Posted on 07/18/2006 7:45:03 AM PDT by Pokey78
Nicholas Wade's Before The Dawn is one of those books full of eye-catching details. For example, did you know the Inuit have the largest brains of any modern humans? Something to do with the cold climate. Presumably, if this global warming hooey ever takes off, their brains will be shrinking with the ice caps.
But the passage that really stopped me short was this:
"Both Keeley and LeBlanc believe that for a variety of reasons anthropologists and their fellow archaeologists have seriously underreported the prevalence of warfare among primitive societies. . . . 'I realized that archaeologists of the postwar period had artificially "pacified the past" and shared a pervasive bias against the possibility of prehistoric warfare,' says Keeley."
That's Lawrence Keeley, a professor at the University of Illinois. And the phrase that stuck was that bit about artificially pacifying the past. We've grown used to the biases of popular culture. If a British officer meets a native -- African, Indian, whatever -- in any movie, play or novel of the last 30 years, the Englishman will be a sneering supercilious sadist and the native will be a dignified man of peace in perfect harmony with his environment in whose tribal language there is not even a word for "war" or "killing" or "weapons of mass destruction." A few years ago, I asked Tim Rice, who'd just written the lyrics for Disney's Aladdin and The Lion King, why he wasn't doing Pocahontas. "Well, the minute they mentioned it," he said, "I knew the Brits would be the bad guys. I felt it was my patriotic duty to decline." Sure enough, when the film came out, John Smith and his men were the bringers of environmental devastation to the New World. "They prowl the earth like ravenous wolves," warns the medicine man, whereas Chief Powhatan wants everyone to be "guided to a place of peace." Fortunately, Captain Smith comes to learn from Pocahontas how to "paint with all the colours of the wind."
In reality, Pocahontas's fellow Algonquin Indians were preyed on by the Iroquois, "who took captives home to torture them before death," observes Nicholas Wade en passant. The Iroquois? Surely not. Only a year or two back, the ethnic grievance lobby managed to persuade Congress to pass a resolution that the United States Constitution was modelled on the principles of the Iroquois Confederation -- which would have been news to the dead white males who wrote it. With Disney movies, one assumes it's just the modishness of showbiz ignoramuses and whatever multiculti theorists they've put on the payroll as consultants. But professor Keeley and Steven LeBlanc of Harvard disclose almost as an aside that, in fact, their scientific colleagues were equally invested in the notion of the noble primitive living in peace with nature and his fellow man, even though no such creature appears to have existed. "Most archaeologists," says LeBlanc, "ignored the fortifications around Mayan cities and viewed the Mayan elite as peaceful priests. But over the last 20 years Mayan records have been deciphered. Contrary to archaeologists' wishful thinking, they show the allegedly peaceful elite was heavily into war, conquest and the sanguinary sacrifice of beaten opponents.... The large number of copper and bronze axes found in Late Neolithic and Bronze Age burials were held to be not battle axes but a form of money."
And on, and on. Do you remember that fabulously preserved 5,000-year-old man they found in a glacier in 1991? He had one of those copper axes the experts assured us were an early unit of currency. Unfortunately for this theory, he had it hafted in a manner that suggested he wasn't asking, "Can you break a twenty?" "He also had with him," notes professor Keeley, "a dagger, a bow, and some arrows; presumably these were his small change." Nonetheless, anthropologists concluded that he was a shepherd who had fallen asleep and frozen peacefully to death in a snowstorm. Then the X-ray results came back and showed he had an arrowhead in him.
Not for the first time, the experts turn out to be playing what children call "Opposite Land." There's more truth in Cole Porter's couplet from Find Me A Primitive Man:
I don't mean the kind that belongs to a club But the kind that has a club that belongs to him.
Although Porter was the kind that belongs to a club, the second line accurately conveys his own taste in men. He'd have been very annoyed if Mister Primitive had turned out to be some mellow colours-of-your-windiness hippy-dippy granola-cruncher.
Lawrence Keeley calculates that 87 per cent of primitive societies were at war more than once per year, and some 65 per cent of them were fighting continuously. "Had the same casualty rate been suffered by the population of the twentieth century," writes Wade, "its war deaths would have totaled two billion people." Two billion! In other words, we're the aberration: after 50,000 years of continuous human slaughter, you, me, Bush, Cheney, Blair, Harper, Rummy, Condi, we're the nancy-boy peacenik crowd. "The common impression that primitive peoples, by comparison, were peaceful and their occasional fighting of no serious consequence is incorrect. Warfare between pre-state societies was incessant, merciless, and conducted with the general purpose, often achieved, of annihilating the opponent."
Why then, against all the evidence, do we venerate the primitive? And to the point of pretending a bunch of torturing marauders devised the separation of powers in the U.S. Constitution. We do it for the same reason we indulge behaviour like that at Caledonia, Ont. We want to believe that the yard, the cul-de-sac, the morning commute, the mall are merely the bland veneer of our lives, and that underneath we are still that noble primitive living in harmony with the great spirits of the forest and the mountain. The reality is that "civilization" -- Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian -- worked very hard to stamp out the primitive within us, and for good reason.
