Healthy Kingdom of War?

From: richardc_at_sypte.co.uk
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1999 13:44:07 +0000


>Edgerton calls for eradicating the distinction between ``primitive'' and
>``modern'' altogether, arguing instead for a uniform standard of judgment
>that, borrowing from psychology, distinguishes between cultures that are
>``healthy'' and those that are ``dysfunctional''

The tiny core of evolutionary biologist left in me all these years since I stopped being a student feels that all of the above labels are loaded with value judgements I reckon the only way to describe a society scientifically is in terms of its ability to survive and propogate its=20= culture
Societies are either successful (widespread, powerful, long-lived) or not (small, marginal, contracting)

The thing about evolutionary biology is that it is not, in the long run, a predictive science The Kingdom or War (or for that matter the Lunar Empire) may be successful to date but as their environments change (as presumably they are about to catastrophically with the coming of the Hero Wars) they may prove to be no longer so well adapted

We could go on to discuss the moral basis of describing particular societies' mores as "healthy" or "dysfunctional" if we equate these with "good" and "bad" especially in a world where gods can make their views plain on the moral questions of the day but I suspect this thread is heading rapidly off topic

Richard Crawley


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