectures, or as a longer-term solution the sustained political will to do eugenics (the kind where we don't kill everyone impure or force people not to have sex, just the normal kind we do with every other plant and animal species besides humans where we restrict what breeding outcomes are available), we will remain slaves to our adaptions, with the most intelligent and self-reflecting among us only slightly more able to control themselves. From a predictive standpoint, knowing through evolution what is can tell us that, barring eugenics in some form or another, there's no way we can get to what ought to be for certain values of what ought to be, and so many attempts by liberal-minded people predictably fail while wasting resources and upsetting the social order. The best we can do now is take what is and align the incentives for the greatest amount of people so that things can be relatively stable and peaceful until we get to the point we can truly give evolution the middle finger. When I look at the culture that kick started the industrial revolution through a liberal lens, I see a lot of evil people with a twisted social order. But from a non-liberal lens, I see order, order instead of chaos (the inverse of what I see when I look at the typical results of liberal interventions through a non-liberal lens) and I see aligned incentives, and I wonder if that sort of society is what it's going to take to get to the Singularity.