How was human civilization born?
The Western scholar Carneiro gave the answer in the 1970 journal Science:
Human civilization was born out of war and is driven forward by war.
This assertion sounds absurd:
War became a source of progress? The mutual killing of human beings has become the dawn of human civilization?
However, 20 years later, this doctrine, under the name of "limitation theory", has become a common theory in Western academic circles.
How did war give birth to civilization? And the acceptance of this thesis by the mainstream academic circles in the West reflects what kind of cultural psychology in the West?
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="11" How did > war give birth to civilization? </h1>
Archaeological evidence invariably shows that Peru, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Rome, Northern Europe and almost all of the world's prehistoric origins have been in constant war.
This also includes ancient China: the war between the Yellow Emperor and Xuan You, as we know it.
The reason why war has become the driving force for the birth of civilization is, fundamentally speaking, war with a certain scale is essentially a competition for resources under the constraints of conditions and population pressure.
Human development seems inevitably leading to war: in a constrained environment, the natural growth of the population will eventually lead to an imbalance between the population and natural resources in the shortage of available resources.
The tensions between the two escalate and eventually lead to wars over natural resources.
Powerful tribes, conquering backward tribes, the conquered have to become subordinate to the victors, the primitive class society is born - the conqueror becomes the ruling class, the conquered are the ruled class, and the individual establishes the basic identity of social identity.
The upper echelons of this class society have since freed themselves from productive activities and invented civilized content such as art, writing, and architecture, and society has evolved from tribes to chiefdoms.
The expansion of political entities led to the expansion of the scope of war, and the complexity of political units continued to evolve, and the state was born.
This is the general picture of the "restriction theory"—the limitation of resources, which creates the stratification of human beings, thereby liberating some people from productive labor, and constructing group identity in the form of war antagonism, and then evolving into civilization.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="31" > the Western cultural psychology behind the restriction theory</h1>
Although the theory of limitation is popular in the West, it is difficult to be generally accepted by the Eastern academic community.
War is inherently violent, while civilization is inherently anti-violent, and violence only gives birth to more violence than violence.
In the interpretation of historical scenes, including art, writing, painting and other civilizational contents, they were born in the environment of Chengping, rather than in the fire of war.
Moreover, the premise of war is the formation of tribes, and the formation of tribes is based on the exploitation of natural resources, with blood as a link, the formation of cultural organizations. Obviously, the source of tracing the roots of civilization is the "war" between tribes against nature (such as hunting, reclamation, etc.), not the war between tribes for resources.
In fact, it is not the restriction theory that clarifies the birth of human civilization, but the Western cultural psychology needs the limitation theory.
Because fundamentally speaking, the theory of limitation is rationalizing the "law of the jungle" and "the logic of the strongman", beautifying the conquest of colonization as the driving force for civilization, and then shaping western colonial civilization as a "human foresighter".
In other words, the theory of limitation, which catered to the cultural psychology of Westerners, gave the centuries-old rounds of war launched by the West a layer of progressive clothing, and eventually, it was praised as a manifestation.