I was interested to read Wade's book after a month in which men raised in suburban Ontario were charged with a terrorist plot that included plans to behead the Prime Minister, and the actual heads of three decapitated police officers were found in the Tijuana River. The Mexican drug gangs weren't Muslim last time I checked, but evidently decapitation isn't just for jihadists anymore: if you want to get ahead, get a head. A couple of years back, I came across a column in The East African by Charles Onyango-Obbo musing on the return of cannibalism to the Dark Continent. Ugandan-backed rebels in the Congo (four million dead but, as they haven't found a way to pin it on Bush, nobody cares) had been making victims' relatives eat the body parts of their loved ones. You'll recall that, when Samuel Doe was toppled as Liberia's leader, he was served a last meal of his own ears. His killers kept his genitals for themselves, under the belief that if you eat a man's penis you acquire his powers. One swallow doesn't make a summer, of course, but I wonder sometimes if we're not heading toward a long night of re-primitivization. In his shrewd book Civilization And Its Enemies, Lee Harris writes:
"Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe. . . . That, before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of the enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary."
It's worse than Harris thinks. We're not merely "forgetful." We've constructed a fantasy past in which primitive societies lived in peace and security with nary a fear that their crops would be stolen or their children enslaved. War has been the natural condition of mankind for thousands of years, and our civilization is a very fragile exception to that. What does it say about us that so many of our elites believe exactly the opposite -- that we are a monstrous violent rupture with our primitive pacifist ancestors? It's never a good idea to put reality up for grabs. You can bet your highest-denomination axe on that.
The idea of "the noble savage" came from the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. Yet ANOTHER half-baked idea we can blame on the French!
Rousseau was actually Swiss. He was born in Geneva.
Snicker...
O, NE ZOT! This is just too much, before lunch and everything!
Yup.
Although we generally discount the efficiency of "primitive" weapons.
The huge death toll in Rwanda was achieved almost entirely with sticks and knives.
The Romans, at Cannae, lost 50,000 killed out of 80,000 men in a few hours. That is a much higher death rate than any of our bloody Civil War battles. Such losses were not uncommon in ancient warfare.
The Taiping Rebellion of the middle 19th century against the Manchus was fought mostly with relatively primitive weapons. It is estimated that 50M people died.
Primitive weapons are ineffective when pitted against modern weapons. They can be highly efficient at slaughter when pitted against other primitive weapons or the unarmed. All you need is soldiers willing to keep killing.
And somebody to sharpen your blade every few hours.
Really? Well, this is the first I have heard of it.
Perhapsyou should sue the Iroquois for reparations? ;)
But we're supposed to believe that they were bucolic, pastoral people with an advanced civilization utterly destroyed by the evil Spaniards, who then tortured them into Catholicism even as they plundered their palaces.
History in the last 30 years has been the study of revisionist claptrap, not fact.
Liberals are such effing idiots.
For any Freeper's interested, there was a quite prescient volume written on this subject qquite some time ago: "A History of Warfare", By John Keegan.
I heartily recommend it to anyone interested in the methods and motivations of ancient warfare. Without the political correctness.
It has the added bonus of turning Clauswitz on his head.
Just a suggesstion.
Wombat101
You really can't talk about these civilizations as a group. The Maya and Aztecs had some contact and continuity, but they were as different as Chinese and Arabs in many ways.
The Incas were so isolated they weren't even aware of the civilizations of Mesoamerica to their north. They were also generally not as bloodthirsty, although they also practiced human sacrifice, if on a much smaller scale.
Historians today are generally agreed that the collapse of these civilizations was caused by the merging of the Old and New World disease ecosystems. The Spanish had the luck of walking into societies that were disintegrating anyway.
It is estimated that 90 to 95% of the population of the Americas died by 1600 as a result of Eurasian and African diseases.
How about a word for "mass extinction of large mammals"? The invading (across the Bering) prehistorics, aka "natives", exterminated about 80 percent of the species of large mammals on America's left coast. After the animal meat supply understandably dwindled human canabalism became the protein source of choice.
bump
Steyn had better watch it because amongst the "respectable" conservatives there still is this superstition that the Left is moral.
BTTT!
The origin of the State is twined with that of death-cults.
It could be argued that the State as we know it is the mere reification of blood-lust.
I almost fell out of my chair when I read that. Leave it to Steyn...
But you make a good point. Overt violence and suppression of the natives by European explorers wasn't really the major cause of death among those peoples. They were exposed to diseases for which they had acquired no natural immunities, and they were decimated by the resultant plagues.
In the case of the Aztecs, their culture had stagnated anyway to a large extent. They re-energized their warrior culture by arranging mock raids on nearby tribes to "capture" their young men and sacrifice them.
And people thought Roman decadence was bloody ...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.