Can we go beyond tribal minds?

Can we go beyond the tribal mind?

Thucydides says the preconditions of war are:

(1) colonists (literally, farmers) who set up settlements on other's lands,

(2) bilateral agreements (treaties) of support if one or the other is attacked,

(3) multiple bilateral treaties turn into alliances between members of one group against members of another group, so that

(4) insult, injury or betrayal of one member sets off retaliation but even more importantly,

(5) sussing out and anticipating the consequences of (1) to (4), ANY member looks to other members of an alliance to launch a pre-emptive strike against a member of another alliance. Since membership to an alliance can change by mere threat, a grinding, mutually destructive scenario is primed.

For the great works on war as the reality of the human condition, see:

(a)Thucydides on the History of the Peloponnesian Wars [http://classics.mit.edu/Thucydides/pelopwar.html] and

(b) Gibbon on The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire [http://www.gutenberg.org/files/25717/25717-h/25717-h.htm].

The great anthropologist Levi-Strauss, after studying tribal wars and classificatory symbolic systems of traditional peoples in South America, use to write: "trade (materials and women) or die." I would say this slogan is somewhat confirmed by Potts' and Hayden's (2008) biological evolutionary thesis in their book, in Sex and Death: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism And Offers a Path to a Safer World.