The Human Potential for Peace: An Anthropological Challenge to Assumptions about War and Violence Book

This is an excellent book. The author argues convincingly that the human being is not inherently warlike. We have a great capacity to create peace and live in harmony. This may at first seem strange and an utopian dream, but, looking at the data that the author provides it turns out to be undeniable, the evidence is truly overwhelming. We see war and violence every day in the news, we study the history of our civilization and others and discover that they all had war. So, why wouldn't we assume that human is inherently violent? Our cultural beliefs, as Douglas P. Fry argues, constrain us in our search for the truth. Many times, we make the mistake of portraying sedentary agricultural tribes as windows of the past. These tribes are predominantly warring and hierarchical. Warfare, as Fry states, increases with social complexity. The truth is that, despite being a small minority today, all humans were nomadic hunter-gatherers until around 12,000 years ago and lived in a sparsely populated planet (the highest estimates say that humans numbered about 10 million at the time). There were plenty of resources back then contrary to our beliefs due to the low population density (1 person per 8 sq. miles). In the worst Australian desert conditions that's the exact density needed to support a hunter-gatherer. Surely there were much more abundant places than Australia's harshest desert back then. Hunter-gatherers are predominantly non-warring and egalitarian. Individuals may fight over women but groups don't. Normally, in these societies, women possess as much power as man Fry also demystifies many writings of the so-called "realists" with powerful arguments and evidence and denounces how they tend to overlook peaceful pre-industrial societies overlooking them or explaining them away as they constitute a nuisance to the theories of warfare. My favourite chapter is the one in which he criticizes (and, indeed, demolishes) some assumptions people make about the past. These are 'The assumption of warring over scarce resources', 'The assumption of warring over women' and 'the assumption of warring over land'. Moreover, in conditions where resources are scarce (such as access to waterholes in the Kalahari Desert), cooperation rather than fighting is the chosen option for nomadic hunter-gatherers and much more advantageous.