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As we saw earlier, William Divale and Marvin Harris scrutinized data
from 561 primitive tribes and discovered that within this sample 21% of the
males were killed off violently before they ended adolescence. The
percentage of the slaughtered skyrockets if you include the women and
children wiped out by indigenous peoples like the South American
Taulipang, who burned dozens of families in their huts when trying to
eradicate an enemy tribe, then marched home shouting a joyous "hei-hei-hei-
hei-hei!"175 Our techno-capitalist civilization comes nowhere near the
resulting grim proportion of butchery. If it did, roughly 720 million modern
humans would be blasted to smithereens in wars or homicides every
generation. Compare this with the 55 million who died in WWII, and the
bloodlettings of the current century, appalling as they've been, are less than
one-tenth what they'd amount to under aboriginal conditions. That
reduction in violence is a blessing of the superorganism's evolution. It is a
result of the growth of social agglomerations from tiny clusters of men and
women huddled in jungles and plains to massive nations sprawled across
entire continents.
Ironically, however, the partial spread of peace is a product of past
battles between superbeasts, the colossal atrocities that accompanied the
building of the empires of Alexander, Caesar and the ancient Chinese, the
gore that oozed from the consolidation of the modern European, American
and Russian states.
The movement of humans into social groups, the tendency of one
social organism to swallow another, the rise of the meme, the increase in
cooperation--all are ways in which the universe has ratcheted upward in
degrees of order. But under the natural urge toward more intricate
structures, higher planes of wonder, and startlingly new and effective forms
of complexity, there is no moral sense. There is no motherly nature who
loves her offspring and protects them from harm. Harm, in fact, is a
fundamental tool nature has used for her creations.
No, we are not Clint Eastwoods, nor were we meant to be. We are
incidental microbits of a far larger beast, cells in the superorganism. Like the
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