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Notes -
"What was the epic poetry about?"
War. Why do you think this is a gotcha?
Coffee_enjoyer has a rather simplistic view of this stuff, but yours is pure denial. Epic poetry was born as a means of exploring and understanding violence, not moralizing about it (see, for instance, Odysseus's slaughter of the suitors). Grand architecture was born as a means for the projection of power and the defense of strongholds, space travel as a complement to/substitute for nuclear war. The veneer you mention isn't a thin one. In fact, it's the thick crust built over those instincts that makes civilizations great, but the desires to take and to destroy, even the desire for sadistic violence - and, above all, the need to get better at those - are some of the core drivers of civilization. It's only with fairly advanced civilization we even get the concept that this violence could be bad in itself, instead of merely situationally unacceptable (you can rape the Sabines, but you can't rape Lucretia).
Now, there are many ways to deal with it, like the introjection of sadism Nietzsche mentions as the root of guilt cultures, or the sublimation of male energies into productive effort that Freud prefers, but it's not some mere chimp impulse we should beat down in boys. Our schools/phones produce enough castrati as is. Let 'em take it to sports, the arts, the boardroom - when necessary, the military - and remind the world that homo sapiens is the apex predator even when he isn't killing.
No.
Yes.
I don't deny we glorify and celebrate war, but as a means, not an end.
That was my point.
Chimps do violence for the sake of violence (and because their instincts tell them to, because there's a lot of evolutionary hardwiring).
We should prefer not to live in a society of chimps. That doesn't mean castrating men. We can still acknowledge the evolutionary hardwiring.
I don't want to "beat down" boys, but anyone who celebrates violence for the sake of violence and revels in pain and suffering and destroying what others have built is a chimp.
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