Douglas P. Fry

Douglas P. Fry (born 20 September 1953) is an American anthropologist.

Quotes

...Let’s take World War II, for instance, there are numerous situations where German troops and U.S. troops understood that the enemy was right nearby, and decided, “We’re not going to shoot at you. You don’t shoot at us. You go your way. We’ll go our way.” There are many of these types of anecdotes, and there is also some more systematic evidence.

In one case that I like, somebody got the idea to examine all of the muskets collected off of the Gettysburg battlefield. I think they collected around 27,000 or so muskets. Many of the muskets were loaded twice, some were loaded thrice and a few were loaded 21 times or something absolutely crazy. Overall, 90 percent of all 27,000 muskets were loaded one or more times. If you work out the statistics around how long it takes to load a musket, and all the time there was a battle going, then if people are loading their musket and firing, you’d expect only about 5 percent to have been loaded. Of course, we don’t have videotapes of what was going on, exactly, but it points to the idea that there was a whole lot of reluctance to actually be shooting at the enemy. Now, that’s just one case from our own U.S. history, and there are others. There is a wonderful, descriptive book written by a military man and historian who served in the U.S. army [during WWII and the Korean War] named S.L.A. Marshall called Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command (published in 1947). He did a series of interviews and found out that a vast majority of the combat troops were not firing at the enemy. Some were firing into the air. Some were firing into the bushes. Some were firing over the heads of the enemy. Many weren’t firing at all.

...Really, the only way forward for humanity is going to be to pull together and address these common threats to our species survival, or else the future is not looking good.

...Across history, in different cultures and space, humans do realize the necessity of cooperating when faced with an external threat. So again, if we can just do a little bit of reframing the narrative, the external threat is not necessarily the Russians or whatever. No, it’s the conditions we’ve made and the conditions we face.

We would solve so many problems if we could develop that expanded level of identification all the way up to humanity, all the way up to the planet level, and basically think about the Earth also, and all the creatures on it, as being part of the same bio life system. We need to get this, as in Buckminster Fuller’s book, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. We’re all on the same spaceship, so we can’t be fouling our nest with pollution and so forth. It’s just foolish to be fighting among ourselves, or as the old saying goes, rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. We need to actually be steering the ship away from icebergs.

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Douglas P. Fry