Attempted Reading

I’ve been reading a book lately… no, that’s not noteworthy in and of itself. I’ve read a staggering number of books in the last few months.

No, what I mean is that I’ve been reading a paper book lately. Like, a physical object, occupying a particular set of coordinates in space and time, confined to but one location and doomed to inevitable decay and dissolution.

And it’s a library book. Yikes.

I’m finding it quite difficult to get through, as the opportunities are so limited. It’s not an audiobook, so I can’t listen to it as I drive or hike… it’s not an ebook, so I can’t just pull it out of a pocket whenever I’m waiting in line… it’s fragile enough that I can’t really do a good job of reading it during downtime at work.

Anyway, the book itself. It’s called “The Human Potential for Peace”, by Douglas P. Fry. Anthropology. Very interesting stuff, especially in contrast to Steven Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature”. Which, spoiler alert, I didn’t much like but do generally agree with.

The two books don’t address each other directly. Fry’s book is five years older, and if I get the chance I’d like to read a book of his written after Pinker’s book, since that was popular enough to deserve a proper scholarly takedown.

So far, though, I think the main conflict between the books is best illustrated by a thought experiment: Imagine a completely isolated society… no contact with the outside world whatsoever. A stable population, neither growing nor shrinking. In this society every child as they come of age picks out the sickest, feeblest member, and murders them.

By Fry’s measurement, at least as I’ve understood it so far, this would be considered a peaceful society. No war, right? By Pinker’s measurement, at least as well as I can remember it, this would be a society in which everyone is a murderer and everyone dies of murder. 100% fatality rate.

Pinker’s approach has the basic advantage of being comparatively easy to determine from archaeological and anthropological evidence. But aside from the simplicity of the approach, it has some other usefulness. It could be helpful, for example, in figuring out which society it would be best to live among, or to emulate.

What it lacks is the ability to isolate War as a phenomenon unique from other forms of violence. And in this it becomes much more difficult to figure out the best approach to reducing war.

But I suspect reducing murders could be kind of nice, as an intermediate goal.