Posted by
Nick Thompson on
Mar 09, 2007; 1:07am
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/peace-and-the-topography-of-human-nature-tp523573.html
Dear all,
When I was likkered up at my retirement party ,I agreed to write a chapter for a Peace Handbook (!) on what the "topography of human nature" *had to tell us about peace making and conflict resolution. I wrote the enclosed grandiose statement which, it seems to me, has been edited to make it even MORE grandiose. So now I am stuck writing it, just when I was beginning to get into the flow of doing nothing at all.
I am trolling for co-authors here. Hell, I am trolling for AUTHORS. Anything to actually breathe some CONTENT into this idea. If anybody has some text floating around they would like to kick in, let me know. I have to stay pretty much within the frame of the abstract below. Merle? Carl? Roger? Steve? There might be some lovely ideas here that involved gradients of ideology and the capacity of especially steep gradients to produce structures of conflict such as feuds, terrorism, wars. etc.
Anybody who is out there who is sucker enough to touch this tarbaby, should get in touch with me. Oh me and my big mouth. Alternatively, you could tell me about any sources you might think would be helpful.
Nick
* It must have had three drinks to mouth this whopper!
3. Evolutionary theory: The constraints and possibilities of human nature
?Nicholas Thompson and the Coalition of the Willing.
The UN has defined ?cultures of peace? as social structures and communication systems that foster cooperation and dispel conflict. Until recently, the relevant evolutionary writing has mostly focused on a fruitless debate between those who think that violence is inherent in human nature and those who think that people are fundamentally nonviolent. The debate is futile because we already know that both forms of behavior are possible, and arguing about their "innateness" gives no purchase about how to promote the one at the cost of the other. Contemporary research has greatly extended our understanding of the environment of human evolution and the behavior of humans and similar animals living under similar conditions. These findings stress that human nature has a complex topography with knife-edged ridges that meet at the center: between self interest and ingroup interest, between ingroup interest and outgroup interest, and between outgroup interest and self interest. They also suggest social structures and communication patterns that might help us navigate the complex topography of our natures.
Nicholas S. Thompson
Research Associate, Redfish Group, Santa Fe, NM (nick at redfish.com)
Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthompson at clarku.edu)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20070308/df1828b9/attachment.html