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I don't see anywhere you specified that? I said '12th century' mainly because '12th' is an inversion of '21st' and I found the aesthetic pleasing. The examples you actually gave at the start of this conversation ranged from the 19th century to the 16th to biblical Israel to the Fourth Crusade, so I took you as making a pan-historical claim, about men in all times save apparently the present.
It seems to me that people in all times and places are socialised, that soldiers specifically are a heavily selected group not representative of all people (both because soldiers are specifically trained for killing and because the most killing-prone people are more likely to become soldiers), and for that matter Western soldiers still happy to do war crimes, so the claim that there's something uniquely softening or, if you'll pardon the casual term, wussifying, about modern socialisation seems to outrun the evidence you've presented.
I say this particularly because the evidence you've presented is... what, that boys like playing action video games? That doesn't seem much different to me to boys liking action movies, or boys running around the playground pointing their fingers at each other and yelling "bang! bang!", which, the last I checked, boys still do.
There's just no substance here. Do modern men have a particularly different attitude to violence than historical men? I'm not convinced they do. If we are in a more peaceful age, you could attribute that to us having more peaceful socialisation, or past peoples having more violent socialisation, but neither thesis is more obviously true than the other, so the claim about innate male nature remains unjustified.
Napoleon’s soldiers were conscripted from the general population, not a filtered group of people.
This is like scratching your head at someone injecting themselves with heroin and saying, “what, humans enjoy the experience of activating their endogenous opioid system?” Uh, yeah! The strongest evidence of what males innately like to do is what males volitionally choose to do when they could do anything: their leisure. That boys like to pretend to shoot each other, pretend to “raid the flag”, form snowball fights with ramparts, and watch people shoot each other on TV, and listen to gangster rap about slaying opps, is strong evidence of an innate disposition and innate pleasure. Because of course, we evolved to do this as much as we evolved to eat and copulate. At least most of us. Neither you nor @Amadan have supplied a convincing explanation for the universal leisure activity of males esp. young males.
Being taught that they can have no tribal allegiance in America, and being presented with endless media and stories about how such tribalism is low-status and thus deserving of ostracization, they cannot engage any of innate tribal cognition WRT to Somali fraud. Not being able to engage in this cognition, they can find no enjoyment in combatting Somali fraudsters. They cannot engage in fraud against Somalis, but more importantly they cannot even organize to defeat the Somali fraud politically, because this requires a certain incentive pleasure or fun: dominance and victory over an enemy. To get any pleasure out of defeating the Somali fraud requires that you see Somalis as your enemies, and to see the defrauded Somali tax payer as your teammates. This is impossible for those Minnesotans who believe that (1) every American is on the same team && (2) distinguishing between cohorts with the team violates the most sacred rule of the team’s moral law which is called “racism”.
The Somali community, of course, has tribal and religious customs which maximize their in-group affiliation. They know they are a team, and so they engage in politics as a team. This makes politics incredibly fun and filled with those pleasures which are normally associated today with games. Every Somali gets enjoyment out of donating money to his team’s character and working to increase the victories of his team’s character. The Somali can engage in politics the way a boy engages in Guild Wars II, or a man engages in Eve Online, or a teenager watches his favorite streamer beating a game. They have no compunction about taking the resources of the native Swedes because, well, why would they? It’s a game and you are my enemy.
This is what I mean about the sociobiological asymmetry; I’m not quite making a claim about quantities of innate violence
I mean, if your point were just that boys like competitive games, then sure, that's obviously true. I also think that girls like competitive games, though I think that boys and girls play different types of games because they tend to complete in different arenas. For boys it's usually some variant on defeating someone else, overcoming someone else, achieving a concrete goal faster or more efficient than them, and so on; for girls it's usually more about achieving attention. It's what I call the masculine and feminine modes.
Where I disagree with you proximately is with the claim that all men, innately, have a strong predisposition to violence, and that it is exclusively modern, Western, implicitly white society that socialises that out of people. I don't think you've provided significant evidence of that, and as far as I'm aware there's evidence suggesting that ancient people as well required ritual and training to psych themselves up to acts of violence. This is true on the personal level (as discussed regarding retributive violence) as well as on the communal level (every fighting organisation or warband in history has those combat rituals). You make some evolutionary claims, but books like Man the Hunted make a reasonably convincing case, to my mind, that humans like many animals evolved with a greater emphasis on avoiding costly conflict than engaging in it.
Where I disagree with you in a more ultimate sense is with the idea that any of this has anything to do with Somalis running day care scams. It may well be that successfully running a scam feels good. Certainly I think white people of my acquaintance feel good when we manage to get more money from the government than we ought to have. But the claim that Somalis are somehow much more keen on this kind of scam whereas white Americans have domesticated themselves and become wimps far outruns any kind of evidence or even plausible speculation on your part.
You still haven’t quite addressed why, in your worldview, men like to simulate realistic violence against each other, as even implying that these are not the most popular games, they are so popular that a majority of American men have played and enjoyed them. If it were “just that boys like competitive games”, then why don’t they just stick to a pong-like game, or Wii tennis, or a soccer title? There is some reason why they like to shoot each other and take their resources, and while my etiology of this has explanatory power, it seems to me you refuse to even offer an explanation for this phenomenon. Consider that, if men were offered a game where they get to inflict suffering on an innocent animal, I think most men would never play this and would find the whole concept abhorrent. So it’s not “blood and gore per se”, it’s not that men are interested in experiencing some novelty related to that; instead there is something particular about the act of blood and gore coming out of enemies. I can’t force you to supply an explanation, but surely you notice the dissonance here: in a highly competitive marketplace with tens of thousands of options, males enjoy a particular feature which — in your worldview — they would be either be naturally averse to or naturally ambivalent to choosing.
It’s unfortunate that you can’t provide the relevant passages, evidence, or arguments. Am I supposed to take the view of an economist on the history of Icelandic revenge culture for granted? I managed to torrent it (thanks Russians), and the passage about men being “chickens” in revenge cultures is just sort of a narrative that the author weaves without referring to any real data. Maybe his evidence is on another page.
Here’s a study on how violent men in Iceland conferred a fitness benefit: “We show that, on average, killers gain a very significant fitness advantage despite the often high costs they pay and, more importantly, that they had a dramatic effect on the fitness of their male kin”. This is more scientific than the book you recommended, where the author is all over the place talking about Hamlet and stuff.
Medieval Iceland was violent, their heroes were violent, their wives came from captured Irish slaves, and they descended from the most violent of the Norse who had inflicted violence upon all of Europe. This should have made you intuitively skeptical of Miller’s hypothesis that Iceland proves that all men are chickens naturally averse to violence. If someone insulted you in Iceland, the norm was to fight them. There are sagas celebrating men who request to kill another man because they want rights over a particular woman. So, a lot of the violence was purely volitional, as was the entire Viking raiding and pillaging over Europe, and the Varangian Guard.
However, I deny you really need any extra evidence on this. The “look at what males like to do” argument is strong. The next best argument would be “look at how brothers behave”. IMO this doesn’t require strenuous argumentation.
Yes, because of their culture, their religion, their tradition, and probably their biology.
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I just don’t think this applies to a lot of historic conflict since the advent of civilization. When you’re an man in some European country some time in the last thousand years and one year the King and his council decide that you’re at war with this random other European country because of competition over control for the Caribbean or something happening in the Spanish Netherlands (you’ve never met anyone from there) and then thirty years later the next king decides that actually you’re now allies with the people you fought against and your son needs to go off and fight the people you were allies with, this isn’t some deeply visceral intertribal conflict against blood enemies. This is politics. Until the modern period most people didn’t even have what we’d call a modern, nationalist conception of the state or loyalty to it.
For 200 years, immigrant groups have plundered America, destroying everything the Anglo Saxon founding fathers have created. That much is obviously and entirely true. But it also left the descendants of the Irish who destroyed the peaceful, English eastern seaboard, the New England of gentlemen’s clubs and old Boston, long forgotten, the ‘swarthy’ Scandinavians (according to Ben Franklin who settled the Midwest, the Italians and Poles and whoever else poorly placed to frame their own civilizational conflict against later groups of migrants.
If you were a soldier fighting for your King against another kingdom, the whole “ancestral-tribal cognition” related to ingroup and outgroup was activated against that nation; it was activated and deactivated according to political interests of the Kingdom. Songs and propaganda and stories would be disseminated for this purpose. Particular acts of bravery in slaying the enemy might bring you praise or greater status, or sometimes some reward. In the medieval era the common soldier often had no blood ties to the noble families who decide on war, but they still had all of this collective / tribal / dominance cognition going on. The noble families were united by shared ancestral heritage, unless they had just lost a war, in which case they would be united by heritage within a few generations.
In the modern era you see much more explicitly “deep visceral intertribal” cognition: https://www.napoleon.org/en/magazine/napoleonic-pleasures/le-chant-du-depart-2/
And the famous Marseilles anthem
These were the favorite songs of Napoleon’s troops, the avowedly White supremacist Napoleon who has such quotes as
Now the Minnesotan can theoretically use any of the tribal cognition package he has; it is hypothetically possible that he can draw whatever criteria for ingroup that he wants, by any criteria. But culture prevents from doing this, and so he has no interest in solving the crime.
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