Mikhail Pozharsky released a video in which he began to justify violence and war as entirely normal human phenomena and tools for solving problems, while insulting opponents of war in every way and accusing their position of being untenable. Of course, it is first and foremost the position of Pozharsky himself that can be called untenable, which we will now examine in more detail.
He started well by criticizing the works of Steven Pinker, who claims that the level of violence has decreased throughout history, and that prehistoric humans suffered from chronic wars that could claim the lives of the majority of the population. Pinker was indeed wrong; he drew conclusions by considering only examples that were convenient for his argumentation. But if one considers all archaeological and anthropological evidence, we see that prehistoric populations did not suffer from wars—only 2% of representatives of past hunter-gatherer tribes died as a result of violence. After the agrarian revolution and the emergence of states, the level of lethal violence rose to 5%, after which it began to decline, amounting to only 3% for the 20th century (and this including the bloody conflicts that occurred within it). As anthropologist Douglas Fry believes, the level of violence in history changed according to an “n-type curve.” Pozharsky does not mention these data at all, and they do not align with his argumentation.
Instead, he decided to talk in detail about the violent nature of chimpanzees and cite primatologist and anthropologist Richard Wrangham, who believes that humans have an innate predisposition to cruelty, which he explains as an evolutionary legacy. But as Robert Sussman and Donna Hart write, the evolutionary paths of humans and chimpanzees diverged 8 million years ago. Meanwhile, the paths between chimpanzees and bonobos diverged only 2.5 million years ago, which did not prevent the latter from being peace-loving creatures. Pozharsky also mentioned bonobos, but spoke only of the aggressiveness of their females, failing to mention that their aggression is predominantly defensive, as well as the fact that they fundamentally do not have killings. Furthermore, many researchers, including anthropologist Brian Ferguson, believe that most violence in chimpanzees is provoked by human interference in their habitat, and that they have no innate predisposition to commit murder, just as humans do not.
Pozharsky also cites the Dani people as an example, among whom wars and killings are quite common. However, one could with equal success cite examples of the Paliyar, Semai, and many other peoples who are complete pacifists. Moreover, as Douglas Fry notes, research data shows that the majority of cultures (376 out of 590 studied) were either absolutely non-warlike or not inclined toward war (participating only in minor military actions). And only a third of the cultures participated significantly in wars, pursuing specific political or economic goals.
Next, Pozharsky provides individual examples of violence in history, which is an approach similar to that of Pinker (using episodes convenient for one’s argumentation while ignoring the full picture), claims that war can be just if a set of rules is adopted to reduce the harm it causes (but only suggests following them, without guaranteeing their execution in reality), and also attacks pacifists, portraying them as literally the worst people in the world by groundlessly attributing to them practices that only promote violence, such as appeasing the aggressor or waging war against a proclaimed “evil” without sparing any effort and ignoring the rules.
Of course, Pozharsky never once mentioned the position of anthropologists who quite reasonably do not consider war to be something natural for humans, or the position of military experts, according to which most healthy people possess a strong internal resistance to committing murder (or as researchers of human psyche and neurophysiology call it—the violence inhibition mechanism), and only a tiny fraction of individuals with high psychopathic predispositions are capable of engaging in such activities easily. All of this was ignored.
