Critical Collective Consciousness

You need to relocate! Most big American cities have leftist majorities and the left is still anti-war. I'm a pacifist and I've spent my adult life in Los Angeles, Humboldt County CA and the Washington region, and I have never lacked friends who share my philosophy. Humboldt County (Eureka is the county seat) is especially leftist, it's basically still 1968 there. I am not actually a leftist (any more) but a left-leaning libertarian, and I get more flak for my campaign for smaller government than I do for my opposition to war.

You seem to be comfortable with the concept of paradigm shifts but I'm not sure how you demarcate the paradigms. There's no standard model, but the one I use is:

• 1. Agriculture. Humans changed from nomadic hunter-gatherers to settled farmers and herders. For the first time ever there was a food surplus and tribes no longer regarded each other as hostile competitors for scarce resources. Communities expanded from small extended-family units within which everyone had depended on and cared for each other since birth, to include formerly hostile neigboring tribes. Artifacts too large for nomads to carry could now be built. Economy of scale and division of labor made specialization possible, increasing the quality and diversity of goods and services beyond those essential for survival.
  
  Since we had to learn to trust and be kind to people who were not family members, this paradigm shift required us to exercise our uniquely huge forebrain, by overriding our programmed pack-social instinct with reasoned and learned behavior. We traded instinctive comfort for greater security and prosperity, and we have been struggling over the terms of this exchange with our "inner caveman" ever since.
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• 2. Cities. Division of labor and economy of scale rose to levels that created a complex society with goods and services never imagined. Government was created to maintain order. Money was created as a record of the transfer of surplus wealth among citizens in multiple-party, time-displaced transactions. Full-time teachers, artists, explorers, inventors, priests, etc., could be supported. Formal trading networks were established.
  
  This Paradigm Shift required us to learn to live in harmony and cooperation with total strangers, another step away from our pack-social instinct. Our inner caveman occasionally breaks out and strikes out with instinctive behavior against these "outsiders" by taking their possessions, running them out of his territory, or simply killing them.
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• 3. The Bronze Age. Metallurgy and metal tools and artifacts created the great civilizations of antiquity--large regions administered by a single government. Bronze is an alloy of tin and copper, which are never found in close proximity, so trading alliances between cities became very important. Commerce became so complex that the primitive hash-mark records of shopkeepers and traders evolved into written language.
  
  Unfortunately metal blades, spears and armor were the first "weapons of mass destruction" and war as we know it became possible. The Bronze Age saw the struggle between our civilized veneer and the caveman inside become violent.
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• 4. The Iron Age. Iron ore is everywhere and requires no interurban diplomacy to smelt and cast. There was no more need for peace between cities, and worse yet, once fires of adequate temperature were created even the most uncivilized "barbarian" tribes could turn themselves into armies and attack the cities. Nonetheless, the classical civilizations managed to arise during this period of violence.
  
  During this Paradigm Shift we distanced ourselves even further from our Paleolithic ancestors. Despite being the only predatory species of ape, all but the wealthy subsisted on a grain-based diet woefully lacking in key nutrients, and life expectancy fell from the low 50s to the mid 20s. Government became draconian and people even kept each other as slaves. Our inner caveman was seething with revulsion over this new lifestyle and war was common.
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• 5. The Industrial Revolution. The twin technologies of mass production and conversion of chemical energy to kinetic energy released productivity from the limits of human and animal labor, and the occasional water mill. At its start, 99% of the human race was employed in food production and distribution and the standard work week was 80-120 hours; today in the industrialized nations the figures are 3% and 40-50 hours. This resulted in an explosion of new professions and occupations; near-universal literacy and education as a basic right; capitalists becoming the new generation of aristocrats; travel beyond one's home region; leisure time and discretionary income making hobbies and entertainment into major economic sectors. Of course the industrialization of war led to the bloodiest conflicts in history (with the exception that no one has matched Genghis Khan's killing of ten percent of the people he could reach with the transportation technology of his time).
  
