Azar Gat > Quotes

“Deeply entrenched fantasies and persistent, most cherished illusions can at least partly be explained as ‘bugs’ or ‘viruses’ in, or ‘mis-activations’ of, our sophisticated and highly sensitive intellectual software, which is driven but also easily disrupted by, and addicted to, our restless and insatiable need for meaning, order, control, and reassurance.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“From the evolutionary perspective, revenge is retaliation that is intended either to destroy an enemy or to foster deterrence against him, as well as against third parties. This, of course, applies to non-physical and non-violent, as well as to physical and violent, action.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“Reason is still our signature tool for coping with a complex reality, yet it is easily subverted by overconfidence, cognitive closure, and biases.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“Cooperation is dramatically more effective when cultural codes -above all language, but also customs, values and other patterns of thought and behavior- are shared. Culture, cultural diversity, and, hence, the facility of shared culture cooperation are unique to humans and differentiate them from other social animals. Hence the innate human tendency to prefer those who belong to their kin-culture community over strangers.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“Humans have far longer memories than do animals and, thus revenge -the social settling of accounts with those who offended them- assumes a wholly new level with them.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“Indeed, want and hunger were not the only reasons for fighting. Plenty and scarcity are relative not only to the number of mouths to be fed but also to the potentially ever-expanding and insatiable range of humans needs and desires. It is as if, paradoxically, human competition increases with abundance, as well as with deficiency, taking more complex forms and expressions, widening social gaps and enhancing stratification.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“However, contrary to the fashion in much of the gender studies, cultural norms play, and diverge, along a scale set by our inborn dispositions. (Needless to say, the subject is extremely complex and, as we see later, it becomes even more complex with the new opportunities, interactions, and tensions created by accelerated cultural evolution.) The fact remains that among hunter-gatherers, in the 'human state of nature’, women’s participation in warfare was extremely marginal. Even more tan hunting in which women also marginally engaged in a few societies, fighting was a male preserve and the most marked sex difference.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“People can cooperate, compete peacefully, or use violence to achieve their objectives, depending on what they believe will serve them best in any given circumstance.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“Scientists have found that its presence begins to structure the male as different from the female right from the start, from the very beginning of the fetus’s evolution in the uterus (biologically, the original form is the female). Male and female differences in identity are already largely shaped at birth, and behavioral differences between the sexes are recorded very early, before social conditioning can play an effective role. Crudely put, baby girls are more interested in people, whereas baby boys are more interested in things.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“Perpetration of serious violence and crime is in fact the most distinctive sex difference there is, cross-culturally.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“Trophy heads served much the same social purpose for primitive warriors as medals, decorations, or marks of fallen enemy aircraft do for modern ones.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“The cognitive aspect of ideology is rooted in the fact that knowledge and frameworks of interpretation are collective and cumulative human constructs.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“Both the capabilities and evolutionary strategies of men and women, capabilities and strategies that were of course interconnected and mutually reinforcing, made men much more predisposed to fighting than women.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“Rather than being "discovered" or "revealed", morality is a historically developing human creation in the service of social needs.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“No formal criterion or 'definition' should obscure the fact that the early state did not emerge full blown and in a clear-cut form. Its formation was a process rather than a one-time event, which regularly took generations and centuries to unfold.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“Marx's projected emancipating socialist "Kingdom of Freedom" - freedom not only from coercion but from any sort of necessity- turned out to be totalitarian and among the most violently oppressive regimes ever.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“Nevertheless, my contention is precisely that Homo sapiens sapiens possesses an innate, omnipresent, evolution-shaped predisposition for ordering its world, which among other things extends to form the foundation of mythology, metaphysics, and science. As with all other adaptive predispositions, this human propensity to construct interpretative mental frameworks of the world expresses itself as a powerful urge, a profound emotional need, which humans simply cannot help or do without. We are compulsive meaning seekers. It is this propensity -intertwined as it is with the evolution of symbolic representation and generalized conceptual thought- that is responsible for our species' remarkable career.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“The first obvious and generally controversy-free, fighting-related difference between men and women is that of physical strength. Men are considerably stronger than women, on average, of course, and all the following data are on average. To begin with, men are bigger than women. They are about nine percent taller and proportionately heavier. Even these facts do not tell the whole story, because in muscle and bone mass men's advantage is bigger still. Relative to body weight, men are more muscular and bony, with the main difference concentrated in the arms, chest and shoulders. Fat comprises only 15 per cent of their body weight, compared with 27 per cent in women.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“Ideological fixation is the result of the ever-present tensions and conflicts between our normative wishes and interpretation of reality.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“In communities in which spiritual life was permeated -as it invariably was- with supernatural beliefs, sacred cults and rituals, and the practice of magic, this was a potent force. All known hunter-gatherer societies -as with any other human society- exhibit the universal human quest for ordering and manipulating the cosmos.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“Theory and mythology, natural and supernatural, science and magic are dichotomies shaped by later human reasoning. In fact, all of them are rooted in the search for the underlying forces behind the phenomena and the quest to enlist them on one's side.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“Morality is a very real and extremely potent human postulate projected onto the world. It includes broadly shared common denominators, evolutionarily engraved in human nature by the logic and adaptive pressures of social life and social cooperation. It consists of a bundle of attitudes and precepts that serve this logic, which takes different and sometimes incommensurable forms between people and between different cultural traditions.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“Revenge has probably been the most regular and prominent cause of fighting cited in anthropological accounts of pre-state societies. Violence was activated to avenge injuries to honour, property, women, and kin. If life was taken, revenge reached its peak, often leading to a vicious circle of death and counter-death.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“Ideological clashes, antagonism, and fixations are as old as civilization.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“As members of the same species, human beings broadly share notions and precepts of morality, of what is socially regarded as a proper conduct. But again, there is no reason to think that these notions and precepts should fully converge and cohere between different people and different communities, or even in the minds of the individuals themselves.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“Again, as young males have always been the most aggressive element in society whereas older men were traditionally associated with a counsel of moderation and compromise, it has been suggested that the decline in young men’s relative numbers may contribute to the pacificity of developed societies while explaining the greater belligerency of developing ones, particularly those of Islam.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“The history of ideologies should teach modesty, or at least warn against fixations and biases.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“Cognitive studies, aided by brain scanning, have revealed that men and women in fact use different parts of their brains in coping with various cognitive tasks. Furthermore, whereas the right and left hemispheres of a man's brain are much more specialized, those of women operate in greater co-operation, and the corpus callosum connecting them is larger. Not only are the bodies of women and men structured somewhat differently but also that particular organ of their bodies, the brain, and hence their minds.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“It has been found that so called tomboy behavior in girls correlated closely with higher levels of testosterone. On the other side, low testosterone levels in males result in unassertive and ‘feminine’ behavior, whereas the highest levels of testosterone to which men are exposed during adolescence result in extra aggressiveness.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“People are naturally inclined to be far more attuned to the blame game of social bargaining than they are to the nuances and the balance of the facts, whether historical or contemporary.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars