Some questions to think about as
you watch the ads…
• Write down five sentences that capture main
themes found across these advertisements?
What words strike you as most important?
• Write down first five images that you found
most compelling in the US Army examples
• Describe the music in the US Army
advertisement
• What are the main differences between the
advertisements?
ARE WARRIORS BORN
OR ARE THEY MADE?
US army
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKciWKsWHJc&feature=related
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwvCV0QuQKU&feature=related
Britain (5:35)
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyWQinmBjBk&feature=related
Canada:
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5K69jwRkm04&list=PL302720FD5E03FCAD
&index=4&feature=plpp
Soldiers of Conscience (Sgt. Washington, Sgt. Isom)
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8921Xp_J20&list=PL9E33273DB4AC696A
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rkM95ur4IU
Saving Private Ryan:
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwBkQy9CpS0
WHY IS WAR PRESENT ACROSS
CULTURES, TIME, AND
SOCIETIES?
What’s the first image? Innate human aggression,
selective aggression as the product of evolution,
and the psychology failings of leaders
What do “philosophers” say about individuals?:
• Original sin causes violence (Augustine)
• Hobbes: Rationality and the security dilemma
in the state of nature causes violence
• Darwin: Biological and behavioral evolution
(Why study primates?)
WHY MIGHT VIOLENCE PAY OFF GENETICALLY?
• Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression (1966); Jane Goodal’s work on chimpanzees
(1980s): Ethology tells us that men and some primates belong to a very small
subset of mammals that engage in intraspecific violence to the death
• Weren’t early humans a lot less violent than we are now? What kind of violence
did they engage in?
• How can we have two driving instinctual impulses that are contradictory: We
work together but we are violent
• How is violence related to: survival of the gene pool, beneficial hierarchy, & the
passing along of better gene pools?
• Territoriality, resource competition, and aggression: Why might they be
connected? How does modernity reduce the pressures of the factors?
• What happens when social adaptation to new environments outpaces genetic
change?:
• How do thumbs and tools relate to our missing appeasement gestures or
universally accepted rituals of limited violence?
• How have the development of culture, morality, and language impacted our
biological impulses towards violence? What about nationalism?