  But the industrial lifestyle has separated us even further from our roots. As farmers we may not have been chasing our dinner across the landscape like our nomadic ancestors, but we still spent our days with our hands and minds focused on food plants and animals, a reasonably familiar, comfortable life for our inner caveman. Working in a factory or an office and picking up dinner at the supermarket is a very unnatural lifestyle. Predictably, our inner caveman has had great difficulty adapting to it. Psychology, sociology and other new sciences had to be invented to deal with him.
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• 6. Electronics. The electronic age began in 1833 when the first telegraph service was launched. The telephone revolutionized communication, keeping people on opposite sides of cities in close touch with each other and making it possible to occasionally talk to people in other states and countries. Radio and then television continued this trend. Regional cultural differences began to level as everyone listened to the same announcers and watched the same programs. It's been suggested that showing live full-color images of the Vietnam War in American living rooms during dinner time was the real catalyst for the anti-war movement.
  
  Electronics created the first stirrings of the globalization movement. Of course some humans had progressed so far from their pack-social roots that they were able to regard as fellow citizens people on the other side of the planet who were nothing more to them than abstractions. But suddenly TV gave those people names and faces!
  
  Of course the internet has taken us beyond that: We are now communicating with those people directly. They're no longer just strangers on a TV screen who we think deserve the same rights we have, they're our friends!
  
  This Paradigm Shift may be the one that finally unites all of us in one global civilization. Our inner caveman will never rest, but hopefully there will no longer be days when the inner cavemen of an entire country rise up in unison, overwhelming the forces of discipline and reason, and attack another entire country. Notice that although the "wired" countries are still making war, we're making war on "unwired" countries. Most of us have no contacts in places like Afghanistan or the Congo. It's illuminating to realize that although the U.S. government regards Iran with great hostility, the American people are not eager to make war on Iran. The reason, I submit, is that Iran is "wired" and the Iranians are now our next-door neighbors. When Neda was killed in the street in Tehran the images of her death on cellphone cameras were showing up on American screens within a few hours--and we wept. These are not people we want to bomb.

Our inner caveman is a visually-oriented guy. If he makes friends with somebody else's inner caveman over the internet, there will be peace between them.

I'm glad to encounter someone else who sees civilization as a superorganism, of which we are the cells. It satisfies most of the criteria for being defined as "life," after all.

You may be right, who knows? But I'm betting that you're not. I see the forces of separation and violence as relics of past eras, which are being steadily swept aside by the Paradigm Shift of the Electronic Revolution. Although this Paradigm Shift started in the 19th century, it wasn't really kicked into high gear until the internet came into existence, less than a generation ago. People now have the ability to communicate with anybody, anywhere... except only in "wired" countries. Fortunately wireless technology is proliferating, but it will still be a while before SciForums has a lot of members in Myanmar, Paraguay or Burkina Faso.

When that happens, I think you will see (and I mean "you" literally; at 67 I may not live to see it but I'm sure you will) a major shift in the character of civilization.

We will eventually also see a change in our nature. With their six-month breeding cycle dogs have had 23,000 generations to adapt to life since the Agricultural Revolution. Their psychology is distinctly different from their ancestral wolves. They are much more gregarious and tend to greet a stranger (of multiple species!) with wary camaraderie rather than hostility. During that same time we've only had about 500 generations, and that's just not long enough for major genetic reprogramming of our neurons. Our civilization is evolving faster than we are!

But have faith. It will happen!

 

World War II was the high water mark: It killed an average of five percent of the planet's population every year. The bloodiest war since then is the Congo Civil War; in a bad year it brought the war-death rate to about one-third of one percent of the planet's population per year. That's a decrease of more than one entire order of magnitude.

Unfortunately that war isn't really over, just in a lull. Just like the Middle East, it's all about resources: gold, tungsten, tantalum and tin.

 

Sorry about the math. I did slip a decimal, and I thought the world population was only two billion at that time.

Wikipedia agrees with you on the Congo death toll, but other sources I can't put my finger on said it was closer to ten million. I think their estimate of the second-order effects like starvation and unavailability of medical care are greater than yours. That's okay, you'll never get two authorities to agree on stuff like that.

Still, we're looking at the state of global civilization, so we have to be hard-nosed and not dwell on the dysfunctionality of one individual region. Even if it's U.S. companies buying the tungsten and tantalum ore who finance the war.

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Eight percent is a lot. The American Civil War only killed three percent of our population, and a century and a half later we still haven't gotten over it.