***This movement, MST, is not a social movement," he said. "They are a political, ideological movement and their goal is socialism, the expropriation of land with no payments to the owners, just like in Communist Russia." The chasm between the two sides stems from one of Brazil's most intractable problems: the concentration of land ownership among a tiny elite, a problem inherited by in many Latin nations as a legacy of colonialism. ***
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That awful civilizing colonialism.
Mugabe Moves Into Cities To Seize Land Owned By Whites*** President Robert Mugabe's government has launched a new wave of land seizures targeted at white-owned land in Zimbabwe's urban areas, in violation of his own controversial private property confiscation laws.
A government programme codenamed Operation Clean Sweep is reportedly underway despite statements by President Mugabe that his land seizures ended last year.
There has been no official confirmation of Operation Clean Sweep but an analysis of new lists of properties published in recent days by the state press show that vast swaths of land in or near urban areas have been earmarked for compulsory seizure. ***
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The perils of designer tribalism***The Culture Cult is partly a brief for the Enlightenment values of universal culture and scientific rationality, partly an attack of the various atavisms that Sandall sees impeding the growth of those values. Its method is not systematic but exemplary. Sandall proceeds through a number of illustrative case studies. There are not many heroes in this book. One finds kind words for Ernest Gellner and for Karl Popper's book The Open Society and Its Enemies, written in the 1940s when Popper was in New Zealand. For the most part, however, The Culture Cult is a tour through an intellectual and moral rogues' gallery. There are suitably wry bits about anthropological fantasists like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, anti-industrialist utopians like Robert Owen (founder of the New Harmony commune), and randy utopians like John Humphrey Noyes (founder of the Oneida Community). Sandall also devotes whole chapters to Isaiah Berlin and to the bizarre anti-free-market rantings of Karl Polanyi. It is useful to be reminded that Polanyi, writing in 1960, believed that "West Africa would lead the world" and that record-keeping with pebbles and rafia bags in eighteenth-century Dahomey rivaled the achievements of IBM.
Most of the figures Sandall deals with are familiar. Like Bruckner and many others before him, he singles out Rousseau and the eighteenth-century German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder as the spiritual grandparents of romantic primitivism. Rousseau contributed the hothouse emotional sentimentality, Herder the völkisch celebration of cultural identity at the expense of assimilation and a recognition of universal humanity. (As the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut observed, "from the time of Plato until that of Voltaire, human diversity had come before the tribunal of universal values; with Herder the eternal values were condemned by the court of diversity.")
Sandall's real target is the assumption-common coin among anthropologists-that "culture" is a value-neutral term and that, as Claude Lévi-Strauss put it in 1951, one had to "fight against ranking cultural differences hierarchically." In his book The Savage Mind-which argues that there is no such thing as the savage, as distinct from the civilized, mind-Lévi-Strauss spoke blithely of the "so-called primitive." (It is significant that Lévi-Strauss should have idolized Rousseau: "our master and our brother," "of all the philosophes, [the one who] came nearest to being an anthropologist.") One of Sandall's main tasks in The Culture Cult is to convince us that what Lévi-Strauss dismissed as "so-called" is really "well-called." Sandall does not mention William Henry's In Defense of Elitism (1994)-another unfairly neglected book-but his argument in The Culture Cult reinforces Henry's accurate, if politically incorrect, observation that
the simple fact [is] that some people are better than others-smarter, harder working, more learned, more productive, harder to replace. Some ideas are better than others, some values more enduring, some works of art more universal. Some cultures, though we dare not say it, are more accomplished than others and therefore more worthy of study. Every corner of the human race may have something to contribute. That does not mean that all contributions are equal. . . . It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to put a bone in your nose.
Henry's quip about the bone in the nose elicited the expected quota of outrage from culture-cultists. But the outrage missed the serious and, ultimately, the deeply humane point of the observation. What Sandall calls romantic primitivism puts a premium on quaintness, which it then embroiders with the rhetoric of authenticity. There are two casualties of this process. One is an intellectual casualty: it becomes increasingly difficult to tell the truth about the achievements and liabilities of other cultures. The other casualty is a moral, social, and political one. Who suffers from the expression of romantic primitivism? Not the Lauren Huttons and Claude
Lévi-Strausses of the world. On the contrary, the people who suffer are the objects of the romantic primitive's compassion, "respect," and pretended emulation. Sandall asks:
Should American Indians and New Zealand Maoris and Australian Aborigines be urged to preserve their traditional cultures at all costs? Should they be told that assimilation is wrong? And is it wise to leave them entirely to their own devices?
Sandall is right that the answers, respectively, are No, No, and No: "The best chance of a good life for indigenes is the same as for you and me: full fluency and literacy in English, as much math as we can handle, and a job."****[full article at LINK]