purity and danger

The violence of Man (and it usually is men: why does that go unnoticed?). The bloody 20th century: the Camps, the Gulags, the Trenches, man-made famines; Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Saddam...The list is endless. Not just the mindless acts of terrorism-which in the scale of things are not that large, not compared to state-organized violence, that is-but the daily acts of violence and brutality...

But when did it begin?

Estimated that 4-5% of all deaths in the 20th c. were violent ones. Compared to 1.5-2 % we see now or in industrial times. And for the hunter-gatherers, in that pre-lapsarian world, what Sahlins called the original 'affluent economy'. Well, estimates are anything up to 13-14%. So much for the noble savage!

So, what about the theory that the greater the surplus the greater the specialization (in violence and religion..and perhaps the links between these two needs to be teased out) ? Well, despite, or perhaps because of, our sheer bloody-mindedness it seems as if some progress has been made. We do trust strangers-even if we don't care much for them. We have decided that city life and a politics not based on kinship, clan, and hierarchy, is the way to live. And even bearing in mind the cynicism towards human rights you've got to admit that this is an achievement. The peace of the bourgeois world may not be heroic or even very spiritual, but I don't think there's any denying that things are much better (think: the rights of minorities, women, the notion of citizenship...).

Don't knock it. You who live safe, in warm houses, who find on returning in the evening, hot food and friendly faces (Primo Levi)

And yet these fantasies of exclusion, of the expulsion of the vermin persists, as if it was hard-wired, had taken root.

What is it that binds one person to another, then? What obliges someone to not only not cheat or attack another person, but actually want to cooperate with him? If it's not religious or ethnic identity, and if self-interest can work just as much in favour of mutual dependence as trying to pull a fast one, then what? Can an altruistic disposition, a sense of mutual sympathy, be enough and what type of institutions reinforce them, make them sustainable?